Uber believes it’s found a solution to its AI spending problem after it blew through its budget for the technology in just the first few months of the year.
In an interview with The Information earlier this year, Uber Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga admitted he went “back to the drawing board” on allotted spending after the rideshare giant encouraged employees to use its tools, particularly Anthropic’s Claude Code, as much as possible, even devising “leader boards” to rank software engineers on their usage.
The blitz was part of a trend of “tokenmaxxing,” or companies incentivizing workplace AI use, only for many to back off from the practice as they found it wasn’t offering the returns on investment to justify the rapid spending. While Uber was no exception, Naga said the company has now figured out a better way to deploy AI without breaking the bank.
“We’re seeing some very interesting trends on AI costs,” he wrote in an X post on Wednesday. “I think it’s another signal that we’re coming to the end of the so-called ‘tokenmaxxing’ era.”
Uber quadrupled the number of employees who use frontier AI tools, Naga explained, which brought down the cost per token. It was able to do this by improving prompt caching, as well as adjusting its default model setting, evaluating new models for efficiency, and allowing engineers to see their AI usage and costs per hour.
