AI is becoming workplace commonplace

AI will transform workplaces within a year, becoming essential partners to human employees, says Aidan Gomez, CEO of LLM startup Cohere.

“Every day you’ll be talking to [AI] models, probably more than you talk to humans at work,” said Aidan, while addressing the Centre Stage audience at Collision 2024 (our former North American event, succeeded by Web Summit Vancouver).

“They’ll be your partners in doing your job. They’ll be off doing work for you inside the organisation.

“A year from now, I think it’s going to be ubiquitous. People will be much more familiar with the technology, how to work alongside it, how to integrate it into their jobs and their day-to-day lives,” added the CEO.

“When a new technology comes out, it’s a learning process. It’s not trivial to make this technology useful for you and your job, you need to get good at using the tool to make you more effective. That takes time and effort.”

Yet Aidan thinks the widely reported threat of AI to human jobs has been oversold: “I’m a big believer in augmentation and not displacement. So I don’t foresee people losing jobs…What it will do is help us achieve our goals and help us achieve the growth that our world needs to see.”

“There’s extraordinary things that will happen. It’s not a doomsday AI scenario. It’s extremely positive,” added the CEO.

“We’re going to become way more effective at discovering drugs. We’re going to boost productivity massively, when the world is going through a productivity crisis at the moment. So I think the good from AI is what I’m focused on, and I’m extremely optimistic we’re going to deliver that in the short term.”

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Main image: Ramsey Cardy/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)