Three weeks into her expanded role as president and chief corporate affairs officer, Jill Hazelbaker is already cutting. Uber announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating 23% of positions in its People and Places division, the unit responsible for human resources, recruitment, workplace facilities, and culture.

The cuts, many targeting senior roles, represent less than 1% of Uber’s 34,000 corporate employees worldwide, according to CNBC. The company’s approximately 10 million drivers are classified separately as independent contractors.

A spokesperson told Bloomberg the reductions are unrelated to artificial intelligence, a distinction Uber appears keen to draw as the broader tech industry sheds tens of thousands of jobs in the name of AI-driven efficiency.

Hazelbaker’s mandate

Hazelbaker, who previously oversaw marketing, communications, and public policy, was promoted on 11 May after chief people officer Nikki Krishnamurthy departed. The new role added safety operations and the People and Places organisation to her remit, an SEC filing confirmed.

“As we’ve grown, parts of the organisation have become too complex and fragmented, with overlapping responsibilities, unclear ownership, and teams operating too far from the businesses and partners they support,” Hazelbaker wrote in a memo to affected teams on Wednesday.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi backed the move in a separate internal memo. “These changes are necessary to maximise the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead of us,” he wrote.

The AI question

Uber’s insistence that these cuts are not about AI is worth noting precisely because the company is, in fact, grappling with how AI reshapes its workforce. Last month, Fortune reported that Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in just four months after incentivising engineers to adopt AI tools. Nearly 95% of the company’s engineers reportedly use AI tools monthly, and close to 70% of committed code is generated by those systems.

Uber said last month that it would slow hiring as a direct result of internal AI adoption. It is still advertising more than 800 open roles, according to Bloomberg, including positions focused on commercialising robotaxi partnerships with companies such as Rivian, Wayve, and Nuro.

The distinction Uber draws, that HR cuts are structural while engineering hiring reflects AI’s impact, is becoming a common refrain across the industry. Chinese courts recently ruled that replacing a worker with AI is not legal grounds for dismissal, a decision that underscores the growing tension between corporate restructuring narratives and the reality of what is driving them.

Return to office, too

The layoffs are not the only change hitting Uber’s HR staff. Employees in the People and Places division who had previously been approved to work remotely are now being told to comply with the company’s three-day-a-week office mandate, which went into effect in June 2025.

That policy triggered significant internal backlash when it was announced, with employees criticising the move on internal forums. Khosrowshahi’s response at the time was blunt: workers who valued remote arrangements would “have to make a choice.”

A pattern, not an anomaly

Uber’s People team is not being cut for the first time. In 2023, the company targeted its recruiting team and online grocery subsidiary Cornershop. The current round follows the same logic: trim the functions that support the workforce, while continuing to invest in the technology that may eventually reduce how much workforce is needed.

Uber’s shares were down 0.6% to $71.21 in Wednesday morning trading after paring earlier losses. The market, it seems, has seen this story enough times to know that cutting HR is not the same as cutting the business, even if the people being cut might reasonably feel otherwise.