Bloomberg / Getty Images
Uber $UBER -2.43%'s chief operating officer said the company is struggling to connect its rising artificial intelligence costs to meaningful gains in consumer-facing products, according to The Verge.
Andrew Macdonald, Uber's president and COO, made the comments in an interview with Rapid Response released over the weekend. Drawing on conversations with Uber's senior engineering leaders, Macdonald concluded that greater token consumption was not yielding a corresponding rise in useful features delivered to end users. "That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features,'" Macdonald told the outlet.
The remarks come after Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga disclosed in April that the company had exhausted its entire Claude Code budget for 2026 — just four months into the year, according to Business Insider. Macdonald called the CTO's disclosure a "head-exploding moment," saying it set off company-wide conversations about the cost of token consumption and what the company gives up — including potential headcount — to sustain it.
