Uber's CTO Takes the Stage in San Francisco
San Francisco's spring tech calendar just got more interesting. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga has been added to the speaker lineup for StrictlyVC SF, TechCrunch's April 30 kickoff event for its 2026 events season. The gathering takes place at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center and is shaping up to be one of the more compelling tech conversations of the year.
Naga's addition was announced as a bit of a surprise — a late-breaking headliner joining what was already described as a stacked roster. His planned topic: what it actually looks like to run a company the size of Uber in the age of AI.
Operating at Scale in the AI Era
For anyone who has followed Uber's evolution, Naga's perspective is worth paying attention to. Uber operates in hundreds of cities globally, handling millions of trips and deliveries daily. Embedding AI into that infrastructure — from routing and pricing to driver support and fraud detection — isn't a side project. It's core operations.
The conversation around AI has often centred on startups and early-stage experimentation. Hearing from a CTO at Uber's scale offers something different: a ground-level view of what it takes to actually deploy AI reliably, responsibly, and at a pace that matches a massive, real-time platform.
Questions around latency, model reliability, data governance, and workforce impact tend to look very different when you're managing a global logistics network versus building a proof of concept in a garage.
StrictlyVC and TechCrunch's 2026 Events Season
StrictlyVC is known for its intimate, candid format — less polished keynote, more straight talk between investors, founders, and executives. TechCrunch using it to open its 2026 events calendar signals confidence in the format and its ability to draw serious industry names.
The Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, the chosen venue, adds a distinct flavour to what might otherwise feel like a standard conference room circuit. San Francisco's tech ecosystem has deep roots in the Bay Area's Filipino community, and the venue choice nods to that intersection of culture and industry.
Why This Conversation Matters
The question of how established tech giants integrate AI — rather than simply compete with AI-native challengers — is one of the defining business stories of the decade. Uber, like many legacy platforms, has had to evolve rapidly: from a mobile-first disruptor to an AI-dependent logistics company.
Naga's session at StrictlyVC SF is an opportunity to hear that story from someone living it daily. For investors sizing up the next generation of AI infrastructure plays, and for founders building tools that enterprises like Uber actually buy, this kind of executive access is exactly what these events are designed to deliver.
The event takes place April 30, 2026 in San Francisco.
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