Uber Dismisses Two Senior Leaders at AI Data Labeling Unit

Uber is reshuffling the leadership of a business it has been holding up as one of its next big growth stories, and the details Bloomberg reports sketch a division still finding its footing. Naga Kasu, senior director of engineering, and Pankaj Kamat, director of product at Uber AI Solutions, have both left the company after spending more than ten years at Uber, where each had led key operations inside the core ridesharing and delivery businesses before moving to the data labeling unit.

An Uber spokesperson framed the exits as part of a 'broader leadership transition' within the division and said the business is 'seeing strong momentum.' The unit itself is young. It was set up in 2024, and its workers do the foundational plumbing of AI training: validating coding outputs, evaluating audio recordings across languages, and labeling video footage for driverless technology. Customers reportedly include Google parent Alphabet, driverless trucking company Aurora Innovation, and Pokémon Go developer Niantic, and Uber says the unit now counts more than fifty corporate clients and operates in more than thirty countries, up from five markets at launch last November.

The reason this is worth flagging is that Uber has been pitching this business as a way to turn its gig-worker network into a ready-made global labor pool for AI training, and the unit's expansion pace this year, including a reported doubling of the platform's clickworker count, suggested a company in growth mode. Losing the engineering and product leads at the same moment complicates that story, especially for enterprise buyers who care about roadmap continuity in the middle of a multi-year labeling contract.

The honest caveat is that this rests on a single unnamed source with corroboration from an Uber spokesperson. The reporting does not name replacements, describe the scope of any wider changes, share revenue or margin figures for the division, or say whether existing enterprise contracts are affected. What is worth watching is whether the Alphabet, Aurora and Niantic relationships continue at the same pace under new leadership, and whether the aggressive geographic and workforce expansion keeps going or pauses while Uber rebuilds the org chart.