Businesses have been piloting and testing different AI tools in recent years to figure out what their adoption strategy will look like. Investors believe that the period of experimentation is coming to an end.
TechCrunch recently surveyed 24 enterprise-focused VCs, and the vast majority predicted that enterprises will increase their AI budgets in 2026 — but not for everything. Most investors said this budget increase will be concentrated and that many businesses will spend more capital on fewer contracts.
Andrew Ferguson, vice president of Databricks Ventures, predicted that 2026 will be the year when businesses start to consolidate their investments and pick winners.
“Today, businesses are testing multiple tools for a single-use case, and there is an explosion of startups focusing on certain shopping centers like [go-to-market]where it is extremely difficult to discern the differentiation even during [proof of concepts]”As businesses see real proof points from AI, they will cut some of the experimentation budget, streamline overlapping tools, and deploy those savings in the AI technologies they’ve delivered.”
Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric Capital Partners, agreed. He predicts that enterprise companies will not only concentrate their individual spending, but the broader business landscape will limit overall AI spending to just a few vendors across the industry.
“Budgets will increase for a limited set of AI products that clearly deliver results and will decrease sharply for everything else,” Biederman said. “We expect a bifurcation where a small number of vendors capture a disproportionate share of enterprise AI budgets, while many others see revenue flat or shrink.”
Focused investments
Scott Beechuk, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, believes businesses will increase their spending on tools that make AI safe for business use.
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“Businesses now recognize that the real investment is in the safeguards and levels of oversight that make AI trustworthy,” said Beechuk. “As these capabilities mature and de-risk, organizations will feel confident moving from pilots to scaled deployments and budgets will increase.”
Harsha Kapre, director of Snowflake Ventures, predicted that businesses will spend on AI in three different areas in 2026: boosting databases, optimizing models after training, and integrating tools.
“[Chief investment officers] are actively decreasing [software-as-a-service] expand and move toward unified, intelligent systems that reduce integration costs and deliver measurable [return on investment]Kapre said. “AI-enabled solutions are likely to see the greatest benefit from this shift.”
A shift away from experimentation and toward concentration will affect startups. What is not clear is how.
It’s possible that AI startups will reach the same point that SaaS startups did a few years ago.
Companies that operate hard-to-replicate products, such as vertical solutions or those based on proprietary data, will likely still be able to grow. Startups with products similar to those offered by large enterprise vendors like AWS or Salesforce may start to see pilot projects and funding dry up.
Investors also see this possibility. When asked how they know an AI startup has a moat, many VCs said companies with proprietary data and products that can’t be easily replicated by a tech giant or a large modeling language company are the most defensive.
If investors’ predictions are true and businesses start aggregating their AI spending next year, 2026 could be the year business budgets grow, but many AI startups aren’t seeing a bigger piece of the pie.
