The Business of AI: What Scales and What Doesn’t

This panel will explore how investors are evaluating software platforms, enterprise AI applications, vertical SaaS solutions, and developer tools that monetize AI capabilities at scale. The discussion will focus on business model durability—as competition intensifies, which companies will capture margin through proprietary data, distribution advantages, or switching costs, versus those competing primarily on model performance or compute efficiency? How are enterprise adoption patterns, time-to-value, and ROI measurement shaping which AI applications gain traction, and which remain as science projects? With thousands of AI startups competing for attention, what separates sustainable software businesses from infrastructure-dependent wrappers?