Global ride-hailing company Uber Technologies has launched a sweeping restructuring that will eliminate 3,300 jobs, or 10% of its workforce. It is the company's largest such move since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Managers Cut 20% in Organizational Overhaul
Uber announced on the 2nd that it would cut 3,300 positions, equal to 10% of its total workforce, according to Bloomberg and other foreign media. It is the company's largest workforce reduction since 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 3,300 cuts include both managers and rank-and-file employees. Twenty percent of Uber's managers will no longer hold management positions. Some of that 20% will be laid off and leave the company. The rest will keep their jobs but move into non-managerial roles. The 3,300 figure combines the managers who are being laid off with the non-managerial employees who are also losing their jobs.
The overhaul centers on stripping away bloated bureaucracy. Uber had operated with an inefficient structure in which reports had to pass through seven or more layers before reaching the chief executive. Three separate units that had handled restaurant, retail and white-label delivery have also been merged into one to speed up operations. The company has tightened its remote-work allowance to about 1% of all employees, aiming to move away from the work-from-home practices that spread after the pandemic and return to an office-centered model.
Restructuring With AI in Mind, $2 Billion in Annual Savings
Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi explained the rationale in an internal email to employees.
The ultimate goal of the cuts, he said, is to make Uber leaner and faster and to secure clear capacity to invest in its future growth. He said revenue had nearly tripled over the past five years or so, delivering quantitative growth, but that the process had bred the ills of a complex organization, including more reporting layers, more coordination and fragmented accountability.
A leaner organization will clarify where accountability lies and make decision-making considerably faster, Khosrowshahi said, adding that the decision was by no means easy but would lay the foundation for a stronger Uber in the years ahead.
The internal message made no direct mention of artificial intelligence. But industry watchers and foreign media said the restructuring is underpinned by a strategy to deploy AI across the company and maximize operational efficiency. Cutting management layers and consolidating units, they said, amounts to groundwork laid with AI-driven automation in mind.
Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence projected that the job cuts and reorganization could save Uber roughly $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year, or about 2.04 trillion to 2.7 trillion won.
