Uber’s CTO Joins StrictlyVC SF — Here’s What That Tells Us About AI at Scale

StrictlyVC San Francisco just got a lot more interesting. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga is joining the speaker lineup for the April 30 event at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, and honestly, this is the kind of addition that makes me actually want to attend.

The event is TechCrunch’s kickoff for their 2026 events calendar, and the lineup was already looking solid. But adding Neppalli Naga? That’s a signal that they’re leaning hard into the “operating at scale in the age of AI” conversation — which, let’s be real, is the only conversation that matters right now if you’re building anything serious.

Uber isn’t just another tech company dabbling in AI. They’ve been running machine learning in production for years — from surge pricing algorithms to route optimization to fraud detection. The difference now is that the tools are getting more powerful, and the stakes are higher. Neppalli Naga’s talk should cover what it actually takes to deploy AI at Uber’s scale, not just the theoretical stuff you hear at every other conference.

I’ve seen too many panels where a CTO shows up, talks about their “AI journey” with vague platitudes, and then disappears. Neppalli Naga has a reputation for being more technical and direct than that. He joined Uber in 2022 from Amazon, where he ran the e-commerce platform’s infrastructure. That kind of background means he’s dealt with real-world scaling problems — not just the “we have 10 users and one server” kind, but the “millions of requests per second across multiple continents” kind.

What I’m hoping to hear: How Uber handles the tension between AI model performance and latency. How they decide what to build in-house versus buy. And honestly, whether they’re seeing any real ROI from all the generative AI hype or if it’s still mostly experimental. Those are the questions that actually matter to people building products.

The event is on April 30, and if the rest of the lineup is anything like this addition, it’s going to be worth the trip to the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center. I’ll be there, probably taking notes on my phone like a journalist from 2015.