In need of a little confidence boost before a face-to-face with your boss? That urge seems to be driving employees at rideshare giant Uber to strange places.
According to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, some of his underlings have created an AI clone of him so they can prepare for meetings with him, ensuring everything is fine-tuned for his wants and needs.
“One of my team members told me that some teams have built a ‘Dara AI,’” Khosrowshahi said on a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast, as highlighted by Business Insider. “They basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me.”
Khosrowshahi sounded equally amused and pleased with his employees’ next-level obsequiousness.
“By the time something comes to me, there’s been a prep and a meeting and the slide deck has been beautifully honed,” he said.”They have Dara AI to tune their prep!”
It may sound suspiciously apocryphal, but it’s actually kind of the perfect use case for AI. What else is AI good for if not imitation? We’ll tell you what: flattery. In theory, Khosrowshahi gets to have his ass kissed with his employees’ AI-refined flourishes. And employees get to have their egos boosted by a chatbot’s preponderance of “Absolutely”s and other glazing remarks. A win-win for everyone.
Khosrowshahi, unsurprisingly, is bonkers for the tech. On the podcast, he boasted that 90 percent of Uber’s coders are using AI at work, with a third of them being “power users.” AI, he said, “is changing their productivity in a way that I’ve never, ever seen before.” He also predicted that AI will eventually make Uber’s software engineers 25 percent more efficient.
Citations needed for those claims, but plenty of other CEOs and executives “absolutely” love AI with a similar breathlessness. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly told his workers that they’d be “insane” not to use AI for every possible task. Many brag about using AI to slash their companies’ burdensome headcounts. Meanwhile, the rank and file workers who actually get stuff done seem to think AI is mostly useless.
For now, though, Khosrowshahi says that his coders are safe from AI-spurred layoffs. Or maybe not. After suggesting that an AI boost to efficiency would inspire him to “hire more engineers” to “go faster,” he mused about taking the opposite path.
“I may not decide to add engineering headcount,” Khosrowshahi said. “At that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from Nvidia.”
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