Cohere CEO says AI will disrupt white collar jobs — and finance could be next (www.businessinsider.com)

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez warned that enterprise AI is only in its infancy and that broader disruption — including in finance — is coming as large language models (LLMs) get better. Speaking on Kleiner Perkins’ podcast, Gomez noted Cohere already deploys LLMs with partners like RBC and TD Bank and that the company, valued at about $7 billion after recent funding, is focused on practical enterprise use cases. As a co‑author of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper, Gomez emphasized that current work is still “foundational”: automating low‑level tasks such as summarizing emails and meeting notes, but primed to scale into deeper workflows. The significance for AI/ML practitioners is twofold: technically, LLMs are moving from assistance to augmentation of white‑collar tasks, matching the cognitive patterns of entry‑level roles; economically, that shift could reshape labor markets in software, finance, legal and publishing. Tools like Claude and ChatGPT have already altered software engineering workflows, and Gomez — echoing others in the field — predicts finance will be a major next frontier as models improve. The implication for engineers and product teams is to prioritize robust, secure, domain‑adapted LLM integrations that preserve oversight and address potential job displacement while unlocking productivity gains.