AI's Momentum: How Startups Are Redefining Enterprise Adoption

Forbes

8 hours ago

Pradeep Kumar Muthukamatchi is a Principal Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft and a passionate advisor to numerous startups.
For startups, in particular, AI has transcended innovation budgets to become a fundamental operational imperative, driving tangible value and reshaping entire industries. I work daily with agile startups, and what I'm seeing on the ground confirms a significant shift: AI is being applied with aggressive intent and remarkable results.
To give founders a more nuanced look at what's top of mind for enterprise buyers today, we'll cast light on just how boldly the AI revolution is reshaping startup strategy—and the surprises don't stop there.
AI Budgets Are Exploding: From Experiment To Essential
Remember when AI was primarily funded through 'innovation budgets'—discretionary pools for speculative projects? Those days are rapidly fading. We're now witnessing AI spend move directly into core operational IT line items. According to PwC's May 2025 AI agent survey, nearly 88% of responding executives indicated their companies plan to increase AI-related budgets during the year because of agentic AI.
This surge reflects a newfound confidence in AI's ROI. Startups, with their inherent need for efficiency and rapid scalability, are leading this charge. They're investing heavily in AI solutions to automate, optimize and differentiate.
Fine-Tuning Takes A Back Seat: The Power Of Prompt Engineering
One of the most surprising yet impactful shifts is the decreasing criticality of extensive fine-tuning. Newer, more intelligent models with longer context windows are capable of delivering similar or even better results through advanced prompt engineering alone.
This is a game changer for startups. Fine-tuning models can be a resource-intensive and time-consuming process, requiring significant data preparation and computational power. By relying on sophisticated prompt engineering, startups can achieve strong model performance with far less effort and cost. This agility also reduces model lock-in, allowing for greater portability across different models and providers.
Synthesia—a London-based startup that allows users to produce AI-generated videos with digital avatars, eliminating the need for cameras, actors or editing software—uses prompt engineering to direct its AI in script generation, avatar selection and adjusting tone and delivery rather than retraining models for each scenario. According to TechCrunch, Synthesia's prompt-first strategy has attracted more than 60,000 customers, including major enterprises, and helped the company raise $330 million in funding, reaching a valuation of over $2 billion.
Multimodel Is The New Norm: Strategic Selection For Optimal Performance
The 'one-size-fits-all' approach to AI models is quickly becoming obsolete. Enterprises, particularly agile startups, are now embracing a multimodel strategy, often deploying five or more different models in production for various use cases. This is a strategic necessity driven by a clear goal: optimizing both cost and performance.
Different AI models inherently excel at different tasks. For instance, some models are designed for robust, in-depth, complex question-answering systems and intricate data analysis, offering a broad understanding and deep contextual comprehension. Other models are better suited for creative brainstorming, content generation or rapid ideation thanks to their conversational fluency and ability to produce diverse outputs.
Harvey, a legal tech startup, integrates multiple AI models across its platform. One model specializes in summarizing dense legal documents, another in drafting client communications and yet another in extracting structured data from scanned contracts. This multimodal strategy allows Harvey to serve roughly 400 law firms globally, including one-third of the top 100 U.S. firms.
Rising Stakes: AI's Deeper Integration Making Switching More Complex
The 'easy come, easy go' era for AI models is fading. While simple AI tasks once allowed for seamless model interchange, the rise of agentic workflows is changing the game. These sophisticated, multistep AI processes, such as an AI autonomously drafting an email, researching a recipient and scheduling a follow-up, demand deep integration.
Many companies are now investing heavily in custom guardrails and precision prompting for these intricate workflows. This commitment creates significant switching costs. I worked with one leader who noted that extensive prompts are meticulously tuned for specific models, often spanning 'lots of pages of instruction.' Changing a model now means a massive reengineering effort, as even a small tweak can disrupt complex, interdependent workflows.
The difficulty of ensuring reliable results with a new model makes businesses, especially startups, far more reluctant to switch, effectively anchoring them to their chosen AI partners.
The Shift From 'Build' To 'Buy': Accelerating Innovation
The AI application ecosystem has matured at an unprecedented pace, leading to a significant shift from 'build' to 'buy' strategies within enterprises—especially among startups. Off-the-shelf, AI-native applications are often outperforming internal builds, proving more efficient, reliable and easier to maintain.
Many startups, with their focus on rapid iteration and market fit, are keenly aware that their core competency might not be in building foundational AI infrastructure from scratch. Instead, they can leverage purpose-built AI apps to innovate faster, leading to better outcomes, happier users and a stronger ROI.
Instead of building a fraud detection system from scratch, SentiLink—a fintech startup tackling synthetic identity fraud—developed a hybrid approach using prebuilt AI models enhanced with human insight. Its system flags suspicious applications by analyzing patterns across Social Security numbers, addresses and behavioral data. This buy-plus-optimize strategy enabled SentiLink to scale rapidly, serving over 300 financial institutions—including major fintechs and seven of the top 15 U.S. banks.
The Bottom Line: Real Impact, Real Opportunity
Enterprise AI is moving at lightning speed. What we're observing in the startup ecosystem is not merely experimental investment but a profound integration of AI into core business functions. Real budgets, real traction, a real focus on value and real, powerful tools are driving this transformation. This creates an enormous opportunity for startups to create significant impact, reshape industries and deliver unprecedented value to their customers.
The lessons learned from these agile pioneers—strategic model selection, the power of prompt engineering and the embrace of a robust AI app ecosystem—are invaluable for any enterprise looking to harness the true potential of AI.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?