Good News For Startups: Enterprise Is Bad At AI

Engineering teams at these orgs are filled with people that themselves don't actually really believe in AI, don't use code gen tools, think it's all super overhyped, or really excited when an MIT study comes out saying that it's all, like, hype and retweet it-

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... and, um, and really want 'cause it's a narrative they want to believe. But the consequence of that for the companies is that they can't build the product. So if your engineers don't believe in this, then how are you gonna build a product that actually works? The knock on effect for startups then is if you can actually build something that works, the enterprises will talk to you because they have no other options; can't build it internally, can't go to an established company. Um, so the startups are actually getting, like, the shot that they never had before.

I guarantee you someone is watching this right now, and, uh, you've just horribly triggered them. Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. One of the things that has been really pissing me off is these AI influencers. You see them on X. You see them on YouTube. And they're claiming that 95% of AI projects are failures, and that's proof that AI is a scam. What's the real story, Jared? You actually dug in to the MIT report that these people are grifting with. What does the report actually say? What really went viral was, like, tweets about this study, and I think the tweets are actually quite misleading. Diana and I were talking to a bunch of college students recently, and they had concluded, just by reading, like, the tweet version of the study, that, like, "Oh, all these AI startups that YC is talking about, like, must not be working because the study says that they all fail." But actually, the more I read the study, the more I realized it was actually confirming a lot of the things we've talked about here on th- this podcast about what AI agents are really like in the real world and what approaches and categories are working. And so I thought it'd be interesting for us to talk about what the study really says.

Because it's a very different approach to the go-to market for all these AI solutions. It's not just standard enterprise sales. I think one of the big things that we talk a lot about is this aspect of, um, teams, startup and founders, embedding themself into the business processes and really grokking a lot of the internal systems of record and going deep, deep, deep in the integration, which is not something that has been typically done in the SaaS world. SaaS was, like, very plug-and-play, which is different. But w- when you do succeed and plug into the systems of record, the pot of gold is actually quite big. B- but it does take a long time. We actually have a lot of examples of work with companies that have succeeded, which we can talk about later.