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Dara Khosrowshahi said not enough Uber employees know how to use AI constructively.
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Schools and companies should start training people to use AI, he said.
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Tech leaders like Shopify’s Tobe Lütke are pushing for AI use in their companies.
Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said not enough Uber employees know how to use AI.
In an interview last week at his alma mater, Brown University, Khosrowshahi said people have to stop perceiving artificial intelligence as a “tech thing” and see it as a tool for everyone.
“Within Uber, we’re a highly technical company — 30,000 employees and not enough of my employees know how to use AI constructively,” Khosrowshahi said.
Khosrowshahi said Uber will be implementing training programs and teaching employees how to use the technology. Schools, he said, should be doing the same with their students.
“The active use of AI for better outcomes is what companies are after,” he said. “I think it would be quite beneficial for educational institutions to teach that before you get to the company.”
He added that learning to use AI agents to code is “going to be an absolute necessity at Uber within a year.”
Using AI to write code, dubbed “vibe coding” by the OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, is a trend that has skyrocketed this year. While some in tech circles say leaning on it heavily is short-sighted, vibe coding has already started changing how much Big Tech and venture capital value people with software engineering expertise.
The Uber chief joins a long list of tech leaders embracing and even mandating the use of AI at work.
Earlier this year, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expects the company to have “AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer.“
Last week, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke publicly shared a memo he had sent his employees, titled “AI usage is now a baseline expectation.” In it, the leader of the e-commerce company said AI usage is “now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify” and that it would be gauged in performance and peer reviews.
He also wrote that “teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI” before they ask for more head count or resources.
On Wednesday, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman touted Lütke’s post and said that every leader, whether they are running a small startup or a giant company, should integrate AI into their work and conduct regular check-ins about AI learning.
Top tech leaders, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have said they use AI at work daily.
