The Firers Just Got Fired

Uber Just Cut 23% of Its HR Team. No One Is Safe Anymore.

Uber Just Axed 23% of Its HR Department. If the People Team Is Not Safe, Who Is?

I have spent over a decade firing people for corporations especially during mergers and acquisitions, while using the term "synergies." The language was always clean. The reality never was.

I personally handed termination letters to 2,700 people before I said enough and walked away. And across those 2,700 conversations, the one thing that haunted me was not the tears or the anger. It was how surprised people were.

People who were talented, experienced, and completely blindsided because they had stopped watching the signals.

Here is a signal you cannot afford to miss, especially if you are in HR.

Last week, Uber slashed 23% of its People and Places division. That is the department responsible for HR, recruiting, workplace operations, and employee experience.

Gone! Nearly a quarter of the team that is supposed to advocate for employees, develop talent, and build culture. All axed.

And here is the part that should make every HR professional, every talent manager, every recruiter reading this think for a second. "The firers just got fired."

The Corporate Spin Machine Is Already Running

The funny part is Uber's spokesperson was quick with the line. "The cuts are unrelated to AI."

Come on, give me a break. HR people, do you really buy this?

My friend, If you are in HR, you have heard this language before. I am sure you have even used it yourself before. I know I have.

I spent years inside organizations that used phrases like "strategic realignment," "optimizing layers of management," and "building a more connected organization" to describe what was actually happening, which was that people were being made redundant because the business decided it could operate with fewer of them.

Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi put it this way in his internal memo. The changes are "necessary to maximize the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead." New president Jill Hazelbaker, promoted just three weeks before the cuts, framed it as building a "more connected, modern, operationally excellent organization."

Modern????. There is a word worth paying attention to.

Because here is what we also know about Uber, their own CTO disclosed that Uber exceeded its entire 2026 AI budget within the first four months of the year. The company has separately disclosed plans to slow external hiring precisely because of internal AI adoption.

And yet somehow, cutting 23% of the HR function has nothing to do with AI.

That is not a coincidence. That is corporate wordplay. And I have been in enough senior major meetings to know the difference.

Oh, and by the way, those people who were jumping with joy, saying that AI is more expensive than labor because Uber and Microsoft burnt through their budget for the year on AI in such a short time, should understand and read between the lines. If AI were expensive, as Uber announced two weeks ago, they would not have fired 23% of their HR.

You need to understand. When their CTO said they burned through their whole 2026 budget for AI, he meant the technology worked so well and so fast that their adoption exploded beyond what they had budgeted for. What it means is that it is not that AI does not work. It works too well. If 70% of code is already written by AI, how many junior developers will they hire next year? The budget overrunning is a one-time planning issue. The headcount reduction that follows is a permanent one.

What Actually Just Happened

So lets come back to the story at hand, the one about HR,

Let me give you the ground reality of what Uber just did, because the media is largely treating this as a leadership transition story.

It is not.

What Uber just did is something that major corporations will spend the next 18 months doing quietly, then loudly say they stripped out the transactional layer of HR.

The roles that got cut were not the strategic business partners embedded in the business. They were the managers and senior staff handling overheads, the process owners, and the people managing systems that AI-driven platforms can now run more efficiently. Things like Recruiting workflows, Onboarding processes, employee data management, and Policy compliance administration. Basically, it is the stuff that fills HR calendars but does not actually require a human being who can think strategically.

The functions being automated were never really "HR" in the truest sense. They were HR administration stuff.

And that distinction will define careers in HR over the next five years.

Why HR Is Not Special

Here is what I want HR professionals to understand, and I say this with genuine respect for the function because I spent 28 years inside it.

HR has spent two decades selling itself on being the conscience of the organization. The culture builders. The people advocates. And in many organizations, HR professionals became very good at managing processes and very comfortable in their seat at the table, without necessarily earning it through business impact.

The half-life of a learned skill is five years. In functions where AI can absorb the administrative load, that clock is running faster.

What AI cannot do, at least not yet, is walk into a business unit meeting, understand the actual dynamics of a leadership team, read the political undercurrents, broker a difficult conversation between a high-performing executive and a CEO who has lost confidence in them, or build the kind of trust that allows a workforce to move through genuine disruption without breaking apart.

That requires judgment. Experience. The ability to sit with ambiguity and still make a call. The kind of tacit knowledge that comes from 20 years of being in rooms where hard decisions are made.

That is the HR professional who survives. not the one who is shortlisting candidates or ensuring HR administration work, like Payroll, is being conducted.

The one who cannot answer the question "what business problem did you solve this quarter" with something sharper than "we ran the performance cycle on time" is in trouble.

The HRBP Model Is the Future. But Only If You Earn It.

The Gartner and SHRM research on this is consistent. Organizations are moving away from the traditional HR business partner model as a title you hold toward a model where every HR professional is a strategic talent leader embedded in the business.

The distinction matters. The old HRBP model in many organizations was an HR generalist, re-titled, sitting in a business unit, but still primarily handling transactions and escalations. A junior business partner is just an admin with a fancier job title.

The new model is different. It is data-fluent HR professionals who can read workforce analytics, identify capability gaps before the business feels them, work with AI tools to run the administrative layer at scale, and spend their time on the work that actually changes business outcomes.

According to SHRM's State of AI in HR 2026 report, 91% of CHROs now name AI and digital transformation as their most urgent concern. That number tells you everything about which direction the wind is blowing.

The organizations that will thrive are those where HR has a smaller headcount and greater impact. Fewer people doing more strategic work, supported by AI doing the transactional work that currently consumes 60-70% of a typical HR professional's calendar.

That is not a threat. It is an opportunity, but only for the people who prepare for it now.

I Have Seen This Before. And I Know How It Ends.

Here is what I noticed across those 2,700 conversations I had in my past. The people who landed on their feet were not the most credentialed. They were not the ones with the longest tenure. They were the ones who had kept learning, who had stayed curious, who had built real relationships inside and outside their organizations, and who could articulate their value in terms the business understood.

The people who were devastated were the ones who had become experts in a version of HR that the world was moving away from. They were knowers in a world that had shifted to favor learners.

The Uber cuts are not the end of this story. They are the opening chapter.

Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, and a dozen other platform companies are running the same calculus right now. How much of our HR overhead can AI absorb? How lean can the People function be while still delivering on what the business actually needs?

The organizations doing this math are not doing it to hurt their HR teams. They are doing it because the technology now makes it possible, and shareholders and boards reward efficiency. That is the ground reality of how large organizations make decisions.

What You Should Do Right Now

If you are in HR, talent, or people operations, here is your honest three-step assessment.

First, run the cognitive audit on your own role. Make 3 columns on a sheet of paper. Write down what your job description says you do in column 1 and fill it in. In Column 2, write down what you actually do day to day. Then ask yourself: how much of Column Two could be handled by an AI-powered platform in the next 18 months? But that goes into Column 3. If that number is above 50%, you are in a transactional role dressing as a strategic one. That is not a judgment. That data point tells you where to invest your next six months. Focus on what is in Column 1 and the items in Column 3, which need an overview and judgment.

Second, get fluent in the language of the business you support. HR professionals who survive the next wave are the ones who can walk into a business review and speak to revenue impact, capability risk, and talent strategy in the same breath that a CFO or COO would. If you cannot do that today, that is the skill to develop. Not another HR certification. What you need is Business literacy.

Third, start using AI tools professionally, not experimentally. Run your recruiting workflows through AI. Use it to analyze your engagement data. Build your coaching frameworks with AI assistance. The HR professional of the future is not competing with AI. They are the person who knows how to deploy it.

The Bigger Picture

Uber is not a canary in a coal mine. Uber is the coal mine.

This will happen across industries, across functions, and at every level of the org chart. The administrative layer of white-collar work is being absorbed. Not all at once, not without disruption, but systematically and with increasing speed.

The professionals who can understand this now, who architect their career around being indispensable in the ways AI cannot replicate, are the ones who will look back at this moment as a turning point in their favor.

The ones who wait, who assume their title or their tenure protects them, who dismiss Uber as a special case or a one-off leadership change, will eventually have their own version of that conversation I sat in over 2,700 times.

I do not want that for you.

The HR function is not dying. But the HR function that avoids business impact, that operates behind policy documents and process frameworks, that conflates administration with strategy? That version is on its way out.

The version that survives is the one that does the hardest thing: it gets honest about what it actually delivers.

You should do the same.

The future belongs to those who are ready. Go be unstoppable!

Bryce Barrows is the Future Readiness Architect. He spent 28 years in HR leadership at major global tech organizations and personally conducted over 2,700 terminations before founding his career transformation coaching practice.

He helps mid-to-senior professionals globally future-proof their careers against AI disruption.

Follow him on LinkedIn, Medium, and at other social platforms here