---
title: "Uber spent it's entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months."
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/uber-spent-its-entire-2026-ai-budget-in-4-months
date: 2026-05-29
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [Emerging tech and AI]
reading_time: 2 min
summary: "$500 to $2,000 per engineer / month on AI tools!"
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7466034239931658240
---

# Uber spent it's entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months.

$500 to $2,000 per engineer / month on AI tools!

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/uber-spent-its-entire-2026-ai-budget-in-4-months-li1.webp)

And the COO is now openly asking whether it was worth it.

This is the AI "value gap" in practice.

Bottom-up adoption ran ahead of top-down strategy.  
The spend scales fast, but the return is harder to measure and prove.

It's the pattern boards are starting to push back on.

Two years in, the question has shifted from 'are we using AI' to 'where's the return'.

For me it's quite clear.

Three things any leadership team needs to get right before signing off the next phase of AI spend:

1. Anchor AI to a value problem. A real business problem with a number attached. Cost to acquire, cycle time, conversion, revenue leak. If you can't point at the number it's moving, you can't defend the spend.

2. Optimise usage. A leaderboard for token spend creates a brilliant adoption story and a terrible cost curve. The teams getting return are treating AI like any other infrastructure decision. Right tool, right task, governed properly.

3. Align people and process around it. Tooling without workflow change is the expensive bit. The value shows up when you redesign how the work flows. Without that, you've handed everyone a shinier shovel.

We're seeing this play out across financial services, education and B2B tech.

Boards are increasingly asking what the spend is actually delivering.

At 7DOTS we're helping leadership teams pick the value problems worth solving with AI, then scale the usage that earns its keep.

If that's the conversation you're sitting on, get in touch. We'd love to help.

---

Source for the stats: Fortune, 26 May 2026 - Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it's worth it.