Will AI services and deployment businesses earn more money than the frontier model providers themselves?

Harry Stebbings · May 17, 2023

The biggest AI companies will be services-based implementation companies for large enterprises

Large enterprises have no idea how to implement AI themselves

39:17 20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @

Harry Stebbings · Sep 22, 2023

The biggest businesses in AI over the next decade will be implementation and services businesses that help large enterprises adopt AI

Enterprises he speaks to are excited but have no idea how to actually implement AI

Scope: over the next decade

10:00 20VC: Are Foundation Models Becoming Commoditised? Do OpenAI and Anthropic of the World Have a Sustaining Moat? Why Smaller Models May Work Better? Why Incumbents with Data Power Win the AI War with Christian Kleinerman, SVP Product @ Snowflake

Harry Stebbings · May 22, 2024

AI services companies doing implementation and education will make more revenue than foundation model providers

Accenture posted $2.4B in AI-related revenue versus OpenAI's $2B

Scope: referring to Accenture-type implementation and education services

38:31 20VC: Box's Aaron Levie on Predictions for the Next Wave of AI: Will Foundation Models Be Commoditised | How the Business Model of SaaS Changes Forever | Startups vs Incumbents: Who Wins | App vs Infrastructure Layer: Where is the Value?

Harry Stebbings · Jun 12, 2024

AI services will generate more revenue over the next five years than AI models will

Accenture already reported roughly $2.4B of generative AI revenue versus OpenAI's ~$2B, and the learning and adoption curve for large enterprises is challenging

23:52 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's

Harry Stebbings · Oct 7, 2024

Frontier AI companies risk spending enormous capital to achieve technical breakthroughs that other companies then leverage to build the incredibly valuable businesses

Battery technology followed this pattern: companies nobody has heard of made unbelievable breakthroughs, then were acquired, went out of business, or were bought for their IP

Scope: framed as his personal concern

54:35 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

Elias Torres · Mar 21, 2025

There is real money to be made in AI implementation services, because model providers won't build solutions for their own customers

OpenAI sent him leads for customers it refused to help build things for; contracts scaled from $25k/month to $100k and $500k deals, netting ~$2M in six or seven months

Scope: based on his own consulting practice

58:07 20VC: Selling Drift for $1.2BN is the Biggest Failure: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company | Why Incumbents Are Slower & Worse Than Ever | Why the Most Valuable Companies in a World of AI Will Not Have More Than 100 People with Elias Torres

Harry Stebbings · Mar 21, 2025

AI services companies will be bigger than AI technology providers over the next five years

58:34 20VC: Selling Drift for $1.2BN is the Biggest Failure: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company | Why Incumbents Are Slower & Worse Than Ever | Why the Most Valuable Companies in a World of AI Will Not Have More Than 100 People with Elias Torres

Harry Stebbings · Jul 11, 2025

AI services businesses will make more money over the next five years than the model providers themselves

A lot of European corporates need massive handholding to adopt AI

Scope: stands by it despite many disagreeing

65:38 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Aaron Levie · May 22, 2024

Eventually AI software and infrastructure spend will exceed spend on human implementation services

Once systems are in production you no longer need the same change management, mirroring how Box's cloud infrastructure spend now vastly exceeds its cloud maintenance and services spend, the reverse of five years ago

38:52 Software and infra spend eventually overtakes implementation services spend as systems mature