This Is the Year for AI Deployments, Lightspeed Venture's Mhatre Says

Watch on YouTube ↗  |  February 25, 2026 at 21:05  |  10:22  |  Bloomberg Markets
Speakers

Summary

  • 2026 is the Year of Deployment: Mhatre predicts 2026 will mark the transition from "demos" to "big deployments" in large enterprises and public institutions. The market is currently pricing in this shift.
  • The Agentic Shift: The technology is moving from "Chatbots" to autonomous "Agents." These agents handle complex workflows (legal, financial triage, software generation) rather than just answering questions.
  • SaaS Disruption: A contrarian view on software pricing: "What used to be SaaS software now can be done by a digital agent." This threatens traditional seat-based pricing models as "digital coworkers" replace human seats.
  • Anthropic's Enterprise Dominance: Lightspeed is a major investor in Anthropic, citing its focus on trust, safety, and enterprise reliability as the key differentiator for critical business applications over competitors.
  • VC Bifurcation: The VC industry is splitting. "Zombie VC funds" unable to support companies scaling from $0 to $14B in revenue in 3 years will fade, favoring massive platforms with deep capital reserves.
Trade Ideas
Ravi Mhatre Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners 0:36
Mhatre states, "Now agents act autonomously. They're handling everything from legal workflows, financial triage, software generation." He emphasizes that 2026 is the year of "agents" rather than chatbots. The value capture in AI is moving up the stack to the application layer that can execute complex tasks. Microsoft (via Copilot Studio/Agents) and ServiceNow (workflow automation) are best positioned to deploy these "digital coworkers" into existing enterprise environments. LONG. Capitalize on the shift from passive chat interfaces to active agentic workflows. High error rates (hallucinations) in agentic actions could stall enterprise adoption.
MSFT NOW
Ravi Mhatre Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Mhatre highlights Anthropic as a portfolio "crown jewel," noting it grew from 0 to billions in revenue rapidly and is the leader in "trust and safety" for enterprise deployments. He mentions "partnerships" are key to their distribution. Anthropic is a private company, but its primary strategic backers and cloud partners are Amazon (AWS) and Google (GCP). As Mhatre predicts 2026 is the year of "big deployments" in the enterprise, the compute and distribution revenue flows directly to these hyperscalers hosting the models. LONG. These are the liquid proxies for the Anthropic/Enterprise AI thesis. Regulatory crackdowns on AI partnerships or Anthropic losing technical ground to OpenAI.
AMZN GOOGL
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This Bloomberg Markets video, published February 25, 2026, features Ravi Mhatre discussing MSFT, NOW, AMZN, GOOGL. 2 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.

Speakers: Ravi Mhatre  · Tickers: MSFT, NOW, AMZN, GOOGL