Uber employees say AI is doing everything from writing support chat responses to answering questions in Slack

Some Uber employees said that they felt AI was one reason behind the company's layoffs earlier this month.

Bloomberg/Getty Images Some laid-off Uber employees say that AI was playing a bigger role in their day-to-day work.

They used AI tools to respond to customer service messages and answer questions posted in Slack.

Uber said its latest layoffs were about reducing "management layers" and didn't mention AI.

At Uber, AI does everything from answering employees' questions in Slack to writing the response you get when you message customer service during a ride.

Six recently laid-off employees who spoke with Business Insider pointed to several ways that AI became more prevalent in their jobs over the past few months.

Some said that they were prompting AI to do substantial portions of their work.

Uber declined to comment for this story.

Earlier this month, the company laid off about 3,300 people, including all of the employees Business Insider spoke with for this article.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time that the layoffs aimed to cut "management layers" and reduce the number of teams where managers had as few as one or two direct reports.

Khosrowshahi didn't cite AI as a motivation in a memo announcing the layoffs.

At the same time, the employees who spoke with Business Insider said that the company has pushed ahead with implementing AI in a wide variety of uses.

One employee said that in the weeks before being laid off he was using an AI tool that reduced the time it took to do his job to one-fifth of what it used to be.

"AI definitely feels like the dynamite under the bridge for a lot of us," the employee said. 'Don't be using ChatGPT to do your work for you' A laid-off employee in Uber's advertising business said that managers were increasingly urging them to use Gemini and ChatGPT to prepare for client meetings.