Feeding The Dreams Of Ai Venture Capital: If You Want The Vc Money, Just Promise Magic

Stupendous amounts of venture capital money are still floating around, desperate for a home.

The VCs want you to promise magic with technology. They will shower you with cash.

Delivering on the magic? That can come later, if ever. What you need right now is a convincing story about your potential. Your vision.

But what magic fills the dreams of VCs? Sifted went and asked some. [Sifted, archive]

The short answer is, as always: a techy-sounding handwave that will replace all those annoying and expensive human employees.

Here’s the one for sustainable manufacturing:

I’m particularly excited about the potential of AI agents to drive sustainability in manufacturing. One area with immense untapped potential is the sourcing, supply chain management and carbon footprint reduction of sustainable materials. AI could create agents capable of automating the entire process — from identifying the most sustainable raw materials and managing sourcing processes to analysing and improving the environmental impact throughout the production lifecycle.

That is: an exciting dream, a huge and complex problem, and … the AI will solve it with magic?

You could get a chatbot to make a list of raw materials if you can’t be bothered hiring someone who knows the area or just looking it up. “Managing sourcing processes” is a whole job for a well-paid human expert. “Analysing and improving” posits a chatbot that substitutes directly for human thought and understanding over a long-term project.

None of this exists. But wouldn’t it be cool if it did?

The other examples follow this template.

Another wants a magical solution for “legal, sales or accounting” on the basis that “advanced AI agents can parse legal contracts or balance sheets in a fraction of the time it would take a human.”

That they cannot, in fact, do this and it doesn’t work at all yet doesn’t matter.

The request for “agentic procurement processes” starts “I would focus on creating AI agents that automate and optimise complex business workflows” and then goes into fantasies of a super-competent robot assistant that we have no idea how to get to.

“AI agents for industrial workflows” starts with using AI to sort out “all the unstructured data that exists across the working environment.” That is: the first step is to fix your data.

This is literally a promise that enterprise blockchain made a decade ago — and shoving everything into a blockchain couldn’t do the job either.

We can reasonably guess that VCs will be making the same demands in 2035 of whatever the trendy magic technology is at that time. And it still won’t do the job.

Remember: You don’t need to deliver. You just need to pitch.