Canadian AI company Cohere, released North, its own such tool last month. The company’s co-founder, Nick Frosst, says he no longer sweats last minute meetings, because he uses the tool to prepare a brief on individuals based on their entire history with the company in seconds. North now tackles 90% of its general support tickets, though human operators are still in the loop. It isn’t just being used internally, with RBC, Canada’s largest bank, adopting the platform. (Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO, is an investor in Cohere.)
While the bosses of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Deepmind all believe so-called artificial intelligence or AGI—a system that can automate most human work—could be just a few years away, Frosst’s outlook is comparatively conservative. He doesn’t believe we’ll reach AGI using anything resembling current technology. Still, he says even without AGI, the impact on labor will be disruptive, comparing it to the industrial revolution. “When there were massive transitions in the labor market, a lot of what was solved was at the government level, the union level,” he says. “This is a problem beyond any individual, and we need to address it as a collective.”