- Venture capitalists believe New York City is uniquely positioned to benefit from AI, seeing it as an “applied AI capital.”
- NYC’s major industries like media, finance, and healthcare attract AI firms like OpenAI, driving tech sector growth.
- This optimism counters City Comptroller Mark Levine’s report warning AI could displace up to 250,000 jobs.
While New York’s city comptroller Mark Levine is sounding alarm bells that AI is coming for the city’s workforce, the venture capitalists funding that technology see something else entirely. They believe New York may be uniquely positioned to benefit from artificial intelligence since virtually every major industry has a home here.
“A lot of the applications and real-world deployment of the technology — in media, fashion, finance, and healthcare — is going to happen in New York City,” says David Haber, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
While the foundational models and the hardware are still being built in San Francisco, Haber argues New York is becoming the applied AI capital — the place where the technology actually touches industries and reshapes how people work.
The numbers back him up. New York’s tech sector is already growing eight times faster than every other industry in the city — and Haber believe the real surge hasn’t even started.
“We’re still in the first inning,” he told me. “We’re only at 1% penetration of the technology.” That is also part of the reason AI giants like OpenAI and ElevenLabs are opening posts in the city — to be near the concentration of industries, from healthcare to hedge funds, gives them something Silicon Valley can’t replicate.
Haber’s bet is paying off. Moment, a wealth management AI company in Haber’s portfolio, is already working with financial giants — including Edward Jones, Hightower and LPL Financial — less than two years after launching.
The city’s techno optimism has been on full display at NY Tech Week, which kicked off Monday and runs through Sunday. The week-long event, presented by a16z, is expected to draw 40,000 attendees across 1,500 events with banks, law firms and consulting firms turning out alongside the startups — industries that are trying to embrace technology.
That optimism runs directly counter to city comptroller Levine’s report last month that warned that AI poses a significant displacement risk to New York workers. It said that in one scenario, the private sector could lose roughly 110,000 jobs in 2027 alone; in the most extreme “AI Shockwave” case, the city could see up to a quarter of a million jobs lost, concentrated among white-collar occupations.
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Julie Samuels, president of Tech:NYC — whose organization works closely with the banks, law firms, and consulting giants the comptroller is worried about — acknowledges the tension.
“If you follow history, you understand that any time there is a tech revolution, there is increased productivity and more employment,” she told me. “However, we would be foolish not to acknowledge that the transition is hard for a lot of people. We need to take this moment seriously.”
The Anthropic IPO, slated for later this year, is expected to be one of the biggest of the decade. It will deliver a windfall to exactly the kinds of firms the comptroller was worried about. White-shoe law and huge financial firms stand to make a fortune.
Haber believes the only industries that will truly suffer will be the the ones that resist it.
“The companies that are embracing AI most are the ones that are hiring most,” he said. “AI is going to drive a lot of growth — it’s going to allow us all to be more productive.”
Marc Andreessen’s famous line was that software is eating the world. The sequel might be that AI is eating software and New York is home to every industry it needs to adopt.
