Victor Lazarte Says the Idea That AI Isn’t Replacing Jobs Is Bullshit

Victor Lazarte, general partner at Benchmark Capital, has a blunt message for anyone still clinging to the idea that AI is merely enhancing human jobs.

“This is bullshit,” he said on the Twenty Minute VC podcast. “It’s fully replacing people.”

Lazarte, whose firm has backed companies like Uber, Snap, Asana, and WeWork, called out what he sees as corporate spin: “Big companies talk about, like, ‘AI isn’t replacing people, it’s augmenting them.’” He strongly disagrees.

He singled out two professions he believes are most at risk – lawyers and recruiters.

“Law school students should think about what they could do three years from now that AI could not,” he said. “There’s not going to be that many things.”

Legal professionals are already feeling the impact. AI tools are taking over large volumes of early-career legal work  research, document review, and case summarization. Earlier this week, legal tech startup Libra rolled out updates that support every step of daily legal operations, now used by over 3,000 lawyers across 150 firms.

In a courtroom twist on March 26, 74-year-old Jerome Dewald, a throat cancer survivor representing himself in an employment dispute appeared via video not as himself, but as “Jim,” an AI-generated avatar created using video synthesis tech from Tavus. Dewald, who runs a legal tech startup called Pro Se Pro, said he chose the avatar due to his medical condition, but the judges halted the video just seconds in, calling it inappropriate for court.

The American Bar Association has also acknowledged the shift. In a July report, it listed Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot as the top tools legal professionals should understand and adopt.

At a legal tech conference in March, Todd Itami, an attorney at Covington & Burling, put it bluntly: “Lawyers are dinosaurs. Lawyers need to wake up.” He called learning to use AI “imperative” for the profession.

The recruitment industry is under similar pressure. Lazarte believes AI will soon outperform humans in evaluating candidates and do it faster and more consistently than current hiring teams. “AI models would soon be better than people at interviewing candidates,” he said. “And far more efficient than companies’ messy, manual hiring processes.”

Startups are already moving to automate hiring from end to end. In February, San Francisco-based startup Mercor raised a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation. The company was founded in 2023 by three Thiel Fellows, all 21 years old. Mercor uses AI for resume screening, candidate matching, interviews, and payroll and has already processed over 300,000 candidates and 100,000 interviews.

Ironically, Benchmark, Lazarte’s own firm, participated in the Mercor round, alongside Felicis, General Catalyst, DST Global, and Menlo Ventures. The company’s pitch centers on improving hiring accuracy and reducing bias using AI models trained to predict job performance more effectively than human recruiters.

Another player in this space, ConverzAI, raised $16 million in a Series A round also in February, led by Menlo Ventures. Based in Seattle, ConverzAI builds virtual recruiters that handle everything from application parsing to onboarding. Its clients span commercial, professional, and healthcare sectors.

Lazarte’s views go beyond employment to bigger questions about the structure of work and society. He pushed back against the idea of universal basic income (UBI) as a solution to job displacement.

“I don’t buy UBI, by the way,” he said. “Humanity requires purpose. If you add UBI, you remove purpose.”

He questioned the assumption that people would pursue creative or leisurely activities in a world without work. “People say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna fish and we’re gonna paint.’ I promise you, that is not how human psychology works,” he said. “That’s why we have addiction. That’s why we have drugs, gambling, it’s why we have prostitution… We will not paint and write poetry.”

Lazarte does see AI opening new doors — particularly in education. He highlighted Duolingo as a company with long-term potential in this space. “AI’s gonna change people’s lives in really important ways,” he said. “One really important thing is the way we’re gonna learn — it’s going to be AI teachers.”

He praised Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn and the company’s ambitions to build a free AI tutor. “Duolingo, I think, is very sneaky  in a good way,” Lazarte said. “You’re starting with this language app, but they’re making your AI friend that teaches languages, and then they’re going to teach more stuff… That’s going to be incredibly important for humanity.”