Ramp CEO Eric Glyman: Using AI to Build “Self-Driving Money”

When ChatGPT ushered in a new paradigm of AI in everyday use, many companies attempted to adapt to the new paradigm by rushing to add chat interfaces to their products. Eric has a different take—he doesn’t think chatbots are the right form factor for everything. He thinks “zero-touch” automation that works invisibly in the background can be more valuable in many cases. He cites self-driving cars as an analogy—or in this case, “self-driving money.” Ramp is a new kind of finance management company for businesses, offering AI-powered financial tools to help companies handle spending and expense processes. We’ll hear why Eric thinks AI that you never see is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing time spent on drudgery and unlocking more time for meaningful work. Hosted by: Ravi Gupta and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: Paribus: Glyman’s previous company, acquired by Capital One in 2016 Karim Atiyeh: Cofounder and CTO at Ramp and Glyman’s cofounder at Paribus Devin: AI agent product from Cognition Labs and Glyman’s favorite AI app Hit Refresh: Book by Satya Nadella

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Look, I think the most important thing beyond is empathy. If you're trying to make great products, you need to have great taste. You need people who are making to so deeply understand really the experience of building, the pain that people are going through, you know, what they're actually, you know, the customer at the end is actually doing there to run your business that you understand it not just decently, but in some cases better than the customer has. And I think only then can you actually build products that are so well designed that they can actually automate the task, they can do it more efficiently. And I think part of why, you know, as we're releasing products, engineers are on the call with customers when we ship, they're accountable for metrics and how it ultimately performs.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  And what I guess you really won't find people at Ramp who haven't talked to customers with any level of recency. And I think that's just a core part of what makes great product cultures.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Joining us today is my friend Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, which offers companies AI-powered financial tools to manage their spending and expense processes. Many companies rush to add chatbots after the chat GPT moment, but Eric has a different take. He doesn't think that chatbots are the right form factor for everything. I mean, who wants to chat with their expense report? He thinks zero-touch automation that works invisibly in the background can be much more valuable in many cases. In fact, he thinks a better analogy is to self-driving cars, or in this case, self-driving money. We'll talk about Ramp's approach to building in AI and how Eric sees the space evolving. Welcome to the show.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Eric, we are so happy that you're here. We, you know, the original invitation for this podcast, as you know, happened over dinner. And we were so happy that you decided to do it with us. So we have tons of questions for you about the future of AI and how it's going to impact finance and businesses. But for the very few people that don't know, can you mind, do you mind just saying a few sentences on what Ramp is and what you all do?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  For sure. I mean, look, we're dedicated to making companies more profitable and operate more smoothly. The way you can think about Ramp is, you know, we built a command and control system for company finances. So from one place, you can issue cards, manage approvals, make payments of all kinds, and even automate closing your books. And so for your finance teams, it means that your, you know, your operations are simpler. You can automate a lot of business processes and it surfaces up data and intelligence on how your company can spend less. And so the upshot is the average company using Ramp is able to save about 5% per year on their expenses, which is pretty material. You know, over the past five years we've been in business, this has added into billions of dollars of savings and the equivalent of thousands of the years of labor that's been saved.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  And so whether it's large publicly traded companies like Shopify, Virgin Voyages, Boys and Girls Club in America, to 25,000 other businesses, it's bringing benefit today. And a lot of what we're trying to do is really answer the question of how do you make people more productive with their time and with their money?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it. Well, one thing that, you know, I was surprised by before we get into, you know, how Ramp is using AI, you and Kareem, you know, I saw you guys posted this the other day. You built an AI agent in 2015 at Paribus. I mean, this is way before it was cool. What did you build back then? And maybe tell us about that. And then we want to hear about what you've built now and how it's changed over the last nine years.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, for sure. So Paribus was a much, it was a very simple tool, and I think it is fair to call it an AI agent. Basically,

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Go back to a decade ago, if you were buying something online, whether it's at Amazon, Best Buy, whatever, all these stores would guarantee that if you bought some TV for a thousand bucks, the next day it went on sale for $900, you could get the difference back if you ask them. These were price adjustment policies. And so we built it was an app that integrated with your email software, your Gmail, Yahoo, whatever you use. Scan your inbox for receipts, track the prices of what you bought. And if there was a price drop, you were eligible for something different. It generated an email to sound like you, sent it to the store. The store customer service responded and you know, you wake up to a hundred dollars back the next day. And so that was it. It was this, there was this agent that lived in your inbox and help you, help you save money.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  And well, I guess I would say like a couple of things. I mean, first, I think if, you know, many people are thinking about agentic AI and how is it going to change tools and this new use case? I would argue it's actually been around for a long time. This is a decade ago. You know, millions of people use this in order to get price drop refunds from, from stores and retailers. But it was a very narrow use case. When I think about AI today in 2024,

• 5:10Speaker 00

  I think the sets of use cases where computers can be doing work on your behalf is far easier. It's not just going to be these narrow surfaces like price adjustment guarantees. It's really intensive and hard to do that, but more generalized reasoning, helping your finance team run more efficiently, maybe not just asking for price refunds, but maybe even helping you negotiate and running more complex analyses. But I think this, this primitive of software that does things on your behalf has been here for, for a while, and I think he's going to be growing pretty quickly.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  That's a really good segue into what you're building now at Ramp. I'd love to learn more about your vision for Ramp AI.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, first, like, you know, forget even just just just Ramp AI. Like, we're dedicated to this mission of helping people spend less money and spend less time. I think we're very excited about AI because it's a it's a new set of tools that enables us to do this. You know, but ultimately comes down to like, where where is the pain point? Are there processes in your business that result in your company spending more time than you need to? Or are there areas in your business where you're spending too much money? And so, you know, when we think about where things are going to go over time, you know, so much of running a finance team, and Robbie, you know this from your time as being CFO to Instacart. There's a lot of tedium and monotony.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  You know, you're trying to grow your business, and yet, when you look deep in your finance team, you'll find people who are auditing expense reports by hand. They're downloading spreadsheets in order to be able to tag and classify vendors. They're rerunning analysis time and time again. And what we're trying to do at Ramp, our vision is how do you take these tedious and monotonous tasks? And either through better design, integrated tools, automate this. And so the simple way to understand this is instead of eating two apps to buy one thing, your American Express and your Concur, you know, where people are going in and out and adding their receipts. What if it's one tool? You tap your Ramp card and through zero touch, where we will pull the receipt from the merchant, from your email, your expense report is not just easier to do, but it's done for you.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  So there's a lot of cases of zero-touch expenses, better categorization. We sort of apply large language models to the transaction data itself as well as your general ledger. So we can autocomplete expenses for you certainly faster and for the vast majority of customers more accurately. So your books are effectively doing themselves. And over time, Ramp should be able to to point to ways for your business to operate vastly more efficiently. Same sets of vendors, better prices, same business processes done automatically for you. And so there's a lot in in just the the manifestations of how Ramp helps your finance team run more efficiently. There's also ways we're trying to experiment with even how should people interact with Ramp?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Should it be something where you're prompting Ramp to do these things? Or should it be taking care of these things for you and doing work on your behalf? And so we can go either way, but that's that's a loose framework of how we think about it.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  And how do you decide what's in scope? Like, anything that makes a finance team more efficient? Is that what's in scope for you? Or what's in scope and what's out of scope?

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, I think, Sunny, that's probably the right way to put it. You know, it really is. Will, can we create a product that should save time and money for for end customers? If so, I think it's in scope. You know, today, Ramp is largely used for payments out of a business. So I think card expenses, bill payment expenses, business processes on top of that. But when you think about, you know, over time, building towards self-driving money, you know, finance department, that's improving itself. I think thinking about higher yields, more efficient collections, to even more efficient

• 9:00Speaker 00

  record-keeping, I think are all things that we're thinking about over time. So I would argue there's very little out of scope. And I would say in the same way, you know, I, we think about ourselves more as a productivity company than we do as just a money company. And so, anything that makes the productivity of capital in your business go higher are things that we should be thinking about.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Derek, what is the intuition then on your side? You've mentioned you're thinking about how folks are actually going to use AI within Ramp, right? And you said them prompting Ramp versus things happening in the background on their behalf. How do you think it's going to play out? I get that you guys are going to test it and you're going to listen to customers. But where do you think it's going to go?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  So, I mean, maybe just like a couple of notes stepping back. You think about the first phase, you know, what happened sort of after ChatGPT came out? Suddenly, there was a chatbot slapped on everything, you know? And people say, finally, it's your app and you can talk to it. And, you know, I've personally never met anyone who says, you know, I just wish I could chat to my bank account. I wish I could chat with my expense report. You know, and so I would say like, I totally get the skepticism of like, the first set of people who find this really silly. And I think that we've tried to classify internally, and when we think about the sets of user experiences, probably into two buckets.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  I mean, the first, we think a lot about this paradigm of really zero-touch AI. And I would argue even Parabas was an early example of this. The interaction was actually no UX. You would sign up, you'd link your email and that was it. And you'd wake up the next day and it was done for you. And there's a whole category of experiences like this. You tap your card, your expense report is done for you.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Your accounting is done on your behalf. We're suggesting memos for you to click one, two, three. And so we're trying to predict and understand what are the user interaction inputs we may need? Can we get to a level of confidence where we can do this all the way? And can we expand the surface area of these? And so there's a whole set of things that happen from the administration to the analyses, to the operational closure of tasks that you can do. And so I think there's a large category there. We can unpack and talk about the expansion surface area. And there's this next surface area.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  We think, you know, internally, we think about it as agentic AI, where you're going to want to effectively prompt some kind of outcome, maybe monitor what's being done along the way. Or once you get a level of trust, have that done for you. So let's play the use case. A few weeks ago, we launched right after the launch of GPT-4O, the new multimodal model from OpenAI, which now had vision, audio and text understanding capabilities. We created a way for customers to just ask Ramp what it wanted done. And Ramp would show you how to do it and do that on your behalf.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  So you could say Ramp, you know, I'd like to issue a card with a budget of $50 that only can be used at Starbucks. Go. And then effectively, the large language model could read everything that's on your screen, everything you're seeing and would guide you through steps in order to how to do this. We call this the tour guide. So which you click here, enter in this text and you could monitor this. And you can see with extreme accuracy. Again, we didn't build into the interface, click here. This wasn't a managed demo.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  The reasoning of large models are now capable to go and do that for you. And I think there's a whole class of services. And I would argue the majority of business is actually done this way. The interface that most people think about this today is, I think as you've joked once before, Robbie, you know, you hire an analyst and you say, hey, I want this thing done. Go figure this out for me. And you know, that's your interface.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  There have been forms of AI that have been around a long time, as I, as I mentioned to you. Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Exactly. You know, you've, you've had a large language model before. It's an annual. No, but I, I think that's actually a, a, a good way of, of, of thinking about the, of these things. Right. Um, um, I'd actually say it's, it's kind of strange that the status quo today is, you know, people are trained to learn how to use your app. Instead, like I, I think it, it makes more sense to me that people should be thinking about how to run their business, how to sell to customers, how to, you know, find ROI versus how to manage the intricacies of how your app is designed. And I think, um, done right, you should be able to say, this is what I'm trying to accomplish. Go get it done. And in the early era, um, you may monitor that, but over time, as you build trust in that process

• 13:48Speaker 00

  and the reasoning capabilities increase, you'll see it go. And, and I might draw an analogy even to you to, um, the progression in self-driving cars. You know, when you think a decade ago around the hype of, you know, self-driving, you'd have people sitting in the driver's seats, ready to take over, you know, with a steering wheel. And now there are Waymos all around, uh, the Bay Area. And it's strange when there's someone in the seat, um, because the capabilities are actually more accurate. And I think there's going to be sets of tasks over time that will get handed off. And, um, I, you know, you can have an agent, a, it's own driver, driving parts of your organization where there's, um, high fidelity. So I'll, I'll pause there.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  By the way, there's so many jokes I could make about, uh, Ravi handing off work to others, but I'll, I'll hold myself back.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  You know, some of us have been focused on ROI for longer than others, Tonya. I, I, I'm not going to apologize for that.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Eric, if you had to guess, like a lot of what you just described was almost more conversational. The way you kind of get an agent to do something like is the way you go, the way that Ravi would go talk to, talk to a teammate. What does, do you think that means that kind of software interfaces as we know them in terms of buttons and knobs, et cetera, kind of go away and fade into the background? Or how do you think that all plays out? And like, what does a AI-first user experience look like?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  First, yes, I do. I do think so, very much so. And I think that great design actually is about understanding the job to be done so well that you can reduce steps, you can make things easier, more intuitive and effortless to get things done. And I think balancing not only really the range of powerful tools that you can do against and outcomes that you want to drive to the simplicity of the interface is always going to be a tension.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  But I would say we think about that quite a bit internally at Ramp. And so what I would say is I think you will want to be able to audit, to understand functionally, what are these powerful tools doing for you? But done right, yes, I think that it's going to be more, in many cases, just prompting, here's the outcome I want to drive, and the tool will go and drive it. Which, just as like a brief aside, like for us, you know, I'll put it this way, there's over 25,000 businesses using Ramp. Some are run by sophisticated finance teams. You know, others are, they're running small businesses.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  There's lots of complexity and baggage that prevent them from focusing on the areas that really generate a lot of value from them. Meeting new clients, writing better pitches, investing in the parts of their business that generate return, building the next great product. And so much time, I think, is stolen by people having to learn an amalgamation of tools, stitching together processes. And done right, the world should feel more frictionless, it should feel more smooth.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  And so I would say, like, I think if we can accomplish that, I think it's been a failure as an industry to deliver that for people.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Well, one thing, Eric, that I'm curious about is, you think about, Ramp has a lot of pride in its culture, right? And it's talked about externally, it's something that you guys are known for, speed and quality and real customer obsession.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  How did you build the culture and engineering, in particular you and Kareem, that sort of embraces wanting to implement AI and wanting to do it well? What did you guys do there? Because I think that there are places that are a bit more resistant to change and, you know, less embracing of a change like this.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Well, so a couple of things. I mean, I would go back to again, like, what is Ramp like? We're not some AI-driven finance tool that we're going marketing. Do you want to adopt AI in your finance team? No, it's, we exist to save you time and money. We lead with the benefit. We talk about the outcome that we're trying to drive and we put these in simple terms. But I would, I would say it's actually not possible to use Ramp today without using AI. When people say that it's so easy to submit expense reports or that suddenly my books are getting closed faster, it's often because AI is inserted at lots of different parts throughout the process. And so what I would say is, I think one of the first things that we did to try to get at that was focus on what is the problem?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  We are trying to help businesses operate, you know, using less time, fewer hours and less capital. And AI was a means to an end, but was not the end. So we didn't want to have technology in search of a problem, but really focus on what is the problem? Then, once you start to decompose the question of like, what are all the areas that are wasting lots of time? It turns out a lot of time, it's process automation. And so I think it just became like the right tool for the job in so many different cases. And I think rather than trying to say, would you like to use this tool? Instead, you say, would you like to, you know,

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Solve this problem.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Do your expense reports?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Solve this problem. And I think that the other thing too is in so many businesses, I know there are a lot of founders listening to this. I think abstract makers away from the problem directly, which is to say, you know, you can go to a small startup with 10 people and everyone's talking to users. And then somehow you go to a company with 500 to 1,000 people and you, you know, try to figure out who's talked to a customer over the last week, hopefully all the salespeople. But, you know, you start talking in marketing and engineering and people haven't done it. And what I would argue

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Look, I think the most important thing beyond is empathy. If you're trying to make great products, you need to have great taste. You need people who are making to so deeply understand really the experience of building, the pain that people are going through, you know, what they're actually, you know, the customer theory is actually doing there to run your business that you understand it not just decently, but in some cases better than the customer has. And I think only then can you actually build products that are so well-designed that they can actually automate the task, they can do it more efficiently. And I think part of why, you know, as we're releasing products, engineers are on the call with customers when we ship. They're accountable for metrics and how it ultimately performs.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  And I argue is you really won't find people at Ramp who haven't talked to customers with any level of recency. And I think that's just a core part of what makes great product cultures.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Eric, since you've been building with AI for so long, do you think that, you know, the last year or two with these foundation models has been a kind of discontinuous step change in terms of your ambitions and what you're building with AI and in what way? Or do you think it's kind of just, you know, gradually compounding more and more, more and more AI magic in the product?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  I think it's been a step function change for sure. At least as a, you know, practitioner in the market, you know, not a researcher. And I think it's becoming increasingly obvious to us that, you know, this is the biggest shift to productivity, certainly in my lifetime. And I think it has all sorts of ramifications for builders, right? And people building software. You know, when I think about like, what are the sources of durability and moats? And a lot of software businesses, sometimes it's, you know, there's more features, there's more integrations. There's lock-in, you've been using my tool for 10 years and it's really hard to take all your data out. And I think is now.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Today, functionally, you can have human-level reasoning and in some cases, superhuman-level reasoning available through an API. I think it has profound ramifications for people building businesses. And I think it's expressed not just in the ability to understand large sets of data and act on it, but it's a wider variety. I think that there's, you know, I can say, you know, beyond even just the services we're providing to Ram. Part of how we've grown so quickly is we have AI automation in outreach, or we have SDRs that are multiple times more productive than at competitors. It's changed how we do customer service. You know, it's changed how we do copywriting.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  We can listen to 100,000 sales calls at once and ask, what did 100,000 people think? It's just things that weren't possible, you know, even just a few years ago. And so I think it's changed really rapidly and I don't think most people are really, I think people are experimenting in some cases with ChatGPT, which is great. But I think far too few people have actually started to incorporate into the crevices of how they're actually working day to day and have felt it. But I think it should accelerate.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  When you think about that, Eric, you know, just that you're talking about the rate of change and, you know, how people are kind of scratching the surface on this. What do you think the job of a forward-thinking, excellent finance leader looks like five years from now, pick the timeframe, you know, versus today? You know, how do they spend their time today? How do you think they will in the case that they incorporate Ram, they lean into AI and they they sort of, you know, maximize what this can do?

• 23:32Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, first, I think it's incumbent on anyone, whether it's a finance leader, someone building tools,

• 23:42Speaker 00

  an engineer or designer, like, I think people should be thinking about, you know, really automating all the parts of the job.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Maybe you don't like or maybe that are low value.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Because I think there's a whole class of problems. And in acts and doing work that actually can be automated now. And I would, I think this is something like I've always internalized and appreciated from our conversations, Ravi, of like, I think that great leaders are able to not just like create focus and urgency, but identify like where there's outsized returns to our times. And I think what's really true in a lot of finance organizations is yes, maybe the CFO has the time and focus on where is their value. But you look at actually the calendars and what's happening in a lot of the rest of the team. It's a lot of repetition. Okay, it's, it's, it's, the month is closed. We're going to spend the first six days, you know, it's eight and bad cases 15, right?

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Tagging transactions, downloading spreadsheets, matching things into it. And that closes, it's done. And finally, just in the last five days of the, of the month, you're able to do the real work, the reason you got into that. I think people should be thinking now about how do I really take those tasks which are rote intensive and turn that process into more automated process that I'd be thinking about. I think if you're, if you're doing this right, I really do believe, you know, in five years from now, you know, this, these work streams will tend to be more strategic, more insightful, more around where's their creation, you know, value created in a business. And having people really obsess over that even more entirely.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  And I think to get there, it's about how do you automate the processes? How do you design a more efficient system in the interim?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Eric, what do you think happens when we have a more efficient system? Like, is everyone just out on the golf course or are we going to find new ways to work hard?

• 25:37Speaker 00

  It's, um, look, I, for me, I happen to think a lot of purpose in life is creation. I think people build tools. I think, you know, want to move things forward. And so, uh, look, don't get me wrong. I'm sure people will find more, more time for leisure, but you know, I think of it. I think there was a really interesting, there was something that was making the rounds a few months ago. I need to find it. I think it was a set of statistics that the number of bookkeepers, there was a crisis in the US, how the number of bookkeepers had dropped by, I think over the last 10 to 20 years, like a million less bookkeepers that were employed. And people were saying, what was happening to all the bookkeepers? And it

• 26:17Speaker 00

  turned out, if you looked at job descriptions for financial analysts, strategists, CFOs, it had grown by almost a million. And functionally, there really wasn't much of a change, but people were doing different things. Rather than tagging, tabulating, doing low-value tasks, people, I think, had moved to a higher level of abstraction and doing more valuable work for a business. And I think, I actually think a lot of that will happen. I think there are certain levels of work that are uniquely human, that are uniquely high-value. And frankly, too, I think in many cases, much more fulfilling. And I think that for those who are forward-leaning, I think, I think there's going to be much more of

• 27:00Speaker 00

  that, you know, over time. And so, you know, that's how I think about things, for sure. I mean, I think there's also going to be strange things, too, where there's certain creative work that computers, in some cases, will do better. But, you know, I do think that part of what gives people purpose, or at least for me, excitement, like, has to do with, you know, creation. And I think that's always going to be a very human thing.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I mean, that's as good of a segue as you can imagine for my next question, which is, Eric, you are a founder through and through, and you are someone that a lot of other founders probably look up to. What advice do you have for folks, for creators, for makers, for builders, given the moment we're in? You know, how do you meet it? What should you go and build? How do you approach this if you're someone who wants to be a founder or a builder?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Well, first, I mean, like, part of being a founder and a builder, I think, is...

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Just about like running this very longstanding and continuous race. I think that great companies are built over many years and decades. And I hope Ramp is the last company that I ever, I ever work on. I want to be working on it for a long time. And, you know, I think there's, there's always these questions of what's changing in the world? And how is that going to reset certain industry? I think there's a lot of opportunities and we can talk about like the, the places to be spending time. But I actually think when you look at Ramp and part of what's made it work is really been starting of what are the timeless truths that are not going to change? Whether it's now or 10 years from now or 100, 100 years from now. I can't imagine, you know, that 100 years from now, people would say, you know, like

• 28:42Speaker 00

  I, I wish to paraphrase Jeff's phrase is like, I just wish he would have raised prices on, on us, Amazon.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Or I wish he would deliver these goods a little bit more slowly. Um, I think this is very much the case for Ramp. I think people want to, you know, no matter what they're creating, if you can create great work with less effort, um, less time, fewer dollars, I think that always going to be, is always going to be in style. And so I would say, I would start first with being curious about people's problems in the timeless. Um, who are real customers that could serve? What are real businesses and what are actual problems that they have now? Um, and what are these problems that are not going to go away? And then I think you start to discover and uncover new technological shifts that can

• 29:26Speaker 00

  help, help you solve this in a new and unique, or in some cases, uh, you know, very disruptive way. Um, and so I would say like, you know, focus on the timeless would be, um, you know, my, my top advice to this.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, a friend of mine has this great quote, which is, he's like, we try to be timeless rather than timely. Because the timely, it just, you know, it evaporates and it's ephemeral where, and I think that the way you all are building Ramp, you know, certainly fits with that.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Okay, we're going to close it out with some rapid fire questions. Um, maybe for starters, what is your favorite AI app?

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Ooh. Can't say ramp. Oh, my gosh. Well, to be honest with you, like I I I've been really interested just from like a UX perspective and just like how it's bent our thinking. Cognition Labs with Devin. I mean, really what they're trying to do is build an AI engineer and I I know they're working hard at that. But they took this agentic use case and had a few core innovations. They realized if you were going to hire an AI engineer to do work on your behalf, well, you would want it to have access to the tools that an engineer would have. And you would want to be able to understand what it's doing. And so rather than just as a prompt and you see what it does, it, you know, Devin has a notebook, a planner, just like any engineer and thinking through what is it going to do?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  It has a browser, it's a search for things or to check stack overflow when it gets confused. It has shell access, you know, and it's connected to your tools. And so I think what's most fascinating about it is as it does things, you can watch what Devin is doing, what it gets right and the mistakes that it makes. And so my app, favorite app right now is is that because it's it's taught me a new way to to look and think about design and how these tools may feel over the coming years.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  All right. So over the next, next part of the lightning round, over the next five, 10 years, other than finance, what other industries do you think are going to change the most? And by the way, I really like the self-driving money or self-driving finance term that you had earlier. That was, I hadn't heard that before.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  It's a.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  What else is going to go self-driving?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. I I hope people make this come to life. Look, I, for me, like, I really hope healthcare. And I really believe it it will be. I mean, I think it's already changing radically how diagnosis is is done. You know, I think a lot of whether sickness or wellness is taking a large sets of data. It's not just your annual checkup, but if you can have continuous, you know, measure, measurement into over many years and in decades. That goes a long way. I hope it does too. I think, you know, for many doctors, you know, it's a glorified note-taking job. There's very little in the way of diagnosis, listening to patients and having time to spend. And so I actually think, you know, that's one that can actually return some of the humanity to the care of it.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  So I'm very hopeful there for sure. Yeah, I think very obviously design and creation. I think it's no longer about what can you make? And do you understand the tools in order to create? But, you know, can you make something that's fundamentally interesting? That's intuitive. And so I actually think, you know, that becomes very interesting, too. So those would be kind of the healthcare and broader design ecosystems would be probably for me. Once I think about.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Now, on the healthcare side, I totally agree with you, Eric, for what it's worth. Because I think you think about how crazy it is that companies have, you know, dashboards that we look at every hour, you know, for leading indicators on what's going to happen. And for our health, we go to an annual checkup that maybe we don't even go to annually. Can you imagine if like all you looked at was your company's metrics once a year? Maybe just to see, well, I don't know how to go. Okay, I guess everything's okay. I mean, the idea that we don't have a continuous look that is with the idea of it being, you know, know before you know, right? The leading indicator side is crazy. And so I, I agree and share your optimism. And hopefully there's more than just glucose monitors that we can have.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  I, I hope so. I mean, wow, like if you just like totally, like if you could only get a look at how your business is doing, you know, every year or every six months, or it's going really badly. And we're trying to figure out like it's, it's, it's a mess. Like you want to find this stuff early and it's, it's possible.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  What about within financial services? You've, you know, you've built companies in both the consumer and the, and the B two B side. Who else in financial services is doing interesting things with generative AI? Or like, what are the big ideas in, in like, kind of the intersection of finance and AI that you wish you had time to explore and build?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  So I think there's a couple, maybe meta points that I, that I would get at. I mean, first.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  One, I think just financial services is a long, long way to go, right? Like, um, like I think about our competitors, folks like American Express and Chase and Citi, and all led by wonderful people, but their founders wore top hats, right? Like, they've been around for a long time, and as the world went from like no phones to flip phones to iPhones, a lot of these things never really changed. And there was a class of businesses that if you were a bank, you were allowed to move money and store money. And if you weren't, well, you're part of the rest of the world. And I think it's been a big part of why it's moved so slowly. And I, what I would say is, I think it's really wonderful that now it's not just banks that, that, that can, can do this, because I think you can finally introduce great technology in, in, in companies like Ramp,

• 35:05Speaker 00

  where, yes, we're a fintech, but I think we're a productivity company. I think we're a company that's interested in, um, how does time intersect with the movement of money? Um, and so whether it's directly, uh, in financial services, or if it's disruptors from adjacent who are going to encroach, I think it's about, about time for, for the whole sector to get even optimized. And so, um, I, I, I know they wouldn't call themselves this, and they probably would blush, um, and, and say, no, we're not as a fintech company. But I think Apple right now is, you know, is truly a fintech innovator, because they're connecting the movement of money to, um, identification, you know, of who people are,

• 35:47Speaker 00

  you know, face ID in order to create, um, less fraud in the system, um, reducing friction dramatically, um, whether it's offline or, or in person. Um, and I think are increasingly going to be able to connect outcomes of times. And so, um, there's a variety of folks, but I actually think a lot of disruptors won't be from traditional finance companies would be my long-winded answer to you, Sonia. Sorry for, you're giving me too much time. You're just letting me run on?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  No, that's awesome.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  All right. Last question, Eric. Who do you admire most in AI? And you're not allowed to say, Sonia.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  It's Robbie, it's got to be, it has to be you, Robbie.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  It's, of course, no.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  I really appreciate that. It's been a great podcast. We, thanks for your time.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  It's, no, present company excluded.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Present company excluded, yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  It's, look, I, I just think what Satya Nadella has done

• 36:46Speaker 00

  for the creation of the category and how he's, you know, he's partnered with, I think, incredible, the incredible team at OpenAI, you know, to go from what was primarily research to in production. And, and, you know, I think in almost every aspect of computing today, I think has been incredible. You know, he's been an incredible mentor, you know, to, to me and the ramp team and thinking about how can a Gentic AI be designed over time, I think, is thinking, you know, in much larger cycles, you know, not just, you know, weeks and years, but truly decades. And, you know, last, I, I think he's a person who's been through a lot and I think has a lot

• 37:31Speaker 00

  of sincerity and kindness and how he operates.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  You know, I haven't read it. I think his book Hit Refresh is excellent. I think the way that he'd been able to partner deeply with all kinds of companies is pretty inspiring. And so, present company excluded, I think Satya Nadella would be my pick.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  That is a fantastic answer. And I, he is a very admirable person. Eric, thank you. This was awesome. We had a great time. We learned a lot. We learned your expression in self-driving money, self-driving finance. And I think, in all seriousness, the combination of innovation as well as applicability is very unique. So we are very, very, very happy that we get to be partnered with you guys.