Karim Atiyeh is co-founder and CTO of Ramp. He explains Ramp's AI engineering strategy in response to Elad Gil asking whether Ramp fine-tunes models for accounting.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Atiyeh: Ramp uses GPT-4o Mini for 90% of its production AI tasks
“Oh yeah, it's already in production, and for like, 90% of tasks that we're running, it's good enough, so that was a quick switch. And within a day, we can know very quickly, like, that, yes, this is, like, good enough, and we have the right evals.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Atiyeh: AI will not replace human taste in marketing
“The one thing that I think will remain for a very long time is, is having good taste. And at like at the end of the day, like if you are, even if you are working with the eyes and machines at, Someone needs to decide, like, is, is this good or not? And there's…”
Insight
Atiyeh: Test creative performance first before optimizing for brand compliance
“I think it's a lot more restrictive to start with, let's make something on brand, and then let's make it work, and a lot more costly. So trying to, like, invert a little bit how how we produce, like, good creatives and good content.”
Insight
Atiyeh: Finance professionals care about control and accuracy, not AI branding
“Financial professionals care about the job being done and they care about the observability and having control and a lot more than they care. Like they don't actually care that much if they're using AI. They just want it to be like fast and accurate.”
Disclosure
Atiyeh: Ramp evaluates SaaS vendors by interviewing their engineers on development velocity
“The way we
Pick the right vendors is almost like essentially interviewing them.
We primarily like to talk to the engineering teams.
we care a lot about the slope and the rate at which they're progressing, as opposed to whether they have gaps today or not.
And…”
Insight
Atiyeh: Financial AI risk is minimal when tasks are well-constrained
“I honestly don't think there's that much risk if you constrain the problem well, right? Because at the end of the day, so like if you're trying to figure out like how to use AI to help you categorize transactions, it's not an open-ended question.”