Here's how Uber's product chief uses AI at work — and one tool he's going to use next
In an episode of "Lenny's Podcast" released on Sunday, Uber's product chief, Sachin Kansal, shared two ways he is using AI for his everyday tasks at the ride-hailing giant and how he plans to add NotebookLM to his AI suite.
Kansal joined Uber eight years ago as its director of product management after working at cybersecurity and taxi startups. He became Uber's product chief last year.
Kansal said he uses OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini to summarize long reports.
"Some of these reports, they're 50 to 100 pages long," he said. "I will never have the time to read them."
He said he uses the chatbots to acquaint himself with what's happening and how riders are feeling in Uber's various markets, such as South Africa, Brazil, and Korea.
The CPO said his second use case is treating AI like a research assistant, because some large language models now offer a deep research feature.
Kansal gave a recent example of when his team was thinking about a new driver feature. He asked ChatGPT's deep research mode about what drivers may think of the add-on.
"It's an amazing research assistant and it's absolutely a starting point for a brainstorm with my team with some really, really good ideas," the CPO said.
In April, Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said that not enough of his 30,000-odd employees are using AI. He said learning to work with AI agents to code is "going to be an absolute necessity at Uber within a year."
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Kansal's next tool: NotebookLM
On the podcast, Kansal also highlighted NotebookLM, Google Lab's research and note-taking tool, which is especially helpful for interacting with documents. He said he doesn't use the product yet, but wants to.
"I know a lot of people who have started using it, and that is the next thing that I'm going to use," he said.
"Just to be able to build an audio podcast based on a bunch of information that you can consume. I think that's awesome," he added. Kansal was referring to the "Audio Overview" feature, which summarizes uploaded content in the form of two AIs having a voice discussion.
NotebookLM was launched in mid-2023 and has quickly become a must-have tool for researchers and AI enthusiasts.
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's former director of AI and OpenAI cofounder, is among those who have praised the tool and its podcast feature.
"It's possible that NotebookLM podcast episode generation is touching on a whole new territory of highly compelling LLM product formats," he said in a September post on X. "Feels reminiscent of ChatGPT. Maybe I'm overreacting."
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