The most dangerous signal in enterprise AI right now is a customer saying they need exactly what you're building.

They're not lying. The infrastructure to run AI agents inside an enterprise barely exists, so almost every conversation ends the same way: we need this, we can't find it anywhere.

That's the first wave. Enterprise AI adoption is the biggest thing driving innovation in software right now, and it is a genuinely good reason to build here. It is also the smallest of the three waves coming at you, and the only one that feels like help.

The second wave, and maybe the stronger one, is the founders moving into your space. They are hearing the same sentence you are. Enterprises still buy carefully, but new teams appear every other week, many of them pivots from somewhere adjacent. You find out in an announcement, which means it already happened.

The third and scariest wave is commoditization, and it punishes success, not failure. It arrives once the category is proven, which is exactly what the first two waves do for you. An incumbent decides your layer is a feature and gives it away to win the account. Watch what's happening to model routing.

The great founders building this stack already have an answer for all three. The third is the hardest: what do you own that a platform can't give away for free?

Grove Ventures