Pauline Yang & Gwen Umbach (Altimeter Capital)

Perspectives on AI

It was so great to have Pauline Yang and Gwen Umbach from Altimeter Capital join us at SV Icons for dinner last week. Hearing their perspectives on AI was super fascinating. Thank you so much, Pauline and Gwen! Thanks for hosting, Asset Abdualiyev, at Silkroad Innovation Hub. Please find a couple key insights from the dinner below:

Pauline and Gwen believe that AI will enable the future of software to be hyper-personalized and interoperable as companies develop personal agents for our use.

They believe that 2024 will be the year that enterprises transition from experimentation to production, with tons of opportunity for startups at both the application and infrastructure layer.

The potential rise of AI-native hardware presents an exciting opportunity for fundamentally new consumer experiences and a potential threat to incumbents.

Fortune 500 companies are increasingly recognizing the value of their data. They previously would have given their data to startups and paid them to analyze it, but now they would ask the startups to pay them to use it!

90% of the capital invested in Gen AI startups in 2023 came from corporations, not traditional VC firms.

The large cloud providers will be huge winners in the AI boom.