Ep 142: Understanding the AI Wave with 8VC's Alex Kolicich & Jack Moshkovich

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Feb 17, 2026

Jack Moshkovich, partner at 8VC focused on enterprise AI investments, and Alex Kolicich, 8VC partner with IT and Bio-IT engineering roots, discuss the AI wave. They cover the jump from decision support to AI doing work. They map a six-layer AI stack and argue application-layer startups will capture the last mile. They unpack frontier models, managed services, forward-deployed engineering, and risks around adoption and labor shifts.

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ANECDOTE

Augment's Digital Freight Employee

Augment builds AI 'employees' for freight brokers that collect proof-of-delivery and negotiate rates.
Agents handle most routine cases and escalate only the tough exceptions to humans.

ANECDOTE

Agents Enable Tailored Interviews At Scale

Outset uses AI agents to run tailored user interviews at scale and synthesize insights.
This replaces costly manual interviews and unlocks high-fidelity research at low marginal cost.

ANECDOTE

Qualia Uses AI To Automate Title Work

Qualia fitted AI into title workflows (document understanding, search, structured output) and launched Qualia Clear to automate title search.
The product rapidly reduced labor and scaled to millions of ARR within months.

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Advances in AI are occurring at a pace we haven’t seen before in Silicon Valley. How do we know what’s real versus hype? What does it mean for large software incumbents? And how are the top investors and builders thinking about the new possibilities? This week, we talk with two of my partners at 8VC, Alex Kolicich and Jack Moshkovich, who are on the ground working with the leading AI talent to get their perspective on what’s really happening.

Alex Kolicich is a Partner at 8VC, where he specializes in IT and Bio-IT investments. Prior, he was a Partner at Formation 8 and worked alongside Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital Management. Alex was also an engineer and early-product advisor at Clarium, Palantir, and Google. Jack Moshkovich began his career at 8VC and helps lead our investment practice alongside Alex out of San Francisco, where he focuses on enterprise software.

We begin with Silicon Valley’s most recent technological wave: smart enterprise. In 2013, we published our smart enterprise thesis, predicting the B2B software explosion that drove tremendous value creation over the past decade. Now, we’re entering the next landmark shift: the AI wave. Learn why AI is fundamentally disruptive (you can find our thesis here), and the enormous leap from data retrieval to automated decision making and from linear to non-linear problem solving. Next, we dive into the six layers of the AI investment stack, and why we are focused on level five: the application layer. We dissect the tremendous opportunities for AI-native upstarts, as well as the challenges — and upside — for smart enterprise pioneers that can reorient around AI. Finally, we discuss some of the key questions in the years ahead: When and where will we see massive productivity gains in the economy? Will LLMs become commodities, or is each frontier model sufficiently differentiated? And are we entering a bubble, or is the AI wave just getting started?

00:00 Episode intro

01:40 Smart enterprise thesis

04:00 Did enterprise software dramatically boost productivity?

08:30 Understanding the AI wave

11:45 Are LLMs becoming commodities?

17:10 OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Meta vs Grok

20:30 Frontier models vs enterprise incumbents

25:20 What did Palantir get right?

32:30 AI case studies/new possibilities

43:00 The most surprising aspect of the AI wave

46:10 Are we entering a bubble? Or just getting started?

52:40 Biggest concern with AI

58:00 Biggest reason for optimism

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