May 1, 2025

AI can do anything you can do better

Hi there,

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Not: Hiring humans 

Following in Shopify’s footsteps, Duolingo announced this week it’s going “AI-first” as it starts to replace human contractor roles with AI agents. 

Expect many more such headlines.

Business teams are being asked to justify headcount in a world where AI can handle increasingly complex tasks across coding, customer support, sales, and more. 

The result: an enterprise AI agents & copilots market that is poised for exponential growth.

Per CB Insights estimates, the enterprise AI agents & copilots space did over $5B in revenue last year, and it’s expected to grow 155% to reach $13B in 2025.

This shift isn’t just about productivity tools — it’s a fundamental reorg of the workforce, where human workers now have to earn their place alongside increasingly autonomous agents.

See our full breakdown of the enterprise AI agent market opportunity here.

Hot: AI shopping

This week, several major players announced AI buying features: 

• OpenAI rolled out new shopping features in ChatGPT, including links to buy directly in search. 
• Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal all announced agentic payments solutions. While they’re all at different phases of development, the end goal is to allow AI agents to handle transactions while giving consumers control over how agents spend.

These solutions address 2 friction points in agentic commerce: the seamless integration of buying (and eventually, branding) in AI search; and, perhaps most importantly, the ability for agents to make payments securely and with guardrails in place.

Until now, the inability to make purchases has been a major hindrance for AI agents' utility, as we covered in our 2025 Tech Trends report back in November.

So what’s next as consumer-facing agentic solutions roll out? Whose data reigns supreme on AI search? What happens to all that SEO? And who’s set to win the battle for the customer relationship?

See how agents will take control of shopping in the Future of the Customer Journey report.

Not: US economic growth

The US economy shrank 0.3% in the first 3 months of 2025, per a Bureau of Economic Analysis report published yesterday. This was the first quarterly decline seen since 2022.

Industry experts chalk it up primarily to businesses and consumers preparing for tariffs.

CB Insights analysts recently broke down how evolving trade policies are reshaping key sectors from industrials to retail and consumer goods. 

Download the recording here to see:

• The top risks to consider
• What corporate executives are actually saying in their earnings calls
• The emerging tech solutions creating competitive advantages

Hot: Salesforce Ventures

In our latest report on the state of corporate venture capital, we highlight the top CVCs based on the average Mosaic score of their Q1’25 bets.

Here are the top 5:

1. Salesforce Ventures (average Mosaic score of 891, scored out 1,000)
2. Qualcomm Ventures (840 Mosaic)
3. Dell Technologies Capital (794 Mosaic)
4. Prosus Ventures (784 Mosaic)
5. Nvidia’s NVentures (783 Mosaic)

Salesforce Ventures’ Q1 investments included AI leaders like Anthropic, ElevenLabs, and Together.ai. 

Go deep on the state of CVC here, and learn more about what feeds our Mosaic scores here.

The +1

Milquetoast. Peak millennial right here.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

Co-Founder & Exec Chair

P.S. Funding to AI companies skyrocketed in Q1. See what drove the surge in our freshly released State of AI Report.

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