Emergent Ventures’ Post

All of these statements about enterprise AI could simultaneously be true, even if they seem somewhat contradictory: 🌟 Hype will come and go, but GenAI will be a game changer for automating mundane parts of numerous enterprise workflows 🏗️ Making GenAI work within core workflows in the enterprise takes tremendous hard work beyond getting the tech to work - meticulous data pipelines, ensuring accuracy across real-life scenarios, safeguards against hallucination, robust guardrails, on-prem deployment capabilities where needed, change management and more, all while ensuring predictable and acceptable costs. Once done successfully, all this effort creates moats ⚙️ Large models may work out-of-the-box for some basic horizontal business tasks. Applications built around domain-specific models will work much better for many other tasks. Agentic workflows are one likely path to broader automation 👥🤖 Human Augmentation and Human-in-the-loop automation is what is here-and-now. Full automation solutions - outside of simple, low consequence tasks - will take time to perfect and be sufficiently trusted in the enterprise 🚫🎯 Enterprises will not buy “GenAI”. They will buy solutions and outcomes. If a GenAI-powered solution is the optimal one for their needs, then that will be bought 🔄 GenAI has opened tremendous opportunities for enterprise software startups that do other adjacent things to make their products more relevant, usable or actionable, and ‘close the loop’ ⚠️ Many “GenAI for X” startups will fail to deliver value in the enterprise. Many GenAI-native startups with the right solution and approach will be massive home runs. Success comes from focusing on the entire solution you are delivering, not just the technology that enabled it 🛠️ Some Enterprise AI startups will need to become services companies in order to deliver value 🕶️ Some Enterprise AI startups will succeed without becoming services companies 🤹 Both open source and proprietary foundation models will be used in enterprise AI deployments - several models may get used within the same application. The best model will win - on a per API call basis For many things being talked about enterprise AI, the claim and counterclaim could both be simultaneously true. Augmentation and automation of enterprise workflows is a massive undertaking that is broad, wide, deep and extremely bespoke. AI-fication of work and workflows is one of the biggest opportunities in our lifetimes. Things are just getting started!