How AI changes the math for startups, according to a Microsoft VP | TechCrunch

"After a long stretch on GitHub Copilot, Silver is now a corporate vice president at Microsoft's CoreAI division, where she works on tools for deploying apps and agentic systems within enterprises. Her work is focused on the Foundry system inside Azure, which is designed as a unified AI portal for enterprises, giving her a close view of how companies are actually using these systems and where deployments end up falling short."

"I see this as being a watershed moment for startups as profound as the move to the public cloud. If you think about it, the cloud had a huge impact for startups because it meant that they no longer needed to have the real estate space to host their racks, and they didn't need to spend as much money on the capital infusion of getting the hardware to be hosted in their labs and things like that. Everything became cheaper."

"Now agentic AI is going to kind of continue to reduce the overall cost of software operations again, because many of the jobs involved in standing up a new venture - whether it's support people, legal investigations - a lot of it can be done faster and cheaper with AI agents. I think that's going to lead to more ventures and more startups launching. And then we're going to see higher-valuation startups with fewer people at the helm."

Amanda Silver has worked at Microsoft for 24 years and now serves as corporate vice president in the CoreAI division. She leads work on tools for deploying applications and agentic systems inside enterprises, centered on the Foundry system in Azure, a unified AI portal for enterprises. Foundry provides visibility into how companies use AI systems and where deployments fall short. Agentic AI is expected to reduce software operational costs, automating tasks like customer support and legal investigations, lowering capital needs similar to the public cloud, enabling more startups and higher valuations with smaller teams. Multi-step agents are already being broadly adopted across coding tasks.

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