Uber lays off 23% of its HR and recruiting team that became ‘too complex and fragmented’

Uber is cutting 23 of jobs in its recruitment and human resources divisions, Bloomberg reported Wednesday morning. While Uber didn’t specify the number of employees impacted, the cuts account for less than 1 of the company’s workforce of 34,000. Other HR employees who were approved to work remotely were asked to return to the office to comply with Uber’s year-old hybrid work policy. In a memo to company leaders, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that the “changes are necessary to maximize the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead of us.” The news arrives just three weeks after Uber promoted Jill Hazelbaker from chief corporate affairs officer to president. Hazelbaker said the layoffs were part of the company’s aim to create a “more connected, modern, operationally excellent organization.” “As we’ve grown, parts of the organisation have become too complex and fragmented, with overlapping responsibilities, unclear ownership and teams operating too far from the businesses and partners they support,” Hazelbaker wrote in a memo to the impacted teams. Fast Company reached out to Uber for comment. AI has not been mentioned as the reason for the cuts. This week, the company confirmed that it set budget tiers on AI tools at a monthly 1,500 per employee and per agentic coding tool. In certain cases, the cap can be exceeded with permission. In April, The Information reported that Uber’s tech chief said that the company surpassed its AI budget for the year within four months. This came after Uber encouraged staffers to use AI “as much as possible.” It even ranked employee usage internally on leader boards. But the discourse around AI at Uber seems to have slightly shifted. The company’s COO Andrew Macdonald said in a podcast episode last week that “it’s very hard to draw a line” between AI adoption and new consumer products. “That link is not there yet,” Macdonald added. The cost of AI is only increasing and in response, other companies have also announced plans to mitigate their spending in some areas. For example, Microsoft announced plans to end its Claude Code licenses to have greater autonomy over internal tools and combat rising AI costs, especially for data center infrastructure. Other companies have also restructured their HR and people teams, like Bolt, whose CEO Ryan Breslow said he gutted the entire HR team after it was “creating problems that didn’t exist. And last year, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said it replaced hundreds of human resources employees with AI. Even as company execs vocalize uncertainties around how to measure if AI adoption is leading to tangible change, the tech is reshaping how companies hire, manage and retain employees, anyway.