Most tech executives have a practiced answer when AI and jobs come up. They talk about new roles. They mention productivity. They invoke history. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is not doing any of that.
In a recent interview on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, Khosrowshahi said he has heard executives privately admit the true scale of AI disruption. Then he watched those same people go on television and tell audiences everything will work out fine.
“I understand the incentive,” he said. Being honest about job displacement spooks investors and dries up fundraising. So most leaders stay quiet. He decided not to. The result was one of the most candid conversations a major tech CEO has had about AI in public.
His own numbers are stark. Khosrowshahi estimates AI will eventually replace the work that 70% to 80% of humans do. Knowledge and intellectual jobs within a decade. Physical roles like driving and logistics within 15 to 20 years. “Ten years is not a lot of time for society to adjust,” he said.
What Khosrowshahi said his company faces
He did not exempt Uber from the disruption he described. The platform has 9.5 million drivers and couriers globally. He said the majority of Uber trips will eventually be fulfilled by autonomous vehicles.
His timeline was 15 to 20 years. But the admission was still striking from the man running the world’s largest ride-hailing company. These are not abstract workers. They are people who depend on the platform for their income today, many of them full-time.
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When Bartlett asked what those 9.5 million people do next, Khosrowshahi gave a three-word answer. “I don’t know.” He acknowledged that retraining is a question leaders will have to answer in the coming years.
He also expressed doubt about universal basic income as a solution. Jobs provide not just income but purpose and a sense of value that UBI has not proven it can replace. That tension, between the efficiency AI delivers and the human cost it creates, sat at the center of the conversation.
How Uber is already living this reality
The shift is not theoretical inside Uber. Several things have already changed:
- 90% of Uber’s engineers now use AI tools daily. About 30% are power users rewriting entire systems from scratch using AI agents.
- Customer service has been rebuilt around agentic AI. Rigid rule-based policies have been replaced with systems that make personalized decisions in real time.
- Employees built an AI clone of Khosrowshahi himself. They call it “Dara AI.” They use it to rehearse presentations before bringing them to the actual CEO.
That last detail prompted a telling exchange on the podcast. Bartlett asked if Khosrowshahi was worried the team might show Dara AI to the board instead. He laughed. Then he said that when AI models can learn in real time, “that is the point at which I’m going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable.”
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The autonomous vehicle race is accelerating
The road-level disruption Khosrowshahi described is already beginning.
Waymo, the Alphabet-backed robotaxi company, now handles 400,000 rides per week across six U.S. cities. It is targeting one million weekly rides by the end of 2026. It quadrupled trip volume in 2025 alone.
Uber has partnerships with more than 20 autonomous vehicle companies. It is positioning its platform as the network AV fleets will use to reach passengers.
The economics are hard to ignore. Removing the driver eliminates the biggest variable cost in a ride. For Uber, which pays a portion of every fare to human drivers, a driverless fleet would structurally transform its margins.
It would also change what the company actually is. Right now Uber is a marketplace connecting riders to drivers. In a driverless future, it becomes the platform through which autonomous fleets reach passengers.
Khosrowshahi has been open about that calculus. He is just also being unusually honest about what it means for the people currently doing the driving.
What Uber investors should know
UBER shares closed at $73.89 on March 20. The stock has pulled back sharply from a 52-week high of $101.99 in September 2025. Analyst sentiment is still broadly positive. According to Benzinga, 29 of 36 tracked analysts rate it a Buy or Outperform. The consensus target is $106.76.
The broader picture is harder to dismiss. Tech companies have announced more than 45,000 job cuts globally in Q1 2026. AI is cited as a primary driver in a growing share of those decisions.
Goldman Sachs has estimated AI could displace 6% to 7% of the entire U.S. workforce if widely adopted. Khosrowshahi is not describing a distant scenario. He is describing something already in motion. And he is saying openly that the people running it do not yet have a plan for what comes after.
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