Microsoft’s launch of Teams is a classic example of how a tech giant can leverage its core capabilities to build a new, high-growth venture in an adjacent market. It’s a growth strategy that half of CEOs view as one of their top three strategic priorities. And, when done right, it pays off. The largest new ventures built by established companies in the past decade have averaged 1.5 times more revenue than that of the largest start-ups launched in the same period.
CEOs can overlook investing in new ventures when faced with capital constraints. Cutting costs, not increasing them, is a quick way to balance the books. However, investing in new ventures can fuel long-term business health. In fact, companies that invest 20 per cent or more of their growth capital into building wholly new ventures achieve revenue growth that’s two percentage points higher than that of companies that don’t invest anything.
For businesses still hesitant, there has never been a better time than the present to explore new ventures. Gen-AI is enabling a wave of entrepreneurship across all industries. 60 per cent of companies are eager to explore Gen-AI enabled new ventures over the next five years, thanks to the technology’s ability to rapidly move concepts into products and services, at a low cost.
In a market where capital is tight and organisations’ core businesses feel under pressure, venture building is no longer optional. It’s a strategic imperative that will position those that do it well to outgrow their industry peers.
But how can businesses get started? Here are five ways AI is helping to turn new venture ideas into billion-dollar success.
1) Sparking new ideas and direction
AI is jumpstarting the brainstorm process around new business building, helping to define direction. It can rapidly analyse information about the current state of a sector under consideration, identify possible opportunities for a new offering and then pressure-test ideas among digitally generated target segments.
A critical part of the new venture process is identifying a genuine opportunity to move into a new market area or gap. With its ability to process and synthesise vast quantities of information, AI gives leaders a more accurate picture than ever before, of where opportunities are emerging and how best to approach them.
Increasingly, companies are combining their own proprietary data and insights with information from large AI models to uncover opportunities that build on their ‘unfair advantages’, such as customer trust, domain expertise, or data depth. By uniting internal and external intelligence, AI enables organisations to pinpoint where they are best positioned to win, and how to create ventures that amplify their existing strengths.
2) Unblocking barriers to move ideas into development
Of those building businesses around gen AI capabilities, 73 percent say their organisations are still in the ideation and early-development stages. Yet 13 percent of respondents say their companies are already in the value-realisation stage of their Gen-AI-related venture, and the number is as high as 22 percent within pharmaceuticals and medical products.
As ventures progress from ideation to execution, AI’s rapid model improvements significantly accelerate innovation. This enables faster deployment of new products and services, and ultimately, quicker value realisation. But it’s not only about the technology. To move beyond early-stage experimentation, companies must also address organisational bottlenecks, from capital allocation to decision-making speed, and ensure new ventures have the autonomy and space to grow apart from the core business. This is especially critical for AI-focused ventures, which require AI-native teams that work differently, experiment faster, and integrate new tools as part of their everyday operating model. Over time, this way of working will become table stakes. Every successful new venture will be AI-native by design, not by exception.
3) Spotting the hidden traps of business building
AI can also help spot any traps and subsequently refine ideas all the way through the new venture process, from execution to scaling.
‘Fail fast’ has long been a core principle of successful start-up building and Gen-AI takes that to a new level by enabling exponential testing and iteration. Beyond speed, Gen-AI transforms how innovation happens, allowing leaders to run far more experiments, learn faster, and refine ideas continuously. Teams can now generate and test 10× more product concepts, marketing messages, or landing-page variations with customers, dramatically increasing the chances of achieving product–market fit. At the same time, AI gives leaders predictive foresight – the ability to game out possible scenarios, model market reactions, and identify likely outcomes, before committing significant resource. While not foolproof, this kind of AI ‘early warning system’ can significantly accelerate the innovation stage, before a business is established or project cost is committed.
4) Accelerating innovation
With major IT players making more advanced AI technology available on the open market, the pace of AI innovation is moving fast, meaning organisations can move quickly to capitalise on the opportunities in their market. AI-focused ventures don’t have to be based on purely proprietary technology. They may also use publicly available or open-source tools to build and launch new products and services at speed, adapting existing technologies to new use cases, and serving new market segments. The most successful ventures combine this agility with the right governance model, empowering small, cross-functional teams to make rapid decisions, iterate quickly, and scale faster.
5) Reinventing existing assets
A critical first step in venture building is to evaluate existing assets and use Gen-AI to transform proven capabilities into new products, services, and revenue streams. By doing so, organisations can apply their ‘unfair advantage’, in new ways. Existing assets are often easier to scale, as their value is already proven and easier to demonstrate to potential customers. For example, a cloud-hosting provider could create a new application that uses Gen-AI to help insurance companies to identify suspicious claims. Similarly, professional-services firms can use Gen-AI to deliver traditionally people-heavy offerings to smaller businesses, extending high-value expertise to new markets.
Leaders also should treat venture building as a muscle to be built and strengthened over time, not a one-off project. Developing a portfolio of AI-powered ventures helps organisations flex that muscle repeatedly, increasing the odds of outsized success, accelerating learning, and spreading risk across multiple growth bets. As we enter a period of rapid innovation, the most resilient organisations are those building a broad portfolio of ventures that span their core business, adjacent opportunities, and disruptive plays.
The vital first step
Getting off the starting line is the key to success for the 13% that are already in the value-realisation stage of their Gen-AI-related venture. Businesses that move from imagination to execution have decisive leadership, a willingness to reallocate resources, and a commitment to building repeatedly. Those that start now, using AI as their co-pilot, will unlock new revenue streams and power long-term growth.
