Uber is cutting around 3,300 jobs globally as it restructures the business to reduce management layers, simplify its organization and speed up decision-making.
Its biggest workforce reduction since 2020, Uber plans to use the layoffs to reorganize teams and concentrate employees in a smaller number of locations.
Although Uber has not blamed AI for the layoffs, its growing use of the technology, its targeting of middle management and industry beliefs about how AI will reshape companies raise questions about whether it has facilitated the move.
Uber Targets Management Complexity
Uber will cut around 3,300 jobs, but the more revealing part of the restructuring is where those reductions are concentrated. Around 20% of its management layer will go, alongside nearly half of its micro-teams, as the company attempts to strip back the organizational complexity created by years of rapid growth.
The micro-team reduction is particularly telling. Teams with only one or two direct reports are being targeted because, as Vladyslav Mashkara, Chief Technology Officer at PosiTrace, puts it,
“One or two direct reports is usually a title problem, and halving those means removing manager roles.”
The changes do not mean every manager affected will leave Uber. Some will move into individual contributor positions, which Mashkara describes as “a demotion at scale.” That distinction matters because it shows Uber is not simply reducing the number of people it employs, but reconsidering how many people it needs to manage other people.
That restructuring is also reflected in the company’s wider approach to its workforce. Teams are being consolidated into fewer hubs, most remote employees will be expected to relocate and engineering organizations are being combined, all of which points toward the same objective: fewer organizational handoffs and more direct lines of responsibility.
Khosrowshahi has said Uber’s growth created too many layers and too much coordination, slowing decisions and fragmenting ownership. The company is therefore trying to flatten the structure rather than simply shrink it, raising a more consequential question about what happens when technology can take on more of the coordination work those layers traditionally performed.
Could AI Be Coming for Middle Management?
The restructuring is notable because Uber is already a major user of AI, which has long been embedded in areas such as pricing, routing, matching and fraud detection. More recently, the company has expanded its use of generative AI and AI agents across customer operations and internal workflows.
