The a16z Show · Friday, October 2, 2026
Seema Amble explains that while incumbents have distribution advantages and customer trust, internal incentive issues prevent them from developing more advanced AI agents. She notes that deeper AI capabilities can conflict with existing product offerings, creating internal competition and making it difficult to align different VPs and sales teams on a unified strategy.
“The flip side is there's all these internal incentive issues, right, which is if you start getting into more complicated agents, it's an internal conflict with an existing product that's offering workflow versus you're resolving the work.”
“And those are two products that are, like, you're resolving a customer support issue end-to-end versus providing a workflow for a support agent, a human agent. Those are different buyers. How do you, you know, those two teams are in conflict.”
“But anyway, so there's all these sort of classic incumbent issues I think that the incumbent also runs into.”