Fawaz | Structural Research

Sequoia Capital just hosted AI Ascent and gathered 150 of the top AI minds like Demis Hassabis, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Brockman, Boris Cherny of Anthropic 🤯 And Sequoia just gave one of the clearest frameworks for where AI is going. The core idea: - AI is not just another software wave. - Cloud expanded the software market. - AI expands the services market. That means the next giant AI companies may not sell tools, dashboards, or copilots. They may sell the work itself. The full breakdown: 1/12. AI is the biggest platform shift yet Cloud took software from roughly $350B to $650B. AI opens something much larger: A $10T+ services market that machines can now start to address. 2/12. This wave is moving faster than cloud or mobile Every technology wave creates billion-dollar companies. But AI companies are reaching massive scale much faster. What took decades in cloud may take years in AI. 3/12. This is a computation revolution, not just a communication revolution The internet changed how information was distributed. AI changes how information is processed. That is a much deeper shift. 4/12. We are moving from faster horses to cars The first AI apps made workers 10–40% more productive. Useful, but not transformational. The next generation creates 10–40x improvements. 5/12. Sequoia’s practical definition of AGI is simple Forget the philosophical debate. If a system can be dispatched to do a job, recover from failure, and keep going until the task is complete… For business purposes, that is what matters. 6/12. The race is now for the services economy Software companies used to sell systems of record. AI companies can now sell outcomes. Not “here is software to help your lawyer.” 7/12. The best moat is not the model In AI, the underlying technology changes too fast. Today’s breakthrough becomes tomorrow’s baseline. So the moat is not just technical capability. The moat is customer intimacy. 8/12. Founders should wrap around customers, not model releases Most technical founders want to chase the latest model. But the model layer keeps shifting. 9/12. Affordance matters more than people think Raw model power is not enough. A terminal, API, or blank chat box may be powerful, but most users don’t know what to do with it. 10/12. The diffusion gap is the opportunity Frontier models improve every week. Enterprises absorb change over months or years. That gap is massive. 11/12. 2026 is the year of agents 2022–2024 was chat. 2024–2025 was reasoning. 2026 is agents. 12/12. Services is the new software AI is moving from helping humans do cognitive work… to replacing entire categories of cognitive work. Actual work, done end-to-end. Full breakdown here: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026: The future of AI theaiopportunities.com/p/seq…