Anthropic's Data Reveals the First Wave of AI: The Second Wave is Judgment.
1 big thing: Anthropic’s new report, the Economic Index, proves the first wave of enterprise AI—automation—is cresting. But its data also reveals the next, bigger opportunity: a massive “Judgment Gap” that creates the need for an entirely new layer of the enterprise stack.
Why it matters: As the cost of generating AI answers approaches zero, the value of having a rigorous system to validate them becomes infinite. The next defensible moat for business is not better information, but better judgment.
By the numbers: The Anthropic report provides two critical signals of this shift.
- 77% of enterprise API use is “automation,” proving businesses have successfully deployed AI for efficiency and task completion.
- But sophisticated users are already shifting from automation (delegation) to augmentation (collaboration), signaling they’ve hit the limits of what pure automation can do.
The bottom line: The first wave of AI solved the productivity problem. But it created a dangerous, second-order problem: a crisis of conviction, where companies are drowning in plausible, AI-generated answers without a scalable way to determine if they are correct.
The smoking gun: The single most important insight from Anthropic’s report is their conclusion that “context constrains sophisticated use.”
- Our take: The true bottleneck is not just gathering context, but the rigor to interpret it correctly. This is the Judgment Gap.
What’s next: The Second Wave is the race to build Judgment Infrastructure.
- This new layer of the enterprise stack is not about creating more information. It’s an AI-powered sparring partner designed to stress-test it.
- It codifies the “scar tissue” of seasoned experts to identify hidden risks.
- It makes conviction a defensible, auditable asset for high-stakes decisions.
The final word: Anthropic gave us the map to the first wave. It’s now the job of builders to create the infrastructure for the second. The last mile of AI isn’t information. It’s judgment.
A Dialogue on Institutional Judgment
The Judgment Gap is an existential threat to funds facing the mathematical crisis of scaling capital and deal flow. In the AI era, running on artisanal, unscalable judgment processes is no longer a viable strategy. We are building the infrastructure to solve this.
If you are a partner or principal at a growing venture capital fund and are committed to building a more scalable, defensible, and rigorous investment process, we invite you to a confidential discussion.