Companies have been trying and testing various AI tools over the past few years to work out what their adoption strategy shall be. Investors assume that the experimental phase is coming to an end.
TechCrunch recently surveyed 24 enterprise-focused VCs and an amazing majority predicted that corporations will increase their budgets for AI in 2026 – but not for all the pieces. Most investors said that this budget increase could be concentrated and that many corporations would spend more funds on fewer contracts.
Andrew Ferguson, vp at Databricks Ventures, predicted that 2026 shall be the 12 months when corporations begin consolidating their investments and picking winners.
“Today, corporations are testing multiple tools for a single use case, and there may be an explosion of startups focused on specific malls like (go-to-market), where it is incredibly difficult to see differentiation even during (proof of concepts),” Ferguson said. “As corporations see real evidence of AI, they may cut some experimentation budgets, streamline overlapping tools, and roll those savings into the AI ​​technologies they deliver.”
Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners, agreed. He predicts that not only will corporations concentrate their individual spending, but that the broader enterprise landscape will limit their overall AI spending to simply a handful of vendors across the industry.
“Budgets will increase for a limited variety of AI products that clearly deliver results and reduce sharply for all the pieces else,” Biederman said. “We expect a divide through which a small variety of vendors will capture a disproportionate share of enterprise AI budgets, while many others will see their revenue flatten or shrink.”
Targeted investments
Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, believes corporations will increase their spending on tools that make AI protected for businesses to make use of.
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“Companies are actually realizing that the actual investment is in the safety and monitoring layers that make AI reliable,” Beechuk said. “As these capabilities mature and reduce risk, corporations will have faith to maneuver from pilots to scaled deployments and budgets will increase.”
Harsha Kapre, director at Snowflake Ventures, predicted that corporations will spend on AI in 2026 in three different areas: strengthening data foundations, post-training model optimization, and gear consolidation.
“(Chief investment officers) are actively reducing the proliferation of (software-as-a-service) and moving toward unified, intelligent systems that reduce integration costs and deliver measurable (return on investment),” Kapre said. “AI-powered solutions are prone to reap the best advantages from this shift.”
A move away from experimentation and toward focus will impact startups. What just isn’t clear is how.
It's possible that AI startups will reach the identical settlement point that SaaS startups reached a couple of years ago.
The corporations that operate hard-to-replicate products, corresponding to vertical solutions or those based on proprietary data, will likely proceed to grow. Startups with products just like those of enormous enterprise vendors like AWS or Salesforce may even see pilot projects dry up and funding fail.
Investors also see this chance. When asked how they know an AI startup has a moat, several VCs said that corporations with proprietary data and products that may't be easily replicated by a tech giant or a big company with language models are probably the most defensible.
If investors' predictions come true and firms start concentrating their AI spending next 12 months, 2026 might be the 12 months that corporate budgets rise, but many AI startups don't see a much bigger share of the pie.
