Artificial intelligence is not just another tool in the entrepreneurial toolkit — it’s reshaping the very economics of founding and scaling startups, according to Amanda Silver, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s CoreAI division. In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch, Silver explained how AI is lowering traditional barriers that once constrained early-stage ventures.
Silver, who leads work on Microsoft’s Azure Foundry platform — a unified AI portal for enterprise developers — draws a direct parallel between the advent of public cloud computing and today’s AI boom.
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,
she said, emphasizing that AI is triggering a similar structural shift.
Now agentic AI is going to kind of continue to reduce the overall cost of software operations again.
According to the executive, AI agents — software systems capable of performing multistep tasks autonomously — promise to cut costs once tied up in human labor. Tasks like customer support, legal reviews or live-site incident response are now increasingly handled by intelligent automation, potentially enabling startups to launch with smaller teams and less capital.
Silver told TechCrunch that while adoption hasn’t accelerated as quickly as some expected, much of that lag stems from companies still learning how to define effective AI use cases. She noted that success with agentic systems often comes down to clarity around what problems they’re meant to solve and what data they need to perform well.
For founders and investors alike, this shift could mean a new math for startup economics — one where traditional cost drivers are increasingly supplanted by AI-enabled efficiency and automation. As Silver put it, the world ahead may have
more ventures and more startups launching. And then we’re going to see higher-valuation startups with fewer people at the helm.
Material by Irina Kalaydjieva
Image: Microsoft
