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Key Takeaways
- AI agency requires founders to think like owners protecting equity and data can matter as much as adopting the latest technology
- Capital follows defensibility as investors are pouring unprecedented money into AI, entrepreneurs still need sustainable business models
- Founders need to turn AI into proprietary data, intellectual property to gain a competitive advantage
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming table stakes for entrepreneurs. The next competitive divide may not be between entrepreneurs who use AI and those who don’t. It could be between founders who simply consume AI and those who figure out how to own the value it creates. That distinction could define the next generation of successful companies.
When more than half of small businesses have access to similar technology, the access itself stops being much of a competitive advantage.
The question every entrepreneur should be asking now is: What does my company own that becomes more valuable because of AI?
Inclusion to infrastructure
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 58% of small businesses reported using generative AI in 2025, up from 40% in 2024 and just 23% in 2023. Even more telling is that among small businesses using AI, 85% reported increased sales, 84% increased profits and 82% increased their workforce from the previous year.
That question was at the center of a tech agency discussion with leaders Michele Jawando, CEO of Omidyar Network; Allison Scott, CEO of Kapor Foundation; and Katy Knight, President of Siegel Family Endowment.
“The thing that I like to lead with around agency, is that it’s just a conversation about power and ownership,” Jawando said. For entrepreneurs, that idea offers a useful way to think about the next phase of the AI boom.
AI adoption vs. AI strategy
Using ChatGPT to draft emails, generate marketing copy or summarize research can save entrepreneurs enormous amounts of time. Those efficiencies are increasingly available to everyone. The competitive advantage comes from what you build around the technology.
For example, a company might develop proprietary customer data that improves personalization. Another might use AI to create an industry-specific workflow that dramatically reduces the time required to deliver its service. A founder could combine specialized expertise with AI to create a product that competitors can’t easily replicate.
Venture capital has made its priorities clear. U.S. venture investors deployed $320 billion across 15,352 deals in 2025, according to the National Venture Capital Association. AI companies captured an extraordinary $222 billion, or 65.4% of all venture deal value, despite accounting for only 39.4% of deal count.
The AI funding boom can also distort how entrepreneurs think about success. Raising capital isn’t the same as building a valuable company. Founders should determine exactly what outside capital will allow them to accomplish that revenue cannot. Maybe the money is needed to acquire customers faster, hire specialized talent, build proprietary technology or enter a new market.
If you cannot clearly connect the capital to a value-creating milestone, raising more money may simply mean giving away more ownership. This is particularly relevant for founders who don’t have equal access to venture capital.
Future tech funding
Startups with a Black founder or co-founder received only $942 million in U.S. venture funding in 2025, according to Crunchbase. That represented just 0.32% of total U.S. venture funding and was down more than two-thirds from three years earlier.
Scott captured the issue during the conversation with four key questions when she said we all need to look at “Who owns technologies? Who’s investing in technologies? Who is creating wealth from those technologies? Who are those technologies helping or hurting?” Entrepreneurs should ask similar questions about their own cap tables.
The academic evidence makes those questions even harder to ignore. A 2026 Journal of Finance study analyzing the race of more than 160,000 U.S. founders and investors found that just 3.1% of VC-funded startups were Black-owned.
Those companies raised approximately half as much venture capital as other startups. The researchers also found that Black VC partners invested more frequently in Black founders and that those investments produced higher successful exit rates.
For Scott, building inclusive controlled investment infrastructure is therefore more than a diversity initiative, it is an economic strategy. She envisioned “six or seven big funds led by Black fund managers” managing roughly $150 million to $200 million each and backing companies with racial equity and responsible AI investment theses.
Owning our agency
For a creator, agency might mean having control over how original work trains AI models. For an educator, it could mean determining when algorithms belong in classrooms. For consumers, it means understanding what rights are surrendered when clicking “accept.”
Knight extended the ownership conversation to philanthropy, arguing that foundations need to recognize the economic power sitting inside their endowments. “We are not just philanthropy players,” she said. “We are private sector players in that way. And we can be really powerful because we sit on a lot of capital and that matters in this context.”
That thinking is already showing up in the sector. Kapor Foundation reported that Humanity AI was launched as a $500 million, five-year collaborative initiative focused on ensuring AI delivers broader social benefits. Its priorities include expanding computing education, strengthening worker power, supporting new AI solutions, developing safeguards and protecting civil rights and democracy.
Real value opportunity
Jawando offered a useful definition of what meaningful progress could look like and stated, “when we have not just one or two of us that make it, but when you see entire ecosystems shifting because we’re there.”
The shift is already somewhat underway. New 2026 research from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that half of small-business employees are already using AI at work. Among workers who save time with AI, six in 10 reinvest those savings into doing more or better work.
The first phase of the generative AI revolution was about access. The second is about advantages. The third may ultimately be about ownership. That’s the opportunity entrepreneurs should be chasing.
Key Takeaways
- AI agency requires founders to think like owners protecting equity and data can matter as much as adopting the latest technology
- Capital follows defensibility as investors are pouring unprecedented money into AI, entrepreneurs still need sustainable business models
- Founders need to turn AI into proprietary data, intellectual property to gain a competitive advantage
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming table stakes for entrepreneurs. The next competitive divide may not be between entrepreneurs who use AI and those who don’t. It could be between founders who simply consume AI and those who figure out how to own the value it creates. That distinction could define the next generation of successful companies.
When more than half of small businesses have access to similar technology, the access itself stops being much of a competitive advantage.
The question every entrepreneur should be asking now is: What does my company own that becomes more valuable because of AI?
