A Kleiner Perkins partner explains why the firm is betting on AI for highly paid jobs like doctors and lawyers
In an episode of the "Uncapped" podcast published on Wednesday, a Kleiner Perkins partner, Mamoon Hamid, said the firm is investing in startups that make digital assistants for America's highest-paying jobs.
"If you'd look at a chart of the top 20 jobs in the US by pay, those are doctors, lawyers, and engineers," Hamid said. "So we thought, OK, so how do we invest in copilots for these job types?"
The VC added that: "There are parts of these jobs that are very nuanced and the human brain needs to process those parts of the job, but there's parts that AI is scribing or taking notes."
Hamid said that the company had invested in Ambience, a startup for doctors, Harvey, a legal-tech platform for lawyers, and Windsurf, a coding assistance platform for engineers.
He said that physical labor, which is often among the lowest-paying jobs, is harder to tackle with AI.
"It's like back-breaking work that people do and still do it, and that's probably the hardest place to attack today," he said. "We're thinking sort of much further out, which is like robots, it's like humanoids."
The Menlo Park-based firm specializes in investing in early-stage tech and life science startups. Founded in 1972, it has backed over 900 companies, including Amazon, Google, and Twitter.
As AI improves, companies outside the tech industry are promoting or even mandating its use for their employees. That's leading to a rush of contracts for big companies, like OpenAI, and startups alike.
In May, the CEO of Norway's $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund said that using AI is not "voluntary" for his employees.
"If you don't use it, you will never be promoted. You won't get a job," Nicolai Tangen said.
In a viral memo in April, Shopify's Tobias Lütke told employees that AI use is "now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify" and "teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI" before asking for more head count.
In the same month, Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said not enough of his employees know how to use AI and that Uber is implementing training programs to change that. He added that learning to use AI agents to code is "going to be an absolute necessity at Uber within a year."
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