For all their pitches promising something new, AI startups share many of the same questions as startups in years past: How do they know when they\u2019ve achieved the holy grail of product-market fit?<\/p>\n
Product-market fit has been studied extensively over the years; entire books have been written about how to master the art. But as with so many things, AI is upending established practices.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, it just could not be more different from all the playbooks that we\u2019ve all been taught in tech in the past,\u201d Ann <\/a>Bordetsky<\/a>, a partner at New Enterprise Associates<\/a>, told a standing room-only crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt<\/a> in San Francisco. \u201cIt\u2019s a completely different ball game.\u201d<\/p>\n Top of the list is the pace of change in the AI world. \u201cThe technology itself isn\u2019t static,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Even still, there are ways that founders and operators can evaluate whether they have product-market fit.<\/p>\n One of the best things to watch, Murali Joshi<\/a>, a partner at Iconiq<\/a>, told the audience, is \u201cdurability of spend.\u201d AI is still early in the adoption curve at many companies, and so much of their spend is focused on experimentation rather than integration.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIncreasingly, we\u2019re seeing people really shift away from just experimental AI budgets to core office of the CXO budgets,\u201d Joshi said. \u201cDigging into that is super critical to ensure that this is a tool, a solution, a platform that\u2019s here to stay, versus something that they\u2019re just testing and trying out.\u201d <\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco Joshi also suggested startups consider classic metrics: daily, weekly, and monthly active users. \u201cHow frequently are your customers engaging with the tool and the product that they\u2019re paying for?\u201d<\/p>\n Bordetsky agreed, adding that qualitative data can help provide nuance to some of the quantitative metrics that might suggest, but not confirm, whether customers are likely to stick with a product.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you talk to customers or users, even in qualitative interviews, which we do tend to do a lot early on, that comes through very clearly,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Interviewing people in the executive suite can be helpful, too, Joshi said. \u201cWhere does this sit in the tech stack?\u201d he suggests asking them. He said that startups should think about how they can make themselves \u201cmore sticky as a product in terms of the core workflows.\u201d<\/p>\n Lastly, it\u2019s important for AI startups to think about product-market fit as a continuum, Bordetsky said. Product-market fit is not sort of one point in time,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s learning to think about how you maybe start with a little bit of product-market fit in your space, but then really strengthen that over time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all their pitches promising something new, AI startups share many of the same questions as startups in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[28,158,152449,149765,152450,189,190],"class_list":{"0":"post-290549","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-iconiq","11":"tag-new-enterprise-associates","12":"tag-product-market-fit","13":"tag-techcrunch-disrupt","14":"tag-techcrunch-disrupt-2025"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n