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Sima Amble

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23
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2025-12-23
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2025-12-23
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  1. “You know, your labor and your time. And ultimately, given this counterparty, what are the characteristics that you may want to put into a demand letter to actually affect better outcomes? And so I think the more cases that Eve's processes, the smarter and more powerful the platform becomes, again, ultimately reinforcing the business model for their clients.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The sources of compounding competitive advantage reside in AI applications. And I think Eve is a really unique example and case study for this. Ultimately, the founders of Eve had a vision for owning the kind of end-to-end workflow from intake to outcome. And I think deeply embedding yourself within your customer, having them live within the product every day as a source of defensibility. I think they are also creating a really unique data asset, right? Ultimately, by being able to process cases again from intake all the way to outcomes, that outcomes data is not public, right? That is not a source of information that, you know, model companies and labs can actually train on in the public internet. And so ultimately that outcome data is used to better inform smarter intake so that Eve can tell their customers, look, this case has these characteristics to potentially be worth $50,000. This case is potentially worth $5 million. Here's how you may want to triage.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Money so it doesn't erode the billable hour, it really reinforces their business model. And as a result, the market pull for Eves kind of AI workspace has just been tremendous. Another example in our portfolios is a company called Salient, which operates in the loan servicing space. So they're applying voice agents to, they started an auto lending, but they've expanded to a whole ecosystem of kind of consumer lending products where a voice agent can speak in 50 languages fully compliantly, track UDAP, do welcome calls and pay reminders. And obviously, you know, there is a cost reduction story in that, right? It is helping drive efficiencies in many of these bank and non-bank lenders who have large call centers. But I think what they found, which is so remarkable, is that the voice agents are actually driving better collection rates. So it's not just a cost reduction story, it's actually delivering better outcomes for their end customers. And it's a result. It's reinforcing the lender business model. Ultimately, where”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'm David Haber, General Partner here at A16C, and I help co-lead the AI Apps Fund. My big idea for 2026 is looking for companies where AI reinforces the business model. You know, I think there's a lot of narrative around AI helping automate work and reducing cost, but I think in instances where AI is actually reinforcing the business model in driving revenue, there's really no limit to the amount that customers may want to adopt that technology. And so the market pull in examples like that are just so much stronger than those where it's just a cost reduction story. I sit on the board of a company called Eve, which operates in the plaintiff law space. And what's unique about plaintiff law is that those attorneys don't charge by the hour. They operate on a contingency basis, which means that they only get paid if they win. And so again, while AI is helping automate a lot of the drafting and reasoning work that they do, ultimately it's really about enabling them to take on more clients and make more money.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That agents have full ability to go and act. And then there's a separate section, the flags, where humans need to engage and take action. I'm really excited to see these new user interfaces, but what I'm more excited about is where work becomes less about doing and more about reviewing.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But in the future, as they built more and more trust, they can be on the front lines negotiating. So let's paint that picture. You're in an M&A transaction. Your agent has built up trust. They have the responsibility to go negotiate. You've set parameters. So if you're the sell side, you're selling a business, you set the minimum price that you're willing to come to terms on. And then the buy side agent, well, they'll set the max they're willing to pay. And if those two cross, great, you can get to a high level agreement, but there's going to be outstanding questions like what's the working capital arrangement at close? Or how to deal with contingencies or earnouts? The agent may not have the information to negotiate on their behalf, so that gets flagged up. And so software won't be just another chat interface, but you can think of it as a command center. There is a list of activities that are being negotiated on.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is building trust. There needs to be AI operating agreements, understandings of when an agent can act on behalf or when they need to flag an issue. They're humans. Initially, they might be able to schedule a meeting for you.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Comes into gear. If you want to accomplish not just a discrete task, but the full job, you need to be able to collaborate with others. So multi-human and multi-agent collaboration is on its way. And with that, the value of these platforms increases. And the switching costs rise, which is really exciting as we think about defensibility of these platforms. Vertical apps have been criticized that they're not very defensible in this AI era. Will they stand the test of time? The best ones absolutely will. A couple attributes that I look for with vertical apps. One brand. There's a high reference ability in vertical markets.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That a horizontal, as much as I love ChatGBT, is not going to be as good at. We've observed vertical AI evolve across three phases. First was information retrieval. You read some documents, you extract information, and you might summarize it. The second came this year in 2025, reasoning, reasoning capabilities have been really impactful for vertical software businesses with Hebia, you're analyzing financial statements and building models. With basis, you're able to reconcile trial balances. And with Elise AI, you're able to diagnose what the maintenance issue is and contact the right vendor. The problem is that with all complex work, there's collaboration. Multiplayer mode is required.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “My big idea for 2026 is vertical AI is going to evolve from information retrieval and reasoning to multiplayer mode. Vertical software is having a moment, but vertical software was cool before ChatGPT. Shopify, Viva, Procore, Toast have all scaled to tens or even hundreds of billions of market cap. Huge companies. But vertical AI companies, they're growing faster, faster than historical precedents that we saw in SaaS. One of the cool aspects that we're all talking about with AI is how agents are replacing labor. It's easier to replace a lawyer than it is to replace a generalist. Building for a vertical, building for a specific type of employee means deep integrations, proprietary data, specialized interfaces.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Is your bank market products to you that you already have? It's because your customer data sits in all of these different sectors. Why can't customer service agent A answer questions about customer service B if you call in about your banking operations? Now imagine the future of a unified data layer, an incredibly smart people supplemented by agents that can understand your needs, help you with any product you already have, anticipate your needs in the future. That would be a beautiful experience for both customers and businesses. In 2026, we're going to see a dramatic acceleration for any company that has built a new AI first platform that sells into this large industry. But the opportunity is massive. So if you're a founder who deeply understands or is deeply curious about any archaic aspects of banking or insurance, the opportunity”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I see a ton of opportunity here and potentially a dramatic reordering of the winners and losers of incumbent companies based on who become the early adopters of some of these new platforms. And we're already seeing it. There's some banks and there's some insurance companies that are starting to get the reputation of being forward-thinking easier to work with, wanting to lean in. And those companies in some areas like mortgage servicing have been able to turn areas of their business from 5% margin businesses to 50% margin businesses. And you imagine doing that across your company as quickly as possible is going to make a much bigger difference against your competitor that maybe takes two or three years to catch up. One of the reasons as an investor that I get so excited about infrastructure is that it's beautiful infrastructure that enables beautiful consumer experiences and beautiful business experiences. For instance, why”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “There are strong, viable options of this next generation of AI first software built by entrepreneurs who deeply understand your industry are deeply technical and have entirely re-architected your platforms to one, enable you to scale, and two, be incredibly flexible in terms of how you can add AI on now and in the future.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So, as the saying goes, it's not AI that's the competition. It's your competitors using AI. So the best banks, the best insurance companies, will fix their plumbing and enable them to take full advantage and be the most competitive going into the next decade. Companies have been talking about this for decades. Why is it different now? Primarily three reasons. One, we have to remember that many of these companies still live on mainframes decades old mainframes, and their systems were already on the verge of breaking with the scale. Two, now companies see that they're leaving a lot of revenue on the table by not being able to take advantage of AI. For instance, in insurance, underwriters sometimes can't even get to the demand that they have because they're not able to process it fast enough. They can't bring in the documents, they can't scan them. This is a huge revenue upside that can be captured if you get the right system and you layer AI on top. Third,”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “A general partner on the AI applications fund. And my big idea for 2026 is there will be a dramatic turning point coming to financial services and insurance. Finally, the risk of not replacing legacy systems will exceed the risk of change. Institutions will let longstanding contracts lapse and implement their newer AI native computers. Generation of infrastructure doesn't just add AI, they unify the data from legacy cores, from external systems, from unstructured data into a new system of record, enabling FIs not only to scale, but to take full advantage of AI. There are three major changes that are important for both customers and builders. Flows will finally become paralyzed. Between screens, cut pasting data. For instance, your mortgage team could see the 400 plus tasks that are needed to Parallel and even have agents do”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “What I'm most excited about is this ability to pull things out of people's heads and then suddenly unlock the real power of agents. And I think the Fortune 500 has the most siloed and distributed data. And I think there can be a lot of opportunity for smoother operations gives us the operating model, orchestration, context extraction, and digital teams. Now let's look at the clearest industry where this becomes unavoidable. Angela Strange focuses on financial services and insurance where unified data and parallelized workflows make it possible to replace legacy cores and unlock speed, margin, and scale. Here's Angela.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Very slowly and bureaucratically implementing new software takes years. Anything to change takes forever. Now, if you're able to create this context layer where you're able to take things out of people's heads and create a context layer, you know, imagine like putting in a new ERP or a new procurement agent becomes much faster. And then you can actually have these agents work with each other in a way that's much faster than the Asia team and the Europe team needing to set a bunch of meetings and two people needing to continuously talk to each other about closing a contract that's”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “AI, but I think that's about to change. It's most interesting for the Fortune 500 because they have all of this siloed context across people and processes as these organizations Gotten built. A lot of Fortune 500 companies have grown through acquisition. They have different geographies. Each of these geographies have different software systems. They have different people. They operate differently. And what does that mean today? These companies all operate.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And say, okay, our sales agent is doing really well. We're closing a lot of customers or new. Agent is bringing in rate pricing, but all our customers are turning. If we measure all those against each other and say, we see that one is too high relative to the others and we have these quantifiable metrics, we can go back and change the objective function for any of the agents. I think every agent will have its own eval function and it will have KPIs just like humans are measured against right now. There will have to be logic that's saying if A then B ultimately right, just as organizations work towards some set of overall organizational KPIs, that's how agents will work too. There's a huge opportunity specifically working with Fortune 500 in the context of the problem. To date, we've seen Fortune 500 companies be very interested in AI, but it's been, I'd say, more on the experimentation side than deeply.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “One of the natural questions that comes out of this is well, if you have a bunch of agents autonomously working, isn't there a potential for a huge multi-agent cascade of failures? Yes, it's possible, but remember, we're not changing to this overnight. There could be multi-human cascading failures in any organization. I think agents have to be treated similarly. If you think about it this way, there are two checks. One is there still will be humans in the loop at various points. That will be one check. And what will the human do and eventually the agent? There will be a set of audit procedures and evals, you know, again, go back to these quantities.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And then piecing this together as shared context. What needs to be solved across these agents? It's providing the feedback across the agents and being able to ultimately determine, in this case, who is a good customer and are we getting the ROI, how we're spending our dollars or our time. To put that even more concretely, customer support needs to be able to say, this is a bad customer. Sales, you should spend less time prioritizing customer A and go for customer profile B. But right now, if we looked at it, the sales agent is operating autonomously, the support agent is operating autonomously, and they're probably, if anything, being measured more on efficiency metrics versus holistically looking at what's best for the business.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “As agents start to manage complex interdependent workflows like planning, analyzing, and executing together, organizations will need to rethink how work is structured and how contracts flows across these systems. The Fortune 500 will feel this shift most acutely. They sit on the deepest reservoirs of siloed data, institutional knowledge, and operational complexity, much of which sits in people's brains. To get this context out of people's brains, it's some combination of collecting documentation and watching human actions. What's the documentation? It could be onboarding videos, written instructions, full documentation that's been written up. And then the watching human actions is literally watching how humans are clicking around their browsers, the actions they take, the phone calls they make, et cetera.”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “To understand the shift, we start with the enterprise wide view. Sima Amble argues that the move from experimentation to coordinated multi-agent systems will force organizations to extract tacit knowledge from documents, processes in people's heads, turning it into usable operational context. Here Sima. Hi, I'm CMA Amble, a partner on our apps investing team. My 2026 big idea is that AI will create a new orchestration layer and new roles, particularly in the Fortune 500. In 2026, Enterprises will shift further from isolated AI tools to multi-agent systems that will need to behave like coordinated digital teams”

    2025-12-23 · a16z Podcast · Big Ideas 2026: The Enterprise Orchestration Layer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source