Do you need a little confidence boost before meeting your boss face-to-face? It seems this desire is taking employees at rideshare giant Uber to strange places.
According to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, some of his subordinates have created an AI clone of him so that they can prepare for meetings with him, making sure everything is in place for his wants and needs.
“One of my team members told me that some teams have created ‘Dara AI,'” Khosrowshahi said recent episodes Diary of a CEO Podcast, As highlighted business insider. “They basically make a presentation to the Darius AI as preparation for making a presentation to me.”
Khosrowshahi seemed equally pleased and pleased with the next level of dutifulness of his employees.
“By the time I get something, there’s been a preparation and a meeting and the slide deck is beautifully polished,” he said.
This may sound suspiciously unoriginal, but it’s actually the perfect use case for AI. If not copying, what is AI good for? What we’ll tell you: Flattery. In theory, Khosrowshahi gets to have his ass kissed by the AI-sophisticated flourishes of his employees. And employees get their egos boosted by the chatbot’s predominance of “absolutely” and other glowing comments. Win-win for everyone.
It’s no surprise that Khosrowshahi is fond of technology. On the podcast, he claimed 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 I’ve never seen before.” He also predicted that AI would eventually make Uber’s software engineers 25 percent more efficient.
Those claims require citations, but plenty of other CEOs and executives “absolutely” love AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly told his employees that they would be “crazy” not to use AI for every possible task. Many people brag about using AI to reduce their companies’ cumbersome headcount. Meanwhile, the rank and file employees who actually get the work done think AI is mostly useless.
However, for now, Khosrowshahi says his coders are safe from AI-induced layoffs. Or maybe not. After suggesting that boosting AI efficiency would motivate them to “hire more engineers” to “move faster”, they thought about taking the opposite approach.
“I can’t make a decision on adding engineering staff,” Khosrowshahi said. “At that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should have added agents and bought some more GPUs from Nvidia.”
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