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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of my team members told me that some teams have built a \u2018Dara AI,’\u201d Khosrowshahi said on a recent episode<\/a> of the Diary of a CEO podcast, as highlighted by Business Insider<\/a>. \u201cThey basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Khosrowshahi sounded equally amused and pleased with his employees\u2019 next-level obsequiousness.<\/p>\n \u201cBy the time something comes to me, there\u2019s been a prep and a meeting and the slide deck has been beautifully honed,\u201d he said.\u201dThey have Dara AI to tune their prep!\u201d<\/p>\n It may sound suspiciously apocryphal, but it\u2019s actually kind of the perfect use case for AI. What else is AI good for if not imitation? We\u2019ll tell you what: flattery<\/a>. In theory, Khosrowshahi gets to have his ass kissed with his employees\u2019 AI-refined flourishes. And employees get to have their egos boosted by a chatbot\u2019s preponderance of \u201cAbsolutely\u201ds and other glazing remarks. A win-win for everyone.<\/p>\n Khosrowshahi, unsurprisingly, is bonkers for the tech. On the podcast, he boasted that 90 percent of Uber\u2019s coders are using AI at work, with a third of them being \u201cpower users.\u201d AI, he said, \u201cis changing their productivity in a way that I\u2019ve never, ever seen before.\u201d He also predicted that AI will eventually make Uber\u2019s software engineers 25 percent more efficient.<\/p>\n Citations needed for those claims, but plenty of other CEOs and executives \u201cabsolutely\u201d love AI<\/a> with a similar breathlessness. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly told his workers<\/a> that they\u2019d be \u201cinsane\u201d not to use AI for every possible task. Many brag about using AI to slash their companies\u2019 burdensome headcounts<\/a>. Meanwhile, the rank and file workers who actually get stuff done seem to think AI is mostly useless<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u201chire more engineers\u201d to \u201cgo faster,\u201d he mused about taking the opposite path.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI may not decide to add engineering headcount,\u201d Khosrowshahi said. \u201cAt that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from Nvidia.\u201d<\/p>\n