Those of you who have talked with me over the last 6 months know that I’ve become low-key obsessed with AI value creation in the enterprise, and more specifically AI rollups and transformations. Why?
The central debate of AI value creation in the enterprise is if it will create value for the early enterprise adopters on the application layer (as articulated by Robert Smith founder of Vista Equity Partners) or rather be a ship containerization innovation or Red Queen’s race where investment in AI is required to prevent disruption (as articulated by Jerry Neumann, VC veteran ), but does not yield a fundamental business advantage for anyone. What is missing from the argument (and gets me excited) is what happens when existing and new forms of companies emerge with infinite intelligence at their hands, what I call superintelligent corporations.
Superintelligent corporations, by my definition, are corporations that can operate at >2x the productivity of their peers, as measured by topline leverage (more revenue per employee) and bottom line efficiency gains (smaller teams required).
There are already superintelligent corporations - I see frontier AI labs like OpenAI/Anthropic, and select AI native startups like Cursor as prime examples. However, the greater near term business opportunity may be in transforming existing corporations that already have distribution into superintelligent corporations.
There are roughly 3 paths for existing corporations to become a superintelligent corporation:
CEO mandates to adopt AI at existing large corporations. It is hard to tell exactly which corporations have this mandate outside of those who publicly shared mandates in the last couple of years. Some have succeeded in driving shareholder value like Shopify and Coinbase, while others have destroyed value like Klarna and Duolingo, though it may be hard to attribute all value changes to AI adoption given larger macro and business forces.
AI rollups: private equity rollups that acquire services/software companies in fragmented sectors and use AI to transform holding companies: driving margin expansions & revenue growth (see my market map below with additional analysis here). Disclosure: through my fund Hydra Ventures, and our AI-focused entity Metropolis, I’ve made a couple AI rollups investments in Legion Holdings and Rocketable.
AI transformation: consulting (a la Accenture) and forward deployed engineering shops (a la Palantir) that directly understand enterprise workflows and implement custom solutions and/or platforms. I’m doing a deeper dive on this space, but in the meantime checkout this competitive positioning map including key players
Several frontier AI products & tools have recently emerged to completely change how enterprises adopt AI:
Long horizon coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity, Gemini CLI are able to complete 3+ hour long tasks at >50% success rates with Opus 4.5 reaching almost 5 hour task lengths.
Agent harnesses like Claude Skills and defined use of virtual machines and MCPs (like Manus) help to increase reliability and success rates of coding agents.
Growing realization of the value of context/graphs in providing valuable input into agents as articulated recently by Jaya Gupta
Claude Code is exploding in popularity and has recently taken over Cursor in both vibes and web and YouTube search, at least in the US.
It has disrupted the plans of so called vertical AI agents as recently called out by legendary investor Gokul Rajaram.
Gokul Rajaram@gokulr
VERTICAL AI CHALLENGE Vertical AI Founders: You've spent 2+ years building your agents, training your model on your customers' data, embedding into workflows, creating a powerful GTM motion, all the best practices. You've beaten back challengers and are the #1 or #2 player in
12:05 AM · Jan 16, 2026 · 94.8K Views
60 Replies · 46 Reposts · 540 Likes
…and may be the early canary in the coal mine of a flurry of AI rollups & transformations to come.
Alex Svanevik 🐧@ASvanevik
a private equity fund that buys businesses and just forces everyone to use claude code
3:48 AM · Jan 17, 2026 · 149K Views
77 Replies · 45 Reposts · 1.45K Likes
A revolution is coming to enterprise AI value creation, it is just a question of how long it will take. Bottoms up adoption at enterprises of coding agents will take off this year (what I call “self-serve AI transformation”), and while this will raise a lot of security headaches for IT & compliance departments, teams everywhere will gain significant leverage with early adopters potentially benefiting more than laggards.
In future posts I’ll share a bit more about my thoughts on the DNA of superintelligent corporations, what a true AI transformation could look like, and what a world economy full of superintelligent corporations portends for the future of work.
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