• In 2023, Sophia Sun left her job at Microsoft and built an AI product at a smaller tech company.
• After gaining hands-on AI experience, Sun rejoined Microsoft in July 2024 as an AI product manager.
• To break into AI, she advises designing solutions using AI to use as proof of work.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sophia Sun, 29, from San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My first job out of college was at Microsoft, where I worked as a program manager and product manager from 2018 to 2023.

In January 2023, I left my Big Tech job to work for a creator commerce platform. There, I developed an AI product, which led to me landing a senior AI role at Microsoft in July 2024.

In the current job market, AI feels like the safest domain to be an expert in.

My playbook for breaking into AI is to find a real user problem, design a lightweight AI solution, and turn it into proof of work.

I left Microsoft and gained AI product experience at my next job

After joining Microsoft in 2018, I worked on the team of an augmented reality headset device, Microsoft HoloLens, for 2.5 years. Then I moved to an edtech team for a further two years.

Around the time I started at Microsoft, I created my own podcast. I wanted to help creators like myself build their businesses, so I started interviewing for jobs with creator economy firms. In January 2023, I left Microsoft to join Kajabi, a company that developed a business platform for creators and entrepreneurs, as a senior product manager.

At the time, I wanted to build a content repurposing tool to help creators increase their reach. Many creators lack marketing experience, and I imagined the tool would use AI to generate content, for example by taking the transcript from a podcast episode and condensing it into a blog. I thought it could also chop up a creator's hourlong video into short-form videos for TikTok and Instagram.

Before pitching the idea for the tool, I waited around a month after joining the company to understand its priorities. I got the green light and started working on the project around April 2023 with engineers and marketing teammates at Kajabi.

I learned on the job to create an AI product

I hadn't built an AI product myself before, though I was familiar with AI-powered technologies.

I struggled to find resources online explaining how to launch AI products, so I read blogs about things like product pricing that weren't focused on AI products, and then talked to my manager about how we could tweak that guidance to be relevant to us.

Engineering different prompts was key to the project, for example, to generate a good blog post versus a good LinkedIn post. I worked with my engineering team to build an internal tool that easily tested prompts for the main tool and compared them simultaneously.

It was helpful to build infrastructure that could help us iterate and experiment quickly. If your company doesn't have internal tools for testing, I'd suggest building them.

I had around 200 of my own podcast episodes that I could use as testing material by running them through the tool and seeing what marketing materials it made. If I were generating a blog post and the tool didn't quite capture the most important parts of the episode, I would tweak the prompt to improve the output.

My AI product helped me sell myself at Microsoft

We launched the product, called Creator Studio, in March 2024. I loved working at Kajabi, but I wanted to work on a team where people had more experience with AI.

Shortly after the launch, I saw Microsoft was hiring for a team developing generative AI to make visual content, like posters and infographics.

I was excited about the role because I felt that, while there's a lot of industry-wide emphasis on using AI for text generation, we still haven't figured out how to use AI for images and video that well. By joining a visuals team, I thought I would learn skills that others would have to catch up to later, helping me future-proof my career.

I practice a lot for my interviews. No matter how experienced you are, you have to practice telling your story in a way that makes sense to an audience meeting you for the first time.

Develop your understanding of what makes a good AI product

I rejoined Microsoft in July 2024 as a senior AI product manager. I think the fact that I could talk about my end-to-end experience building an AI product at Kajabi helped me land the role. I could show I identified a business problem and explored solutions, and I had a thorough story about what worked and what I learned when things failed.

Having awesome grades is one thing, but if you've built an actual AI project, it demonstrates your abilities.

Developing a sense of what makes a good AI product is something you can do every day. Test out whether an AI agent can solve a real problem for you, like booking your flights.

If your company isn't really working on AI, you can pitch a project, like I did.

Do you have a story to share about pivoting into AI work? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com.

• An industry report indicates that data centers are contributing to blackout risks this winter.
• NERC reports that Texas, the Southeast, and the Mid-Atlantic face the sharpest rise in power demand.
• Rising energy bills and data center expansion are fueling pushback and swinging votes.

Sprawling data centers may increase the risk of blackouts this winter.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation published a report on Tuesday that found expected power consumption this winter is set to grow by 20 gigawatts compared to winter 2024 — most of which is not driven by residential demand.

"The biggest one is data center growth in many parts of North America," Mark Olson, manager of reliability assessment at NERC, told Business Insider of the increase in power demand.

"Other factors like electrification of different parts of the economy — transportation, heating — it can vary by region, but we have identified data centers as one of the leading contributors," Olson added.

Olson said that the biggest energy demand growth areas are Texas, some Southeastern states, as well as the Mid-Atlantic area, where the "data center alley" is located. According to the report, while these regions have adequate resources under normal conditions, severe winter storms could unleash a polar vortex, triggering energy shortfalls.

"Winter electricity demand is rising at the fastest rate in recent years, particularly in areas where data center development is occurring," the report says. "Data centers are altering the daily load shape due to their round-the-clock operating pattern, lengthening peak demand periods."

According to the report, there are other smaller drivers of electricity demand in various regions, including industrial electrification in the Southwest and semiconductor manufacturing in the Northwest.

Business Insider previously reported that a wave of new AI data centers sparked backlash from residents in at least 13 states who are facing higher household electricity bills. As major utilities move ahead with multibillion-dollar projects to expand power generation, few rules stop them from passing those costs on to all customers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a letter to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, recommended that the US add 100 gigawatts of energy production capacity a year to stay competitive in the AI race. He did not specify who would be footing the bill.

The pushback against high energy bills and data centers is already influencing local elections. Earlier in November, Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ousted two Republican incumbents on Georgia's Public Service Commission, which regulates the state's major utility companies and their rates. The two Democrats ran on affordability and have been outspoken about ensuring that ratepayers aren't paying for data centers.

OpenAI, Amazon, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is resigning from OpenAI's board after new emails showing the extent of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein surfaced.

Axios was first to report the news.

OpenAI could not immediately be reached for comment.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

• Thirty Madison's former president is launching her own healthcare AI startup without VC funding.
• Arbiter is launching from stealth with $52 million from family offices, Business Insider learned.
• The round values Arbiter, which is using AI to retool healthcare operations, at $400 million.

Michelle Carnahan spent four years as the president of VC-backed healthcare startup Thirty Madison, and before that, had a two-decade-long career at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Now, she's launching her own startup without a drop of VC funding.

Arbiter, Carnahan's latest venture, has raised $52 million in seed funding at a $400 million valuation, Business Insider has learned exclusively.

Instead of turning to VCs, Carnahan raised the round from multiple family offices, which are essentially private investment firms that manage all aspects of a wealthy family's finances. TriEdge Investments and MFO Ventures co-led the round, joined by private equity firm WindRose Health Investors.

Arbiter's platform connects patient data to automate administrative tasks on behalf of healthcare providers and health plans, including referrals and appointment scheduling. The healthcare AI startup is only 6 months old, but its tech is already live with over 1,000 clinicians, which Carnahan credits to Arbiter's family office backing.

Carnahan has spent most of her career at Big Pharma, including a 26-year stint at Eli Lilly. She was at Thirty Madison during the 2021 VC funding boom, when the startup notched a $1 billion valuation. This September, Thirty Madison was acquired in an all-stock deal for over $500 million.

Carnahan said she didn't set out to avoid VC money, despite having witnessed the boom-and-bust cycle firsthand.

Instead, she said she turned to family offices because Arbiter was looking for more than just capital — the company wanted specialized healthcare investors who could bring their tech to market fast.

"This gives us not only a knowledge advantage, but a distribution advantage in partnerships that would take years to develop," Carnahan said.

Conducting a healthcare orchestra

Carnahan met Dr. Eric Moskow, cofounder and chairman of MFO Ventures, in 2022 while she was at Thirty Madison. They bonded over their frustrations with how fragmented the healthcare system had become, with data siloes and countless single-solution software products.

With the early promise of Moskow's backing, Arbiter acquired a data platform from SecondWave Delivery Systems, a healthcare company Moskow founded in 2020, along with the platform's customers and some employees. The software pulls patient data from different medical records into one place and evaluates patient health risks and other clinical factors to help doctors make better treatment decisions.

Carnahan said the deal accelerated Arbiter's path to market by 18 months. Arbiter didn't disclose exactly how much it paid for the tech, but said the deal represented a small portion of its seed funding. The company said it also signed an agreement with SecondWave to allow SecondWave to continue selling to its broader customer base, which gives Arbiter contracted multi-year revenue.

On top of SecondWave's data layer and risk adjustment capabilities, Arbiter is building AI infrastructure in-house to automate more actions across payers and providers.

Its first application uses AI agents to proactively reach out to patients, schedule appointments, and follow up with them after visits. That patient engagement tech is live with several health plans, Carnahan said.

Arbiter plans combine all of its capabilities into a unified "operating spine" for healthcare, which Carnahan said will launch next year with a major national payer and provider network, focused on automating referrals. She declined to share the names of those partners.

"Everyone keeps building new instruments for the orchestra. There's a prior auth tool here, an analytics dashboard there, but no one's building the conductor. Arbiter is that conductor," Carnahan said.

More M&A ahead

Arbiter is considering additional acquisitions to further boost its growth.

The startup is looking for solutions with a clear data strategy — Arbiter can make the tools more AI-forward, but it wants a solid data foundation for the AI first, Carnahan said. She's also considering technology that can take actions leading up to a doctor's visit, such as prior authorizations or supporting care in non-hospital settings, like the home.

Ultimately, Arbiter wants to move healthcare from reactive to proactive, including by using predictive AI modeling to forecast events such as disease onset and hospital stays.

Because Arbiter has big ambitions, it faces a full field of competitors, from AI-powered patient engagement startups like Hippocratic AI to companies that focus on freeing up healthcare capacity like DexCare.

Arbiter has assembled a top team of board members and clinical advisors to take on that challenge, including Dr. Clive Fields, an Arbiter board member and the cofounder of VillageMD, and Dr. Ainsley MacLean, a clinical advisor and the former chief medical information officer at health system giant Kaiser Permanente's mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group.

After 13 years in leadership roles at Kaiser Permanente, MacLean started her own private equity firm this year to back healthcare AI companies — and she thinks Arbiter's tech can lay the groundwork for the innovations she wants to invest in.

"I see Arbiter as the Palantir of healthcare," MacLean told Business Insider. "It's that kind of play, but with the deep connections, trust, and understanding of healthcare that will make them successful."

• Target cautioned that the critical fourth quarter sales will likely come in below last year's.
• The retailer will invest an additional $1 billion toward an effort to refresh its store fleet. It's also launching a ChatGPT integration.
• Incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke said he is focused on getting "back to growth as quickly as possible."

Target is betting a billion-dollar facelift will improve its fortunes after a rough couple of years.

The Minneapolis-based retailer posted its earnings on Wednesday, its 10th quarter in the past 12 with negative or flat comparable sales, and cautioned that the critical fourth quarter will likely be down as well.

"We're far from satisfied with our current results, and we won't be satisfied until we're operating at our full potential," incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke said in a call with reporters.

Third-quarter comparable sales declined 2.7%, coming in below analysts' estimate of -2.06%. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.78 came in above expectations of $1.73.

Fiddelke attributed much of the quarter's shortfall to a sharp drop-off in September, while August and October were relatively flat. Foot traffic data from Placer.ai shows a similar trend during the period.

Target will increase its annual capital expenditures from $4 billion to $5 billion to invest in remodeling and refreshing its store fleet, Fiddelke said, including the biggest changes to its merchandise assortment and floor plans that the company has seen in years.

Heading into the holidays, Fiddelke and Chief Commercial Officer Rick Gomez said shoppers continue to be stretched thin and making trade-offs wherever they can — a theme that has persisted in recent years across many retailers.

Now, Gomez said, Target shoppers are focusing their holiday spending on items they see as core to the spirit of the occasion, choosing Halloween costumes and candy over decor, for example.

"As we go into Christmas and the holidays, we think the consumer will prioritize what goes under the tree versus what goes on the tree," he added.

The chain has weathered declines in both the number of transactions and the size of those transactions, and Fiddelke said improving the in-store experience is key to turning those trends around.

Still, as economic pressures such as inflation, tariffs, and layoffs weigh on shoppers' minds, Target has found itself falling behind its more value-focused competitors like Walmart and Costco. Target's stock price has declined around 35% since the start of the year, compared to Walmart's 12.6% increase and Costco's 1.6% decrease.

"Prices need to be sharp," Fiddelke said. "The consumer is looking for great price, but we know that our lane — what makes Target uniquely special — is pairing that with incredible product."

The retailer also announced an app integration with ChatGPT that will roll out in beta next week.

"We expect to be one of the first retailers on OpenAI platforms to offer the purchase of multiple items in a single transaction, offer fresh food products on the platform, and the ability to choose drive-up and pick-up fulfillment options," Fiddelke said.

Once the excitement of the holiday shopping season is over, Fiddelke will have his work cut out for him as he takes the helm from outgoing CEO Brian Cornell on February 1.

All of it boils down to one goal: "Target back to growth as quickly as possible."

• My wife and I moved from Savannah, Georgia, back to the Midwest to be closer to my family.
• I wasn't sure about the decision at first, but living in Chicago gives me everything I need.
• I realized that I was thinking too much about how things look on social media.

A year and a half ago, my wife and I decided it was time to leave Savannah, Georgia, after living there for two years, and return to the Midwest. While the decision initially felt right, I entered months of self-doubt and indecisiveness.

In retrospect, it's obvious to me that my lack of clarity was social media-fueled — after all, it can make life feel like a competition over who can look the coolest and most successful. My own desires felt clouded by what I saw through small, digital windows.

We'd wanted to go back to the Midwest largely because we both had family there, including my young nephews. It'd been hard to miss so much of their lives. My father, sister, and my wife's parents were there, too — all people who made up our support system. The Midwest also felt like home, and in the end, we chose to relocate to Chicago.

But I questioned whether this decision was somehow an "uncool" one. I wondered if I'd be happier or more successful elsewhere.

I compared myself to other people

As a writer, I compared myself to other creative people. Writers, musicians, photographers, and dancers I knew who lived in LA or New York City. Was I selling myself short by not trying to "make it" in those places? Was I going to fall behind? Would I be happier or more successful there?

I spiraled. LA and New York are expensive and far from our families, whom we wanted to see more often. If we couldn't move there, should we move somewhere more beautiful — that is, somewhere that looks enviable on Instagram? Somewhere with mountains or lush forests. Despite seeing beauty in the Midwest and a deep affinity for Lake Michigan, I questioned whether it compared to other beautiful places.

I also wondered if my desire to be closer to home said something unfavorable about me, if it meant I was moving backward, somehow. Would I miss out on anything by making this choice?

I tried to imagine my life in another place outside the Midwest

My wife and I made a list of all the places we could see ourselves living. We wrote down Asheville, North Carolina, as well as Burlington, Vermont, and various other midsize cities with naturally beautiful landscapes that are within a 10-hour drive of our families in Michigan.

We made some pros and cons lists and tried to imagine what life would really be like in those places. But I kept coming back to the same thing: I wanted to go somewhere that felt like home, closer to people who felt like home.

Finally, I started listening to myself over my perception of other people's lives

I thought about the first place I lived outside Michigan — Denver. While I liked living in a city and enjoyed the mountains in the distance, it never felt like home. Sometimes, being in a landlocked state made me feel claustrophobic. I missed the big bodies of water of my home state.

Savannah hadn't felt right, either. It was beautiful there, too, but it was unfamiliar in so many ways. I missed familiarity. I wanted to see my family more than once or twice a year.

I realized that in all my indecisiveness, what I was really after was a better version of myself. It wasn't the geographic place I was concerned with, but who I could be while living there. The successful writers I compared myself to who lived in L.A. or New York weren't successful because of where they lived, or at least not that alone — they were successful because of their talent.

People who live among "Instagram-worthy" landscapes might be happier in part because of their surroundings, but they also may not be. I understood the true meaning of that cliché: wherever you go, there you are. I could be who I wanted to be anywhere, and who I wanted to be included someone with strong relationships to people that matter.

I understood, too, that I'd been treating this decision as if I were making it for the rest of my life. If I ever decide I do want to give another city a go, I can change my mind. Life is long. In Chicago, at least for now, I feel like I have the best of both worlds. A major city, "cool" things to do, no shortage of artists and beauty — and my family is a few hours away.

• Satya Nadella said external factors and perceptions, including memes, can shape how employees feel about company culture.
• The CEO was asked about 2011 cartoon that depicted Microsoft's internal divisions in conflict with each other.
• Nadella, who transformed Microsoft, emphasized the need for a culture of "inner strength" that can "resist the social meme."

Satya Nadella isn't a fan of letting memes define Microsoft.

The Microsoft CEO discussed the impact of a 2011 cartoon that depicted tension between the company's various divisions during a Tuesday episode of Stripe's "Cheeky Pint" podcast.

"That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality," Nadella told Stripe cofounder John Collison.

The drawing was part of a larger set of drawings by cartoonist Manu Cornet that poked fun at the Big Tech org charts. For Microsoft's chart, three separate divisions were illustrated aiming guns at each other.

"I'd say there are two things that I learned from that entire episode because I always say, look, I'm a consummate insider, right? Anything good and bad about Microsoft of the last 35 years, I lived through them all, and I'm part of it, right?" Nadella said. "So I can't deny any of it. The thing that I felt was, a little bit of that was just we lost our own belief because we lost the narrative."

"So this doesn't mean, oh, wow, we were all perfect divisions and we were all sort of, you know, in greater harmony. That is not the case," Nadella added. "But you know, in some sense, some of these divisional tensions are real issues that need to have tension, right?"

Nadella also suggested that there can be a time and a place for rivalry within a large organization.

"Social cohesion is not a goal. Winning in the marketplace is a goal," Nadella said on the podcast. "But at some level, you have to orchestrate these large organizations — in fact, you might even have two competing teams, by design."

However, the cartoon is an example of how external voices, like memes, can shape how employees internally view their workplace culture, the CEO said. That's when executives and managers have to ensure they've built enough trust with workers to withstand the influence of social media.

"How to communicate in today's world where your employees read about you outside and form opinions about you is one of the toughest leadership challenges," Nadella said.

It's not the first time Nadella has addressed the over-decade-old cartoon. In his 2017 book, "Hit Refresh," he wrote that he was upset that Microsoft's own people "just accepted it."

"As a twenty-four-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me," Nadella wrote.

The cartoon came out years before he took over as CEO in 2014, but turning around the company's culture was Nadella's "highest priority" when he took the helm, he said in the book. He said he'd do so by removing barriers to innovation and creating a narrative from the top that shapes individual teams.

His shift to a "growth mindset" and "learn-it-all versus know-it-all" culture appears to be working more than a decade into his tenure. Nadella has grown Microsoft from a roughly $300 billion company to the second to reach a $4 trillion market cap, a milestone it crossed in October. The CEO has also positioned the company well in the AI arms race, investing early in OpenAI.

Still, external voices can be loud at times.

"I would say the challenge for all of us in today's world is, let the social media memes not define us," Nadella told Collison. "What's that inner strength that is there in an organization that can, in fact, resist the social meme — that I think is the key."

• Business Insider is compiling a list of startups using AI to transform how people work.
• We want to highlight companies that improve how work gets done across industries.
• Please submit nominations by December 15.

AI has affected nearly every aspect of the workplace. Business Insider is looking for the most compelling startups transforming how work gets done.

Do you know a company that fits the bill? Let us know.

Criteria and methodology:

Prospective companies must be startups that use AI to improve some aspect of the workplace — whether in finance, tech, professional services, retail, or transportation.

Factors we'll consider:

• Amount of funding raised
• Impact the startup is already having on other businesses
• Originality and creativity of the idea

Please make your submission below by December 15, 2025 to have your selection considered. Please provide as much detail as possible in your nomination.

Email editor Julia Herbst at jherbst@businessinsider.com with any questions or issues submitting nominations.

• As AI takes on more repetitive tasks, soft skills may become more critical in the workplace.
• Executives and workplace transformation experts shared which soft skills workers should develop.
• They said problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and creativity are especially critical.

You can't escape the call for soft skills.

As AI increasingly augments repetitive tasks, human connection is becoming more valuable in many workplaces. Even in technical fields, like engineering, developing skills that allow you to collaborate with others can help you prove your worth.

"Equally important are your soft skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork," LinkedIn's VP of Engineering for Talent Solutions, Prashanthi Padmanabhan, recently told Business Insider.

The rising importance of soft skills doesn't mean you need to suddenly become a social butterfly at work — although that might not hurt. Workplace observers have said that extroverted personalities can offer an advantage in the current workforce because human-centered tasks can't be as easily offloaded by AI.

But which soft skills are most important? And how can you highlight the ones you possess when looking for a new job? Business Insider spoke with seven workforce transformation experts, as well as executives from LinkedIn, IBM, and Cisco about the soft skills that will be most important in the AI era.

Read on to learn more about three skills they identified:

1. Problem solving

Your therapist's advice may only be as good as the information you share with them — and the same goes for AI.

Large language models can generate instant suggestions, but it's up to employees to identify the right problems, craft effective prompts, and determine the best course of action based on the insights it spits out.

"Even if AI is helping with consulting work, it's still not so great," said Michael Housman, founder and lead strategist at AI-ccelerator, a firm specializing in AI education and consulting. That means job seekers should work on developing skill sets that are "complementary to what machines are really good at," Housman told Business Insider.

Housman, who is also the author of "Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind)," said that job seekers should focus on developing — and highlighting — their complex problem-solving skills. That means thinking about how to solve complicated challenges with "ambiguous inputs and metrics for success," he said.

Guy Diedrich, Cisco's senior vice president and global innovation officer, told Business Insider previously that critical thinking and problem-solving will become crucial as the pace of AI innovations leads to companies making significant ethical decisions. He said "asking the right questions" about what should be done will be the most important skill humans can develop.

2. Emotional intelligence

Alex King, founder and managing director of ExpandIQ, told Business Insider that self-awareness and the ability to read the room will become increasingly necessary in the AI age.

That involves tapping into your "gut feeling" and understanding situations where you need to lean in or step back, he said.

"People who have those soft skills around self-awareness and emotional intelligence are going to do really well in the future, because that's obviously something AI cannot do," said King, who also served as the former head of global talent acquisition at software-development firm Integrate.

Ruchir Puri, IBM's chief scientist, similarly told Business Insider that while most successful CEOs probably have a high IQ, their success relies more on their ability to connect with others and communicate efficiently, which he refers to as the "emotional quotient" and "relationship quotient."

"The advice I'll give is always be empathetic," Puri said. "Put yourself in their shoes and see why they are reacting the way they are."

That level of awareness also extends to communication and ensuring that there's "clarity" in the way you're expressing ideas.

"Don't just express a concept. Make sure the concept is at a level that they can understand," Puri said, adding that "it's not just what you say; it's how you say it."

3. Creativity and Imagination

With AI augmenting more busy work, many executives have said that there will be more time for "deep work," including expansive thinking and idea generation.

That could be especially true in software engineering. As AI accelerates the process required to launch products and helps solve the issue of "scarcity of developers," Cisco's CPO Jeetu Patel previously told Business Insider that imagination will be "the only constraint."

That means there will likely be a greater emphasis on developing fresh, high-quality ideas.

Terri Horton, an AI strategy and workforce transformation consultant at the boutique advisory firm FuturePath, told Business Insider that creativity is becoming increasingly important. Not only does that mean coming up with unique ideas for how to do your job, but it also includes thinking about where AI can be applied to make work more efficient.

"If we are replacing or removing, let's say, 30% of the tasks that are associated with the role and replacing them with AI, what else can you do?" Horton said. "How can you leverage your creativity to work collaboratively with your functional leader or to help think about how that role can be redesigned?"

LinkedIn's Padmanabhan, told Business Insider that candidates are increasingly using the interview process to highlight their creativity by showcasing a concept they have brought to life.

"If you don't have the coding experience, but you have a brilliant idea in your head — just build something," Padmanabhan said.

• Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said enterprise AI hasn't really even scratched the surface.
• "We're still doing the super foundational," Gomez said.
• He said that once models improve, greater disruption will follow.

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."