Uber president says AI investments getting 'harder to justify'

Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald has publicly questioned the return on the company's massive AI investments. In an interview with Rapid Response, Macdonald noted that while underlying AI metrics like token consumption are 'trending in a really astronomical direction,' there is no clear link between that spending and better features for consumers. 'That link is not there yet... it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features,'' he said. The comments come after reports that Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months, raising concerns about cost discipline.

Uber spent $3.4 billion on R&D in 2025, a 9% increase from the prior year. To balance the books, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently stated the company is hiring fewer human employees to offset rising AI costs. Macdonald emphasized that the trade-off between token consumption and headcount is becoming harder to justify without a direct line to shipping useful features. As AI spending accelerates across the tech industry, Uber's candid skepticism may foreshadow a broader reassessment of ROI for enterprise AI deployments.