Karim Atiyeh, co-founder of Ramp, discusses the long-term role of human marketing teams in an AI-driven workflow.
Disclosure
Atiyeh: Ramp abandoned fine-tuning AI to wait for next-generation foundation models
“We did spend some time fine-tuning in many places, and then we very quickly found out that our time was worth way more and that we should just, like, wait, wait for, like, other generations of model.”
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.”
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.”