This 67 page AI report on how 300 execs at software startups like Cursor, ElevenLabs, Sierra (revenue $10m-$1b+) use AI just dropped. I read it all so you don't have to. Top 7 takeaways: OpenAI is still the #1 model provider in the enterprise, but Claude is second. 1/10
On AI spend. Companies are spending more on data storage, processing and AI infra than inference and training (quite surprising to me)! Of course, AI talent is by far the most expensive line item. 2/10
The most popular tools used to develop AI. This is not a market map. 3/10
On AI spend by product stage. Scaling companies at ~$500M median revenue spend ~$100M/yr across training, inference, data storage and processing. 4/10
The year of agents. A whopping ~90% of high growth startups are either actively deploying or experimenting with agents. 5/10
On pricing model. There's a drift away from subscription based pricing. I love this quote: "Subscription model is not working for us. Power users tend to use a lot resulting in -ve margins considering LLM API costs, while users who aren't using are at risk of churn." 6/10
On AI for internal productivity. Coding assistance [Cursor, Claude] is by far #1 with 33% of the total code being written by AI for high-growth startups. 7/10
Read the full report from Iconiq here: https://www.iconiqcapital.com/...