Uber Cut 23% of Its HR Staff Days After Blowing Through Its Entire AI Budget in Just Four Months

Uber slashed nearly a quarter of its People and Places division on 3 June, cutting jobs across human resources, recruitment, workplace facilities, and culture teams just weeks after the company’s chief technology officer admitted it had burned through its entire 2026 artificial intelligence coding budget in four months.

The ride-hailing giant said the cuts represent less than 1% of its 34,000 employees worldwide. A company spokesperson said the restructuring had nothing to do with AI. But the numbers tell a very different story.

The AI Budget Uber Burned Through

Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga disclosed in April that engineers had exhausted the company’s full-year AI coding budget by the end of the first quarter, according to The Information. He told the outlet he was ‘back to the drawing board’ because the budget he thought he needed had been ‘blown away already.’

Uber then capped per-engineer spending on agentic coding tools like Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude Code at $1,500 (£1,124) per month.

Separately, 95% of Uber’s engineers now use AI tools every month, and close to 70% of the company’s committed code is AI-generated. About 10% of live backend code updates are written entirely by AI agents, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed during the first-quarter earnings call.

However, Uber insists AI played no part in cutting the division that manages its human workforce.

‘Too Complex and Fragmented’

Jill Hazelbaker, who was promoted to president and chief corporate affairs officer in May, led the layoffs. In a memo to affected teams, she wrote that parts of the organisation had become ‘too complex and fragmented, with overlapping responsibilities, unclear ownership, and teams operating too far from the businesses and partners they support.’

Khosrowshahi backed the move in a separate internal note, calling the changes ‘necessary to maximise the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead of us.’

The company still lists more than 800 open positions and reported $53.7 billion (£40.2 billion) in first-quarter gross bookings, up 25% year over year. Uber is not shrinking. It is redirecting where the money goes.

Wall Street’s Name for the Playbook

Deutsche Bank analysts warned in January 2026 that ‘AI redundancy washing’ would be ‘a significant feature’ of the year, describing how companies use AI to justify routine cost-cutting. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged the practice, calling it ‘AI washing.’ Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that some firms are simply ‘hoping’ AI will cover the work of employees they have already let go, with no functioning substitute in place.

Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the outplacement firm, estimated that companies have explicitly attributed nearly 88,000 of this year’s job cuts to AI, about 22% of the 2026 total.

150,000 Jobs and Counting

Tech layoffs in 2026 have now surpassed 150,000 workers across more than 360 events, according to TrueUp’s workforce tracker. The pace of roughly 974 losses per day runs 44% faster than 2025’s rate of 674 per day.

The pattern holds across the industry. Meta cut 8,000 workers in May while raising its AI infrastructure budget to as high as $145 billion (£109 billion). Oracle eliminated up to 30,000 positions while redirecting billions toward data centre construction. In each case, record profits funded record AI spending while support teams were cut loose.

For anyone in a corporate role watching the Uber story, the arithmetic is hard to ignore. The company that spent its entire AI budget in four months then cut the team that looked after its people. It says the two are unrelated. The budget says otherwise.