Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said the company has started sending its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, customer support, HR, and procurement to study how people work before building AI tools. He called these two-week teams "Agentic Pods." Engineers shadow employees for the first few days, then build and test software to improve workflows. Results include a financial planning process dropping from 15 hours to 30 minutes, financial reports falling from two days to 10 minutes, and marketing quality checks shrinking from two weeks to less than an hour. Naga said the biggest gains come from redesigning entire workflows around AI, eliminating unnecessary approvals, replacing old software, and helping people make decisions faster. Several tech executives compared the approach to Silicon Valley's "forward-deployed engineer" role, but instead of sending AI experts to customers, Uber is deploying them inside its own business. Peter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Vantortech, jokingly dubbed the role the "Rearward Deployed Engineer," describing engineers embedded deep inside corporate operations to redesign workflows around AI rather than simply speeding up individual tasks.