Uber COO Says AI Lacks ROI

Many corporate leaders say they’re getting value from AI as their spending on it skyrockets, but hype is outpacing reality in plenty of cases.

On a podcast over the weekend, for instance, Uber Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald said the ride-hailing company isn’t seeing a clear increase in productivity from using AI coding services despite their use by its engineering teams. That has prompted executives to discuss how to get a handle on token consumption costs, he said. 

“If you‘re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, [the costs become] harder to justify,” Macdonald said on the podcast. 

It’s the latest sign that Uber is having a rocky transition to AI-powered coding. Last month, Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told us his company’s surging usage of products like Claude Code had caused it to blow through its entire AI budget just a few months into the year.

Uber isn’t alone. Many other firms are struggling to navigate Anthropic’s shift to charging customers based on token consumption, which has made it harder for them to gauge costs in advance. For now, customers are eating the higher costs, ROI be damned.

Other AI projects outside coding have simply fallen flat or created unintended consequences.