In the AI gold rush, everyone is selling the same shovels

• AI companies are rapidly expanding into each other’s markets for growth.
• For example, labs are entering the vibe-coding and agentic application space.
• “Super-app talk is mostly noise that’s going to get resolved,” one VC said.

Short-term win for customers

These changes bring an opportunity for founders who know what users want out of their data.

“Today’s crop of foundational models can see meeting transcripts shared for summarization, but they don’t know which folders they should be filed under, what a team actually cares about or the required follow-up actions,” Sheridan said. “That’s the gap startups can build into.”

The market is also ripe for consolidation.

“I’d expect one of the major consumer AI breakouts to get acquired within the next 24 months, most likely by Google,” he said. “Google has the consumer ads business to absorb the cost and is structurally the most desperate for consumer AI talent.”

Sheridan said that the first company to be bought gets the best price.

“You don’t want to be the last consumer AI play standing when each major buyer probably only takes one shot,” he said.