AI has become the investment theme of the moment, but opportunities may lie beyond traditional AI companies. Stanislav Shabaiev, founder of STNL Media Invest Holding, believes the bigger opportunity is in businesses using technology to transform established industries. "AI is becoming a layer across the economy, rather than a sector on its own," says Shabaiev. "For investors, that changes the question. It is less about finding the next company with AI in its name and more about finding businesses that can use it to create a meaningful advantage."
There are very few industries left that are undigitised, Shabaiev adds. "What is left are industries with a digital shopfront and a manual back office. The customer sees the status of an order in an app, and behind that screen someone is moving data between three systems and picking up the phone to check it. That is where the value sits: not in giving an industry another interface, but in removing the manual work between the systems it already has."
For Shabaiev, who has spent more than 15 years working across software, media and digital innovation, that is where the investment opportunity becomes particularly interesting. His portfolio spans online media, advertising technology, SaaS and information systems, alongside investments in sectors including healthcare, logistics, construction and e-sports. The common thread is not a particular sector. It's the potential for technology to make a business more scalable, efficient and defensible. "The model itself is available to everyone now," he says. "What creates defensibility is something else: data that only that company has, how deeply the product sits inside the customer's daily process and how expensive it would be to move away from it."
As capital pours into AI, the technology itself can sometimes become the story. "A great deal is currently bought out of an experimental AI budget rather than the budget of the team that owns the problem. Those are different pots of money with different lifespans, and the experimental one is cut first."
Yet investors still have to ask the same questions they always have: Who is the customer? Is there a genuine need? Can the business execute? Is there a path to sustainable growth? That is why Shabaiev’s own test is a blunt one: "I mentally switch the product off for a week and ask what happens to the customer." If the answer is that work stops, it is a very different conversation than a nice addition. These fundamentals matter more as AI moves from experimentation into everyday business operations. The winners may not be the companies that make the most noise about AI."
Shabaiev believes this next phase could favour companies that combine AI with deep knowledge of a particular industry. Rather than competing to build another general-purpose model, these businesses can apply existing technology to specific workflows, markets and customer problems.
"I'm less interested in pilots than in renewals," adds Shabaiev. "How many pilots became contracts, and how many contracts survived a second budget cycle. A pilot only tells you that a company is worth listening to. A renewal tells you that someone is willing to be accountable for it."
The winners may not be the companies that make the most noise about AI. They may be the companies that use it so effectively that AI almost disappears in...
Source: Sifted · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing