Uber Cut 23% of Its HR Staff Days After Blowing Through Its Entire AI Budget in Just Four Months

Uber still lists over 800 open jobs while 95% of its engineers rely on AI tools that exhausted the firm's annual budget (Credit: Raunak Jha on Unsplash)

Uber slashed nearly a quarter of its People and Places division on 3 June, cutting jobs across human resources, recruitment, workplace facilities, and culture teams just weeks after the company's chief technology officer admitted it had burned through its entire 2026 artificial intelligence coding budget in four months.

The ride-hailing giant said the cuts represent less than 1% of its 34,000 employees worldwide. A company spokesperson said the restructuring had nothing to do with AI. But the numbers tell a very different story.