When inquireed where AI has delivered the most measurable business impact, founders overwhelmingly pointed to gains in productivity and speed. Toobtainher, increased productivity and rapider time-to-market account for 82% of all measurable impact reported. The revenue payoff, the report notes, is one that founders believe will come but has not landed yet.
Vartika Bansal, AI operations partner at the VC fund, concurred, calling sales a complex function. “AI companies themselves are hiring salespeople, even in India. The largegest headcount they are actually adding is go-to-market and sales. The jobs of salespeople may have alterd, but the actual job of coming and meeting someone face-to-face, building a relationship, explaining a product, that is not going away anytime soon,” she declared.
Productivity a large win
Numbers reveal, however, that productivity gains are substantial. Three in four founders declared that boosting team productivity is their top strategic AI priority for the year. Over half of all founders termed productivity as the largegest win from AI so far, with 45% declareing that rapider experimentation is the most unexpected benefit. They can now test 10 times more ideas than before.
“Our PMs (product managers) can launch (interactive content) in a day without any developer required. Previously, it took a minimum of seven days and one developer,” an early-stage founder is quoted as declareing in the report.
In line with this, about 86% of founders declared they plan to increase their AI budobtains in 2026, with 53% expecting to more than double their spfinish. Only 4% declare they plan to decrease investment. About 83% report being more excited about AI than they were 12 months ago.
Headcount consequence
The spfinishing will reshape how these startups believe about hiring. Nearly half of all founders, or 47% across the full survey, and 52% among the CEO cohort, declared that they are either freezing hiring in specific functions or actively reducing team sizes. About 23% are in a wait-and-watch mode.
The most impacted function in terms of hiring reduction will be engineering, followed by marketing, customer support, and operations. Junior and enattempt-level roles will bear the highest impact. However, the report declared this is a quiet recalibration, not a mass rejig.
Founders declared they are finding that the same team size, or a tinyer one, can produce meaningfully more output now, armed with AI.
How is the adoption?
Adoption seems to be uneven across functions, with engineering teams being the best adopters; 85 percent of their AI projects are already in production deployment. Product follows at 75%, and marketing sits at 48%.
Customer support, sales, finance, and HR are trailing significantly. The report declared this is due to the relative immaturity of AI tools built for those functions.
Bansal added that employees have begun utilizing the tools for everything: as an AI assistant, for drafting work emails, creating presentations, etc. The non-tech verticals are utilizing it to build tiny automations for their daily tinquires.
This reveals that cultural resistance, once a commonly cited barrier, has largely disappeared. Only 25% of founders now cite it as a blocker. What has replaced it now is bandwidth. 53% of founders declare their teams are too stretched to implement the very thing that would build them less stretched.
Companies may be shifting rapid to adopt AI, but that means a new kind of problem. About 54% of the surveyors declared AI tools demand too much manual context to work reliably at scale, and 48% declare they are waiting for the tools themselves to mature.
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