On Appropriate AI Use w/ 107.7 The Bronc

In late July 2025, I had the opportunity to join Kurtis Baker on 107.7 The Bronc's Master Your Finances alongside my 1435 Capital colleagues, Steven Tunison and Suhani Pandya.

We had a very interesting conversation about our experiences navigating the venture space as the youngest in *every* room, and looked at hot topics in VC. While we covered a lot of ground that morning, the clip below features an angle I'm particularly glad to share, my insights on the reality of AI adoption in modern businesses.

I firmly believe we are past the point where GenAI bolted onto products in a traditional manner creates value. Performative deployments have saturated the market to the point where, as discussed, "AI" has become a phrase to be wary of. In fact, despite deep interest in frontier AI applications, we found ourselves quite disillusioned by many "AI" startups, as they had begun to resemble new ways to portray an API call, frequently even lacking basic technical moats like RAG on some sort of internal dataset.

Thus, I posit that real value comes from contrarian, data-native applications that actually shift a business's unit economics. AI shouldn't just be a shiny feature to show off. It should be deployed to find an edge, and leveraged to provide some structural advantage that leads to sustainable economic and/or social benefit.

When you use AI to act on what others are missing, it stops being a buzzword and becomes a compounding asset.