‘Every single employee will be working with an AI model within a year’

Toronto – June 18, 2024

Seismic changes are coming to the working world within the next 12 months, with AI to the fore. That’s according to Aidan Gomez (pictured above), founder and CEO of AI startup Cohere. 

Most workplaces will have incorporated AI models of some kind into their operations, said Aidan, and the changes won’t stop there. 

“Every day you’ll be talking to [AI] models, probably more than you talk to humans at work,” said Aidan. “They’ll be your partners in doing your job. They’ll be off doing work for you inside the organization… 

“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. 

“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.”

“We need to make humanity more productive, and we need to do more. We need to continue growth, and this tech is the most promising thing we’ve seen in a quarter century to deliver that promise.”

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

When asked about his advice for the next generation of startups in Toronto, Aidan said:

“I really want to see a thriving ecosystem here. I’m really excited by what I’m seeing people build in the city. I want to invest in it, personally. I want to see more venture capital deployed into this city. 

“There has been a decline in VC, so it’s tough to be a startup. To the founders out there, or the founders who are thinking about starting, I would just say, ‘keep fighting’. It’s hard, and venture capital is a fickle sort of sheep-like business, but I think it’s going to come back. And if you have a good idea and you have a good team, you will succeed. You will succeed.¨

Aidan´s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on challenges of implementing AI in businesses at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups will take part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 44 percent of these will be women-founded, and startups will travel to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 800 speakers, 1,200 journalists, 850 investors and 100+ unicorn companies will arrive in Toronto from 140-plus countries, while 120+ trade delegations will participate in Collision to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

Partnerships at Collision have also grown 40% year-on-year, with nearly 250 global partners in 2022, including Snap, Google Cloud, TikTok, AWS, RBC, Siemens, KPMG, CAE, Interac and Crypto.com. Collision’s women in tech program is also sold out, as is our startup program.

The total floor space needed at the Enercare Centre has increased by 54%, from 50,000sqm to 77,000sqm.

Collision will be the largest international gathering hosted in the city of Toronto in more than two years, and is considered the single most important tech deal-making event in the world.

It may also be the largest gathering of tech unicorns at one event, ever. Deel, Canva, Trulioo and FalconX are among the more than 100 decacorns and unicorns that will be in attendance and on stage at Collision, in what Recode calls “one of the best shows for up-and-coming startups”. 

Top speakers at Collision include:
● Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
● Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
● Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
● Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
● Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
● Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
● Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
● Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
● Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

All of our summaries will be published on the Web Summit Summary Service page.

For any questions about this or any other Web Summit Summaries content, please contact us at media@websummit.com.

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship program, and our community partnerships.

Useful links
Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
About Web Summit: www.about.websummit.com