Anouncement
Anouncement
MANILA, Philippines — Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have dramatically lowered the barrier to launching a company, compressing tasks that once took months into mere days. Yet, according to global venture builder Jonathan Greechan, easier execution has created an even sharper hurdle: building something uniquely defensible in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Speaking on the shifting startup landscape, Greechan, co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of the global pre-seed accelerator Founder Institute, highlighted that while generative AI automates the heavy lifting of software development, it does not guarantee customer demand or sustainable competitive advantage.
The proliferation of enterprise-grade AI tools has rewritten the startup playbook. According to Stanford’s AI Index 2026, 88 percent of surveyed organizations adopted AI in at least one business function by 2025, and 79 percent routinely leveraged generative AI. During that same window, the creation of newly funded AI companies surged by 71 percent.
While speed-to-market has never been faster, Greechan warned that technical acceleration cannot replace commercial validation.
“AI can help founders build and measure, but you cannot outsource the learning to the AI,” Greechan said, emphasizing that founders must still directly engage target users, diagnose specific pain points, and confirm real market demand.
With commodity code and off-the-shelf foundation models readily available to any competitor, technical capability alone no longer constitutes an edge. Greechan noted that enduring AI businesses will rely on alternative strategic moats:
The shift arrives as Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem accelerates. Joint research by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company projects Southeast Asia’s digital economy to exceed $300 billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), with venture funding exceeding $2.3 billion across more than 680 regional AI startups.
Locally, data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) valued the domestic digital economy at ₱2.74 trillion, representing approximately 9.8 percent of GDP and employing over 10.39 million Filipinos.
For local founders navigating this landscape, Greechan offered clear advice: win locally before going global.
Rather than chasing presence in Silicon Valley, London, or Singapore out of prestige, entrepreneurs should focus first on solving distinct problems at home. By dominating a focused niche, establishing clear unit economics, and developing a repeatable playbook, founders build a durable base before scaling regionally across Asia.
Looking beyond purely digital software, investor attention is increasingly pivoting toward where machine intelligence interfaces with the physical environment.
Industry metrics demonstrate rapid adoption in hardware-integrated AI:
As software generation commoditizes, the future belongs not to teams that merely ship fast, but to those who embed intelligence into critical workflows and tangible real-world systems.
