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

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.

Do I understand this correctly? Uber incentivized employees to burn through AI tokens regardless of outcome, and wonders four months later how the company wasted so much money?