The head of product at a $32 billion fintech startup calls out employees who aren’t using AI-assisted coding tools.
Jeff Charles, chief product officer at Ramp, an AI fintech startup that helps businesses pay their bills, said on Sunday’s episode of the podcast “Behind the Craft” that employees are expected to be AI natives.
“If you haven’t used Claude code this year, whatever your role is, you’re probably underperforming compared to others in your company,” he added.
Charles said the company frames AI proficiency across multiple levels. At the lowest level (level 0) are people who “sometimes use ChatGPT.” At the top level 3 are people who are “system builders”.
Employees who have a code flair and are good at building apps that automate parts of their jobs are in Level 2, while staff who build custom GPTs and have experience with Claude Code are in Level 1.
“Our job is to promote everyone in the organization,” Charles said.
Regarding Level 0, he added, “The people who are still at L0 probably aren’t at the company.”
“If you’re not self-motivated and don’t have a growth mindset, it’s going to be very difficult to train,” he said.
Charles said 50% of the company’s code is built by AI, and will probably be 80% by March. He added that in the AI-native era, the role of the product manager will evolve, becoming partly a builder and partly focused on business strategy.
The fintech startup announced in November that it had raised $300 million in funding, giving it a valuation of $32 billion. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Founders Fund, Coatue, GIC, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and others.
A company fully committed to AI
Charles’ comments come as technology companies reshape their workforces around AI.
Block cut nearly half its workforce last month, citing advances in AI as the reason for the layoffs.
Atlassian last week laid off about 1,600 positions, or about 10% of its global staff, as the Australian-American proprietary software company reorganized to prioritize AI development and company growth.
“It would be disingenuous to suggest that AI won’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles we need in any given field. In fact, it does,” CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks said in a message to employees.
Ramp isn’t the only company paying close attention to how employees use AI in the workplace.
Google managers told some non-technical staff in February that they were expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows, four employees with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider.
In some cases, non-technical employees were told that the use of AI could be reflected in their performance reviews later this year, two of the employees said.
Daniel Yanise, CEO of background check startup Checker, said his company is encouraging cross-functional employees, not just engineers, to adopt AI tools.
“We gave all of our employees a monthly stipend to try out our AI tools, and we held AI days and demos. After a year, 95% of our employees were using the prompts every day,” Janisse said last month.
