Uber Employees Created an AI Clone of the CEO
As if it’s not enough that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi looks like the real-life version of Iron Man baddie Obadiah Stane, now he’s got a clone. An AI clone, that is.
Khosrowshahi sat down with the “Diary of a CEO” podcast. Suffice it to say, his engineering background showed. Khosrowshahi, who received a bachelor’s in engineering from Brown, said his engineers are “literally the builders of the company.” And they built him something unique.
Uber employees admit to CEO that they’ve cloned him
When those “builders” admitted their side project to the boss, he wasn’t creeped out at all. Here’s how he told it: “By the time something comes to me, there’s been a prep and a meeting, and the slide deck has been beautifully honed. So they have Dara AI to tune their prep.”
And by “tune their prep” he means give feedback as if it is the bossman. Yup, they’ve done their very best to clone Dara Khosrowshahi. “Some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me.”
This would be an incredibly creepy way to prepare for, say, a job interview. Or a date. But for a presentation to the CEO, it’s a clever solution. Khosrowshahi proudly estimates that 90% of his software engineers use AI in their workflow, calling 30% “power users.”
“It really is changing their productivity in a way that I’ve never, ever seen before.”
Before you get too creeped out about a Khosrowshahi clone, know that he sounds like an all-around nice guy. After fleeing the Iranian Revolution at nine years old, he’s remained a lifelong advocate for refugees in crisis around the world. He was also named one of the highest-rated CEOs—according to Glassdoor—by his own employees, while he was running Expedia.
But all that said, his main rival is even more down to Earth. Order a Lyft, and your driver might secretly be the company’s CEO.
