Uber is cutting 3,300 jobs, one in ten, its biggest cut since the pandemic. The company is not short of money, because revenue was up 18 percent last year. What it was short of was speed.

In a note to staff, the chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said growth had brought 「more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership」 than the company could carry. So the number of managers comes down by about a fifth. Teams where a manager watches only one or two people are cut in half. Anyone sitting more than seven layers below the CEO is on the list.

Look at who that is. Not the people doing the work, but the people arranging the work.

When we talk about AI taking jobs, we always point at the same desks: the call centre, data entry, translation, design. But look at what fills a manager's week. Pulling the numbers together, writing up the meeting, collecting what four departments already know, turning it into a report. A machine is good at exactly that, and the salary it saves there is a great deal larger.

Uber is not walking away from Japan, and a robotaxi trial starts in Tokyo later this year with Hinomaru Kotsu. But a company that measures itself this way will measure Japan the same way. And if coordinating is the part a machine can take over, the question does not stop in the middle of the building. The most expensive coordinator in any company sits at the top.