Uber Technologies saves $9 million a year by automating business processes with Power Automate

Uber Technologies is a multinational transportation company with 24 different lines of business, including ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. Since it was founded in 2010, Uber has completed more than 52 billion trips in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities worldwide.

The company grew rapidly and many internal business processes were quickly set up manually to keep up with the pace. A few years later, Uber turned its focus to automating these processes. The work was done using a robotic process automation (RPA) platform running in datacenters on-premises.

Last year, the company decided to move out of these datacenters and on to a cloud service. This prompted the company to reassess its long-term automation strategy. The question was: Should the company migrate its RPA platform into the cloud, or take time to reevaluate and consider another automation platform?

While Uber was heavily invested in Google products and services, they also had access to Microsoft 365 which enabled them to explore products like Power Automate. After an in-depth review process and discussions with industry specialists, Uber decided to move to Power Automate, part of Microsoft Power Platform.

One reason was security. “The integrated security features of Power Automate has made developing and managing our automation systems so much easier,” says Chad Aronson, Global Head of Intelligent Automation, COE at Uber. Automations involving the company’s most sensitive data, for example, previously required implementation of encryption at rest and in transit. With Power Automate, these capabilities are available to Uber out of the box and cover other products the company uses, such as SharePoint and OneDrive.

Power Platform also offered development the kind of development flexibility that the team needed. “Along with the capabilities needed for major enterprise-level projects, Power Automate has made it easier for our development teams to quickly automate processes at the department and team level,” says Saeed Contractor, Head of Technology, IA CoE at Uber. This includes better compliance and risk management processes.

The company was equally impressed by the broad ecosystem offered with Power Platform. “With Power Automate, we get the benefits of a Power Platform ecosystem that aligns with our future plans, including what we see as leading generative AI and process mining capabilities,” says Aronson.

An efficient migration

The migration to Power Automate involved over 50 business processes and was completed at the end of 2024.

To help with the migration, Uber worked with Accenture, its long-time partner responsible for the original automations. “The team pivoted at speed to Power Automate from the existing platform,” says Varun Subramaniam, Senior Manager and Consultant and Accenture. “We have successfully been able to help Uber migrate a very mature and complex RPA environment to Power Automate with minimal disruption to the business.” He also notes that the migration was done without the need for any third-party planning tools.

In terms of the architecture, almost 70% of the original robotic process automation (RPA) flows were moved to Power Automate RPA flows which run on GCP virtual machines. The remaining 30% of flows are now Power Automate cloud flows. These cloud flows have created a notable cost benefit. “By moving desktop RPA flows to the cloud with Power Automate, we have saved over 50% in compute costs,” says Contractor.

Significant cost savings through automation

The automation covered with Power Automate extends across a wide range of business processes at Uber resulting in significant time and cost savings versus manual administration of over 300,000 hours – amounting to more than $9 million a year. For example:

• Safety reporting.Uber drivers and riders can submit safety-related incident reports through the Uber app. Power Automate is used to route these tickets into JIRA and pull related data from other internal systems into the ticket to help inform the safety team. The ensures that a due diligence process is executed for 100% of safety incidents – a process that has saved $530,000 to date.
• Tax categorization. With Uber Eats, there are millions, if not billions, of menu items from stores and restaurants that need to be categorized into particular tax buckets. If there is an error in how an item gets categorized, Uber can be liable for the tax. Power Automate RPA takes menu items submitted by vendors and routes them to an ML model for analysis. The system processes up to 150,000 menu items a day which represents potential tax savings of more than $5 million a year. 
• Vendor application management.Vendors who want to be part of Uber's vendor list submit an application which is received by Uber in ServiceNow.Power Automate RPA checks for new Vendor applications in the system and downloads relevant artifacts for assessment. Other flows initiate related actions (such as background sites) and compile a summary of the data. Uber expects to process about 1,000 vendor assessments a year, with automation savings an estimated 3,400 hours of administration time.
• Invoice processing. Employees previously uploaded travel data manually from emailed invoices to the company’s expense management system. A Power Automate cloud flow now reads this data automatically using the prebuilt invoicing processing AI model in AI Builder. For subsequent UI-based operations, including login and upload of data to the system, the cloud flow calls a desktop flow to complete the automation. This combination of email-triggered Cloud Flows and UI-focused Desktop Flows enables seamless, end-to-end automation across both environments. The system saves an estimated $285,000 in manual effort annually.

Expanding use of Power Platform

Based on the success of the migration to Power Automate, the company plans to automate more than 30 additional business processes by the end of 2025, generating an estimated $4 million a year in additional cost savings.

Meanwhile, the company is actively exploring other Power Automate options such as OCR and data extraction as well as broader Power Platform capabilities. This includes the development of AI-driven chatbots or ‘agents’ using Microsoft Copilot Studioand other emerging AI/ML solutions.

“We are building an Uber-wide capability to enhance business value and cost efficiencies through leading intelligent automation technologies,” says Aronson. “Power Platform gives us the development tools we need to move confidently forward on that plan.”