A viral MIT report claimed 95% of enterprise AI projects fail. This isn't because AI doesn't work, but because large companies are ill-equipped to build it. This creates a massive opportunity for startups that can deliver functional, integrated AI solutions where enterprises and established vendors fall short.
Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss signals of an AI bubble, including runaway valuations and circular financing. They explore why many enterprise AI pilots fail and what separates successful adopters—namely, a focus on measurable use cases and organizational transformation—and offer a nuanced perspective on the US-China tech race, cautioning against underestimating China's progress in AI, robotics, and semiconductors.
Grant Miller uses a surfing analogy to explore the challenges and strategies of AI adoption. He discusses the historical waves of technological innovation, the current surge in AI—from generative models to agentic systems—and offers practical lessons on navigating this rapid change by being prepared, patient, and adaptable.
Elias Torres, co-founder of Drift and Agency, discusses the prevalent expectation mismatch in AI adoption, where businesses demand AI but reject it due to "imperfection anxiety." Drawing from his experiences scaling HubSpot and Drift, he explains why human-led customer experience is fundamentally unscalable and details how his new venture, Agency, is building autonomous, AI-first solutions to solve deep, back-end customer challenges. His goal is to "deprogram the entire business world" from inefficient, human-dependent processes.
Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis explore the nuanced landscape of AI regulation, contrasting foundation model oversight with domain-specific rules and highlighting the critical issue of IP rights in training data. They also analyze China's engineering-led AI strategy and the challenges of enterprise AI adoption.
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrashekar discusses the platform's evolution in the AI era, focusing on licensing its trusted Q&A corpus to major AI labs, expanding beyond Q&A to include discussions and live chat, and the critical role of its enterprise solution in powering internal AI agents. A key insight from their upcoming developer survey reveals that while AI adoption for coding is rising, developer trust in AI-generated output is declining, reinforcing Stack Overflow's position as a vital source of human-curated, reliable knowledge.