AI has already disrupted coding. Finance could be next, according to Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez.
“Finance will come,” Gomez told Kleiner Perkins partner Joubin Mirzadegan on a recent episode of the firm’s “Grit” podcast.
Cohere, a Toronto-based AI startup focused on enterprise applications, is already doing some work in the financial sector through partnerships with RBC and TD Bank. Both partnerships are built on Cohere’s LLM models. After it closed its latest round of funding in September, Cohere was valued at roughly $7 billion.
Gomez, who co-authored the famous 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” while he was an intern at Google Brain, said that AI’s power lies in its ability to augment white-collar work, a view widely shared throughout Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that he’s worried that AI could wipe out up to half of entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
“You have to pay them a lot because there’s not a lot of these people for the world,” Gomez said. “And so there’s tons of demand for these people, but there’s not enough of those people to do the work the world needs. And it turns out that these models are best at the types of things those people do.”
AI’s effects are already being felt in software engineering, where powerful tools like Cursor, along with frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT, allow users to “vibe code” software without any specialized coding knowledge. Other industries, including finance, legal, and publishing, are still in varying degrees of the early days of AI disruption.
“It’s still so early for the enterprise,” Gomez said. “We’re still doing the super foundational, super — Summarize this email for me. Summarize these meeting notes for me. It’s so basic, low-level. I just think there’s so much to be done.”
Mirzadegan said the next step of AI is the ability to “augment people.”
“I mean, isn’t that the whole point of this? We’re eating a different part of the market where it’s not seats and licenses,” he said. “It’s being able to actually augment people, actually do the jobs of people in many ways, and that’s so much more transformative.”
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