SkyDeck exec: AI hype may be waning; tariffs hit spice industry

Business Journals

25-04-2025

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Venture capitalists might be less fervent about artificial intelligence than they once were.
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Interest in AI may be coming off of fever pitch
More than half of the startups that pitched at accelerator Berkeley SkyDeck's demo day earlier this month featured artificial intelligence as a core part of their business, reported Sara Bloomberg of the San Francisco Business Times.
Despite that, SkyDeck Fund managing partner Chon Tang said some of the fever pitch around AI has abated on the investor side.
"AI is actually not as hot as it used to be," said Chon Tang, the fund's managing partner. "The investor interest on those companies has been lukewarm, and it's almost like how it used to be two, three years ago, pre-AI, where if you're in an industry I care about, if you have already shown tremendous traction, then I want to meet you."
That would be a big shift from the recent excitement surrounding the technology. Nearly one-third of all the venture capital deployed in 2024 went to AI companies, marking an 80% increase over 2023, SFBT's Bloomberg reported in January.
But venture capitalists aren't the only ones losing a bit of interest.
Managers less keen on replacing workers with AI
Managers are changing their tunes on whether they want to replace workers with artificial-intelligence tools, reports Andy Medici of The Playbook.
Just 30% of managers said it would be financially beneficial if they could replace large numbers of employees with AI, according to the second-annual manager survey from AI-powered presentation-software firm Beautiful.ai. That's down from 48% last year.
The percentage of respondents who said they did not want to replace workers with AI jumped from 39% to 54%, meanwhile, and 63% said they do not believe multiple employees they manage could be replaced by AI tools and still operate well without them (up from 43% last year).
Anxiety among workers over generative AI tools has been high since OpenAI's ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing digital tools. About 58% of managers said their employees are still worried AI tools will eventually cost them their jobs.
FULL STORIES:
How the spice industry is talking tariffs
As U.S. companies scramble to find new suppliers amid soaring tariffs on Chinese imports and broad tariffs everywhere else, one Texas company has found there simply isn't another option, reports James McCandless of the San Antonio Business Journal.
A lot of the spice industry's supply chain is international and unmovable, and Adams Extract has its chain set up so that most of its stock is kept in the country of origin and orders are placed as needed, said Paul Nagy, director of procurement at Adams Extract.
"We can't grow certain spices here, we can't have an infrastructure in the U.S. because of the climate and because of soil," Nagy said. "We could develop that over decades but it's something we can't really replace tomorrow and it's something we don't compete in."
China exported about 2.6 billion pounds of onions and about 4.2 billion pounds of garlic in 2023, according to the World Bank, and much of it ends up in U.S. spice mixes. India has a similar supply of onions and garlic, but it would take years for the American palate to adapt to the difference in taste, Nagy said. The inflexibility in the supply chain means the cost of the tariffs will end up passed toward the consumer.
"Most of the tariffs will be passed through eventually," he said. "There may be some amount we can hold back in the beginning because of our stock, but you'll see prices driving up because of the tariff and it'll be within the next month or so that you'll start to see that."
FULL STORY: South Texas spice maker: No ready replacement for Chinese supply chains