1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So Ashish, I’m gonna switch gears a little bit and ask you about hallucination. Now, here’s an amusing anecdote. A friend of mine sent me a screenshot. He tested what Meta has to say about Sramana Mitra.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’ve recently talked to a number of people who are looking at the services aspect and the human-in-the-loop aspect. Have you invested in companies with human-in-the-loop?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures (Part 1)

Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures, has been in the industry for a long time and has an interesting perspective on AI investing.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj, General Partner at BGV (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have one last question, Yash, before we adjourn. The SaaS industry has been around for 15-20 years. Around 2008 is when it started really hitting its stride. It’s 2024, so it’s been a while. Then AI came in around 2015-16. Generative AI came in last year. There are cloud companies, SaaS companies, and vertical SaaS companies that are much further along, that have some heft. But now there are AI companies coming into the same markets with AI-enabled solutions, competing with those somewhat hefty vertical SaaS companies. And the answer from the incumbents is, we do co-pilots to introduce AI into the process.

What are you seeing in the market? It’s not a sufficient solution to produce an AI-enabled SaaS application. What is your perspective? What are you seeing in your portfolio?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj, General Partner at BGV (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So I think the subtlety here is that if the decision makers are not adjacent decision makers, then the whole sales cycle has to be repeated. You may get a referral that, “Oh, we’re using this product and this product is doing well for us.” Right now, from a technology point of view, the same technology can be applied to a lot of different things. Your agent technology, for instance, can be applied to various use cases—like marketing, human resources, or engineering—but these aren’t adjacent use cases. They’re far apart within an organization, and in a larger enterprise, that adds complexity.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj, General Partner at BGV (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Enterprise has always been like that. We have this solution selling methodology that you have to break it down to technical decision makers, economic buyers, champion, and coach. That has always existed.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj, General Partner at BGV (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Lyzer sounds very interesting. So how does this company go to market? It sounds like it’s a horizontal technology. So presumably selling to the CIO.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj, General Partner at BGV (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Yash, I agree with you on workflow automation and very precise domain-specific AI being a much better opportunity to build businesses and do startups in than boiling the ocean and trying to do something much broader. In general, in startups, I don’t think broad brushed approaches work very well. They just burn a lot of capital. They don’t really produce very effective companies.