Uber lays off almost a quarter of its HR and recruitment staff, but says it has nothing to do with AI

1 week ago 29

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi speaks while seated on stage while wearing a light grey sport coat and a light blue dress shirt.

Uber is laying off nearly a quarter of its People and Places staff — but not because of AI, the company said.

The department oversees teams from human resources to recruitment. The job cuts amount to less than 1% of Uber's global workforce of 34,000 employees, a spokesperson said.

The layoffs come less than a month after Uber named Jill Hazelbaker to the newly created role of chief corporate affairs officer and president.

Hazelbaker, who has worked at Uber since 2015, said in a memo to staff on Wednesday that the layoffs reorganize teams that "have become too complex and fragmented, with overlapping responsibilities, unclear ownership, and teams operating too far from the businesses and partners they support."

While other major companies have cited AI as the reason for layoffs this year, the cuts to Uber's people division weren't due to the technology, the spokesperson said.

"These changes are necessary to maximize the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead of us," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in her own memo to staff explaining the layoffs.

Like many tech companies, Uber is using AI — and wrestling with its implications.

Uber is hiring fewer employees as its employees use AI to become more productive, Khosrowshahi said last month. COO Andrew Macdonald, meanwhile, said that those productivity gains aren't proportional to what the company is spending on AI tokens.

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Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.