- Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) co-founder, Marc Andreessen, says that VCs may escape the rising tide of AI automation. On a recent podcast, he said the relationship-driven art of venture capital may make it one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing when other jobs are automated.
Marc Andreessen is predicting that at least one job is safe from the rise of AI: his own.
In a recent podcast, Andreessen said that venture capital might be one of the few jobs that will survive the rise of AI automation. He said this was partly because the job required several “intangible” skills and was more of an art than a science.
“A lot of it is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time,” he said.
Andreessen is a seasoned venture capitalist having co-founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in 2009, which went on to invest in major tech companies like Facebook and Airbnb.
While he acknowledged that AI may become better at picking investments, he added that the complex skills needed for the job may help it escape the rising tide of AI automation.
“The great part of venture capitalism is that picking is the small part of the game,” he said. “So much of what a venture capitalist firm is are its relationships with the world, because to build a company, you end up needing a lot of relationships.”
“So, it is possible—I don’t want to be definitive—but it’s possible that that is quite literally timeless. And when, you know, when the AI is doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing,” he continued.
The rise of AI
As companies increasingly incorporate AI into everyday workflows, some employees are getting concerned about their jobs.
A recent Future of Jobs report published by the World Economic Forum forecasted that 40% of employers plan to reduce headcounts in areas where AI can automate tasks, with technology projected to disrupt roles in information processing, customer service, and basic analytics over the next five years.
Employers have been saying the quiet part out loud recently when it comes to replacing workers with AI.
CEOs such as Shopify’s Tobi Lütke and Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski have both spoken candidly about their desire to reduce future headcount with the help of AI.
In a memo shared with Shopify staff late last month, Lutke told staffers before asking for more headcount and resources, “teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”
At Klarna, Siemiatkowski has said that the company’s AI chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and has spoken openly about AI eventually driving down the headcount at the company.
Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta are also increasingly incorporating AI to work on coding tasks. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said that AI is writing around 30% of the company’s total code.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also predicted that AI could be writing more than half of the company’s code within the next year.
