AI does not replace the entrepreneur. It compresses the time between an idea and the first version a customer can hold. The four ventures below — drawn from the 2025 Summer Venture Program1 — show four different kinds of work, and the three providers students reach for to do them.
Each team below was a member of the 2025 SVP cohort1. The vignettes pair the venture's category with the AI capability — and the specific provider — that maps most naturally to that kind of work. The capability mapping is illustrative; SVP itself does not prescribe a tool stack.
An explicitly AI-native venture, where the three providers are the infrastructure. For founders building on top of these models, the question is not which provider to use but which fits which task — and how the choice shifts as capabilities advance quarter to quarter. Anthropic's Opus 4.7 (released April 20262), OpenAI's GPT-5.5 (April 20263), and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro4 are the three options in 2026.
Software-for-business ventures benefit most from agentic execution. OpenAI's Workspace Agents, launched in April 20265, run multi-step workflows directly inside enterprise tools (Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot). For a small team, this is the difference between needing a sales-ops engineer and not.
Data-intensive ventures lean on long-context synthesis. Both Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.72 and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro4 ship one-million-token context windows in 2026, which makes it tractable for a small team to integrate regulatory, scientific, and customer data in a single pass.
Visual and multimodal ventures benefit most from Google's Gemini, currently the only AI model that handles video alongside text, image, and audio in a single pass4. Workspace Intelligence integrates that capability directly into the productivity tools students already use6.
Four kinds of work. Three providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — that students reach for to do them.