1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, Founder and Managing Partner at Monta Vista Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Fair enough. What other AI companies have you invested in that are non generative AI? On our platform, we’ve been covering AI startups aggressively since 2016, long before generative AI hit the popular consciousness. And there are very substantial AI companies that have been built with AI, not necessarily generative AI. I do believe that there is a huge opportunity still in AI, not just generative AI.

Venktesh Shukla: Yes. We invested in one company that is enabling medium-sized businesses to have fully functional supply chain systems. Today, supply chain management is so complex that only large enterprises typically have advanced systems, as it requires integration with inventory management, financials, and more.

For medium-sized businesses without these extensive tools, this company is using AI to build customized supply chain solutions for demand forecasting. This includes managing inventory, determining delivery timelines, optimizing stock levels across warehouses, and more. AI helps detect demand signals, allowing these businesses to achieve similar capabilities to large enterprises without needing massive systems like SAP. Essentially, it’s competing with supply chain solutions that usually depend on SAP or similar infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: So this is competing with SAP.

Venktesh Shukla: This competes with supply chain solutions that are built on top of SAP or require presence of SAP to be effective.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Is there anything else that you would like to discuss apropos AI investment strategy or thesis? We will continue the conversation. We’ll bring you back a few months, maybe in a year or so to exchange notes. But for this conversation, is there anything else you want to add?

Venktesh Shukla: No, I think these are pretty exciting times, but we are far, far away from artificial general intelligence.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not even relevant, right? Who cares? Artificial general intelligence is not important to solve most of the enterprise use cases. So sorry about it right now.

Venktesh Shukla: Talking about enterprise, I had a very insightful conversation with the CIO of a big company. I asked him about what kind of use cases are you implementing AI on? And he was very blunt. He said, “Don’t bring any AI to me. Bring only that AI to me that eliminates white-collar jobs.”

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting point, actually, that before AI reallySramana Mitra: became big in the popular consciousness, the fear was it’s the blue collar jobs that are going to be automated by AI. But where we are seeing the AI uptick is actually in white collar jobs.

Venktesh Shukla: Well, generative AI is enabling that. You see that in customer center situations where a lot of low-level interactions are getting automated.

Sramana Mitra: Yeah. And you just missed Santosh’s presentation, which was an excellent generative AI customer service application presentation. It was really, really interesting. But in software development, one of the real discussions that we are having everywhere right now is how much of software development can be automated, how much of enhancement of junior software developers can happen by because of AI, because there is human in the loop. Then if you equip that human with lots of great tools, AI can make software engineers incredibly productive. And as a result, you will need a lot fewer of them.

Venktesh Shukla: Yes, including a generation of test cases. That’s a proper use case.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s automated. Thank you, Venk. Thank you. Very insightful conversation.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Venktesh Shukla, Founder and Managing Partner at Monta Vista Capital
1 2 3 4