Elad Gil Which AI Markets Have Winners — And Which Are Still Wide Open?

Solo VC investor Elad Gil said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that artificial intelligence was one of the least predictable technological explosions ever seen.

Gil has been at the top of nearly every successful company of the past decade, including many of today’s top AI companies.

However, he believes that over the past year, some AI markets seem to have been nearly sewn up by the market leaders. Beyond these areas, a huge chunk of AI remains everyone’s game.

“I started investing in genetic AI in 2021… [A]At the time, they didn’t pay that much attention to it,” Gil said. But he had seen the huge jump in capability between the GPT-2, launched in 2019and GPT-3, was released in 2021. “The step between 2 and 3 was so big that if you just extrapolated the scaling laws or the curve, then you could really assume that this would be incredibly important,” he said.

This convinced him to start supporting early-stage startups building products powered by large language models. Its bets included both mainstream model makers like OpenAI and Mistral, as well as app companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Character.ai, Decagon and Abridge. However, throughout 2024 and much of 2025, the capabilities of the base models exploded with each release, toppling the AI ​​every few months.

“I used to say at the time that AI was the one market where the more I learn, the less I know. Usually, the more you learn about something, the better you know it, the easier you can predict the future, etc. But AI was just murky. There’s just too much uncertainty. And I think there are still markets like that in AI,” he said.

However, he now also sees markets with clear winners. The most obvious example is with the fundamental models themselves. Although there are hundreds of models and some countries like South Korea are still working on developing mainstream models from local companies, they have emerged as leaders. “Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe xAI, maybe Meta, maybe Mistral — it’s like a handful,” he predicts of the winners.

After the models, he believes that AI-assisted coding has big winners that will make it difficult for new entrants to catch up. Not only have the key model builders moved in (Anthropic with Claude Code, OpenAI with Codex), but startup leaders like Anysphere’s Cursor and Cognition’s Devin (which acquired Windsurf) will be hard to beat. And there are well-funded startups like Magic (which Gil called a potential “loss”) and Poolside.

He sees medical transcription as turning a corner, with Abridge leading the way and a handful of others like Ambience being “important”.

He names customer support — which was an early target of both traditional AI and the new crop of AI agent startups — as hard-to-catch market leaders like Decagon’s portfolio company. (Increased $131 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in June.) OpenAI president Bret Taylor’s startup Sierra competes in this space. This is also an area where incumbents — Salesforce, HubSpot and many others — are adding AI offerings.

So which markets look wide open? Gil says financial tools (fintech), accounting, AI security and “other markets that we know are inherently very interesting. We just don’t know who’s going to do it.”

Ironically, rapid growth is not the signal it once was that a company is about to become a success. “The CEOs of every major company are basically saying to their teams, we have an edict. We need to figure out our AI strategy,” Gil said. “These giant enterprises are willing to try things that two years ago they would never have tried, and that’s just because of AI.”

So new AI markets can quickly reap a lot of revenue from big-name, enterprise customers, “but that doesn’t mean they’re going to stick around,” Gil points out.

Only after a market goes through the boom cycle of the test phase can a startup and investors see if that revenue will stick and grow. “There’s false signal and then there’s stuff that just works,” Gil said. He calls legal AI startup Harvey one of the market leaders that “just works.” It raised three massive rounds in 2025, jumping from a $3 billion valuation to $5 billion in 8 billion dollarsin just a few months.