Uber engineers have built an AI-powered version of their boss

Consumers may think of Uber as a ride-hailing and food delivery company. But in the eyes of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber is really just a giant codebase of engineers who are “literally the builders of the company.” In fact, Uber engineers went so far as to replace Khosrowshahi with a chatbot through which they could ask questions in preparation for meetings with senior officials.

That’s according to an interview Khosrowshahi gave this week on Stephen Bartlett’s radio show, The Diary of a CEO.

“One of my team members told me that some teams have built the Dara AI system, you know, so that they basically give the presentation to Dara AI as preparation for making a presentation to me,” Khosrowshahi said on the podcast. “Because you can imagine, you know, by the time something comes up, there’s preset and the slide deck meeting is beautifully optimized. So they have Dara AI to fine-tune their setup.”

Business Insider previously reported these details.

About 90% of Uber’s software engineers use AI in their work, while about 30% are “power users” of AI tools, completely rethinking the company’s architecture, Khosrowshahi said.

“They make the bricks that go into the system, and they are architects who kind of think about what the system should look like,” he said.

“This is really changing their productivity in a way I’ve never seen before,” Khosrowshahi added.