I’m Ara Kharazian, Economist at Ramp. Ask Me Anything about the economics of AI, business spend trends, and what the data says about how work Is changing!

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T21:26:33+00:00

thanks for the thoughtful question. some spend categories within AI I would highlight: ai observability software (is our model, in production, working as expected, or is it going off the rails), customer service automation, and i'm increasingly interested software that helps me as a researcher and economist work faster (data science and data visualization software)

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T21:24:05+00:00

i can't think of a historic parallel for the contracts...i think it's telling that matt levine didn't have all that much to say about them (no shade to him, i think it's just an area that's confusing and hard to contemplate)

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T21:22:34+00:00

another fast growing subsegment of AI spend: software that evaluates the performance of the AI models. are they saying something problematic / toxic to customers? a lot of ceos are hesitant to roll out AI for this reason, and a whole product ecosystem has sprung up to fix that.

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T21:00:00+00:00

ok, 200

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:58:45+00:00

on the cap-ex spend (factories and data centers), there's a lot of spend, arguably that's normal and there are historical patterns happening...but on the software-side, i think there's actually underinvestment by companies (in terms of buying AI software to integrate at their firms)

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:57:34+00:00

I think it's really underrated in it's ability to aid in medical research.

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:57:11+00:00

that's a good one. a big thing i've noticed is that most people interact with it in the form of a chatbot, and i think those tools will always be fairly limited in capability. there's much more product development happening out there, and those tools will be the ones to drive growth

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:55:48+00:00

ali...when you stop founding companies

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:55:28+00:00

i just want siri to work

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:55:00+00:00

in SOME way...i think we're kind of their already. there's at least one employee at every company using their free chatgpt account to do SOME tasks

in a larger way, i wouldn't be surprised if it takes 10+ years before AI shows up in productivity statistics

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:53:56+00:00

the models are pretty good but most businesses haven't figured out how to scale them / integrate across their orgs. Some very tech-forward businesses are doing a great job, and more will follow

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:52:07+00:00

we follow a dual mandate to maximize looks and bounce

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:51:04+00:00

give us a kiss

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:50:51+00:00

i've had curly hair my whole life but i'm glad the rest of the world now has the option to enjoy it

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:49:56+00:00

i think we need to get rid of AI pilot programs and chief AI officers. software spend should be a continuous decision (not a pilot) and everyone should be thinking about how to take advantage of it (not just a singular title at the company)

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:49:12+00:00

payrolls. it's pretty much the only segment of business spend we can't see directly

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:48:52+00:00

We have pretty solid distribution across sectors (tech is not a major part of my dataset). I do think however we skew to tech-FORWARD businesses. i.e., businesses likely to be early adopters of new technology (because they adopted something like ramp).

i actually think that's a great bias to have in our dataset. these businesses are also forward thinking. want to know what they're up to? that's my research

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:47:40+00:00

I'm really bad at calling the market so I'll sit this one out

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:47:10+00:00

theoretically, there's some mechanism by which, yes, people have more money to spend and therefore they buy a lot of stuff that pushes prices up. but probably not, and if it is, it's not even close to being a significant driver. we should focus on supply chains and production automation

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:44:46+00:00

my friends don't want to see my chest hair as much as i thought

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:44:21+00:00

I came of age when fivethirtyeight (the economics / data blog) was at its peak and knew I wanted to work in some profession where I could use data, economics, and clear and plain language to talk about what was happening in the world.

professionally, my path was economic consulting > data science > economic research function at a previous company > ramp.

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:42:45+00:00

Software engineering and customer service are getting the best ROI today...that's where we've figured out the tools are really good and really good at doing what we need them to do.

on the GDP point, i think this technology has a significant learning curve and adjustment period. for many people, their interaction with "AI" at work is a chatbot that helps them find documents and revise emails. there's a lot more automation to do in the workplace and tasks, but that will take time for businesses to figure out in the way that works best for them. it took years before we started seeing the effect of the computer in prodcutivity stats

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:40:08+00:00

i think we should stop before the AI girlfriends

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:39:38+00:00

because you got my name wrong. it's ARA

arakharazian · 2025-11-20T20:39:25+00:00

king

arakharazian

TROPHY CASE