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Uber Is Cutting 10% of Its Staff. Its CEO Says AI Has Nothing to Do With It

Roughly 3,300 jobs are gone in Uber's biggest round of layoffs since the pandemic — its own explanation for once. In a year when Meta, Amazon, and dozens of other tech companies have pointed to artificial intelligence as the reason for their cuts, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's memo to employees never mentions it once.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

SAN FRANCISCO · SEP 2-6 ~6 MIN READ

Updated on September 8, 2026 · Editorial update: source review, context and clarity.

Uber told employees on Wednesday that it's cutting about 10% of its global workforce — roughly 3,300 of its 34,000 employees, and the company's largest layoff since 2020. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi laid out the reasoning in a memo to staff, describing the goal as making Uber "simpler and faster" and freeing up capacity to invest in the company's future. What's notable is everything the memo doesn't say. Unlike most of the major tech layoffs of the past year, Khosrowshahi never once attributes the cuts to artificial intelligence.

Key Points

Roughly 3,300 jobs are gone in Uber's biggest round of layoffs since the pandemic — its own explanation for once.
In a year when Meta, Amazon, and dozens of other tech companies have pointed to artificial intelligence as the reason for their cuts, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's memo to employees never mentions it once.
Uber told employees on Wednesday that it's cutting about 10% of its global workforce — roughly 3,300 of its 34,000 employees, and the company's largest layoff since 2020.

Management, not automation, is the stated target

The specifics point the same direction. According to details shared with employees, small teams made up of just one or two direct reports are being cut by roughly half, and employees sitting more than seven reporting layers away from the CEO are being reduced by about 20% — a group made up mostly of managers. Uber says it has simply outgrown the layered structure it built while scaling into one of the largest gig-economy platforms in the world, and that the fix is fewer layers, clearer ownership, and faster decisions, not fewer humans doing the underlying work of running rides, deliveries, and freight.

Where the cuts land, and where the company is consolidating

Uber's delivery business is being restructured as part of the changes, with its restaurant, retail, and direct-delivery units consolidated into unified teams operating at the global, regional, and country level rather than as separate silos. The company is also concentrating more roles in its two largest hubs, New York and San Francisco, and scaling back remote work sharply: going forward, only about 1% of employees will be permitted to work remotely, with most being asked to return to the office under a stricter in-person policy. None of this is framed by the company as a cost-cutting retreat from its ambitions — Khosrowshahi's memo reaffirmed Uber's plans to invest more than $10 billion in autonomous-vehicle technology in the years ahead, funded in part by the savings from this round of cuts.

A leaner organization will mean clearer ownership, faster decisions, and more time spent building rather than coordinating.— Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, in his memo to employees

The one word missing from the memo

Context matters here. Uber's cuts land in the middle of a year already reshaped by AI-linked layoffs: Meta cut roughly 8,000 jobs in May, Morgan Stanley cut nearly 2,500 roles in March, and UBS has been working through thousands more, with executives at several of those companies pointing directly to AI tools taking over tasks once done by people. Uber's framing breaks that pattern. Wedbush Securities analysts estimated the restructuring could save the company in the neighborhood of $1.75 billion, money the firm expects Uber to redirect toward growth areas rather than simply banking as profit. Uber's stock rose modestly, around 2%, in premarket trading after the announcement — a muted reaction for a layoff this size, and a sign investors mostly read it as overdue organizational cleanup rather than a warning sign about the underlying business.

This account draws on reporting from CNBC, Forbes, TheStreet, Marketplace, and Free Malaysia Today.

Gustavo Henrique's Read on This

I've written a version of this layoffs story more than once this year, and almost every time, the explanation offered by the company involved AI in some form — automating a task, replacing a workflow, "doing more with less" because software now does what a team used to. Uber's memo is a genuinely different document, and I don't think that's an accident. Blaming management bloat is a less flattering story for a CEO to tell about his own company than blaming an unstoppable technological shift, which makes it more believable, not less, that it's the real reason here. Whether cutting a fifth of your managers actually makes 30,000 remaining employees faster is something we'll only know in a year, not from a memo. But at least this is a memo that's willing to be tested against a claim you can actually check.

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