What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #482

From Copilots to Digital Workers - where it's working

Some founders are going halfway, augmenting a single step in a workflow. Others are going all in and selling digital workers.

Podium is a clean example of the latter.

Podium sells an AI employee, not a copilot. A copilot helps a human do the work. A digital worker owns the outcome.

What’s becoming clear across lower-hanging, easier-to-automate use cases is that if you want growth like this, you need to offer the full digital worker. If you do not, twenty other startups will.

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Short summary if you don’t want to read full post:

AI is moving from helping people do their jobs to actually doing the job. The earliest wins are in well-defined workflows where outcomes are clear and the cost of failure is low. That is why digital workers are showing up first in customer support, sales, and beginning to take on real work inside Excel. Companies like Podium are already seeing breakout growth selling digital workers. More complex enterprise roles such as security and IT are still early, but the transition from copilots to digital workers is inevitable.

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I wrote about this back in What’s 🔥 #475 sharing this example:

At the end of 2023, over 60k local businesses were using Podium to centralize leads and customer communication. Customers convert more leads and make more money with it. But the real constraint was not software. It was staffing. High turnover, missed calls after hours, and every dropped lead translating directly into lost revenue.

So Podium rebuilt the product around an AI employee. Not a chatbot. An employee that qualifies and schedules leads, handles objections and follow-ups, learns through natural-language coaching, and works 24/7. To work in the real world, it has to think, act, understand context, handle edge cases, and be coachable, like a human.

That leap is enormous.

This behind-the-scenes look from Podium investor and board member Tom Loverro at IVP shows just how material the shift was. Cash burn went from $95M to zero. AI ARR went from zero to $100M in 21 months. Overall ARR growth reaccelerated sharply. For ZIRP-era unicorn founders, this is a reminder that product reinvention still beats financial engineering. It is an Intercom-scale comeback.

As Claude cowork improves and other model providers launch smarter agents, selling digital workers will become a reality faster than we think. It is already working in customer support and sales as Podium shows, marketing via Clay-style agents, and parts of coding. When agents can actually do the work in Excel, where a huge amount of enterprise work lives, this truly uplevels the game.

The real question is how fast this pattern moves into more complex enterprise areas like security in 2026.

Some customers will hate it. They will fear job loss or having fewer people to manage. Others will embrace it as a way to scale with less headcount. Those are the ICPs to land first because this movement is inevitable. For more sophisticated enterprise workflows, it will take time, but the direction is set. This is the direction every serious enterprise product will be pulled toward. Understanding context and intent is what will separate useful agents from real digital workers.

PS: If humanoid robots are going mainstream next year, digital workers in software are right on schedule.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

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Scaling Startups

#lots of ideas - entertaining nonetheless

#great post from Jason on founders who overly focus on headline valuation

#reminder - small teams move faster which is why with AI a team of 2,3, 5 people can get so much done

#deflationary pressure equals…

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Enterprise Tech

#💯 the world will tokenize (see below) and stable coins will also become the currency for agents

#wrote about Claude code writing all the code last week but super impactful watching Dario talk about it at Davos - months away from AI doing everything a SWE does - what coding tools get eviscerated and what new ones are created?

“I have engineers within Anthropic who say ‘I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it’... - the creator of Claude code recently also said “100% of his contributions to Claude code were written by Claude code” for the month of December

Dario then goes onto say: “We might be 6 to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end-to-end.”

If the recursive self-improvement loop closes this year, the curve is about to go vertical.

On AI impact of junior level jobs:

“Now I think maybe we’re starting to see just the little beginnings of it, in software and coding,” he said. “I can see it within Anthropic, where I can look forward to a time where on the more junior end and then on the more intermediate end we actually need less and not more people.”

He added: “And we’re thinking about how to deal with that within Anthropic in a sensible way.”

#we still have multi-hundred million Inception rounds

#Ben nails the current state of AI and startups

#Jared Sleeper from Avenir has a great data driven deck on state of public SaaS and AI you should check out :do 🏻 with conclusion

#the human emulator is fascinating and worth a watch - reproduce any work a human does with keyboard and screen, the infrastructure is already there in tesla cars 🤔 - however, don’t share your private product roadmap in public!

#OpenAI focusing more on making software more secure and added $1B of ARR in the last month just from the API business meaning it still has a huge B2B business

#vibe coding is a real thing for consumer apps - still ain’t going to see large scale replacements of enterprise CRM systems but for consumer apps, sure

#reminder to build your site for agents, not humans, clean docs, bullet points, etc - even for founders announcing their company or rounds press releases are as important as ever

#pay attention - the world will rapidly become tokenized

#more open source problems - tldraw is automatically rejecting outside code contributions because they're being flooded with low-quality, AI-generated pull requests that waste maintainer time. It's a sign of a growing problem in open source—AI makes submitting code easy, but someone still has to review it all.

#💯

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Markets

#lots of debate on whether Brex exiting for $5.15B was a win or loss or who even cares - solid breakdown from Hari on what you may expect, the founders and early employees and investors made an absolute whopper of a return and the others got their liquidiation preference back as the peak valuation was $12B during ZIRP - IMO a huge win to get their money back also!

#another look at Brex - once again $5B is an amazing outcome for so many reasons but look at those early investors

#a great 🧵 to understand what’s happening in China