Uber CTO who sparked Tokenmaxxing panic after saying that Uber almost blew through its entire 2026 budget in first three months, now has another lesson on using AI

Earlier this year, Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga triggered a “tokenmaxxing panic” after revealing the company nearly blew through its 2026 budget for Anthropic’s Claude Code in just three months. Now, Naga is back with a new lesson. According to a report by Business Insider, Naga said that the biggest gains from AI don’t come from speeding up single tasks, but from redesigning the complete workflows. Naga said that Uber has started deploying its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, HR and procurement. These two-week teams, dubbed Agentic Pods, shadow employees for several days to understand workflows, then rapidly build and test AI-powered tools.