Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it

Uber’s business model is one of the most AI-forward in Silicon Valley. AI decides your ride price, optimizes your route, among other predictive features. But even with these advanced features, an Uber executive is sounding the alarm on the rideshare company’s AI spending. In a recent interview on the Rapid Response podcast, Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said it’s hard to draw a connection between the company’s rising use of Claude Code and innovations meant to serve consumers. “That link is not there yet,” he said. “Maybe implicitly there’s 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 like 25% more useful consumer features.’” The comments follow reports that the firm had already burnt through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in just four months after incentivizing employees to adopt the technology through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage. It’s the latest development in a complex quandary arising in enterprise AI adoption: increasing AI use comes with higher costs, even as per-unit AI pricing falls. “If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how [many] useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify,” Macdonald said. Uber isn’t the only company facing this issue. Microsoft earlier this month reportedly began canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, according to The Verge, instead moving engineers toward using GitHub Copilot CLI. A number of other business leaders have walked back their initial bullish AI views. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn last year reversed his outlook on AI, saying he doesn’t see the tech replacing the tasks his employees perform. Uber didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Can firms justify their AI spending? In an earnings call earlier this month, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said