Consumer tech has been out of favor with venture capital since 2022. Enterprise AI has soaked up most of the money and attention. But Vanessa Larco thinks the pendulum is about to swing back — hard.
“This is gonna be the year of the consumer,” said Larco, partner at venture firm Premise and former NEA investor, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She’s betting that 2026 is when consumer and prosumer AI finally break out again.
Why consumer AI is back on the menu
For the past few years, AI startups have chased big enterprise contracts: large budgets, multi‑year deals, predictable growth. The problem, Larco argues, is that adoption often stalls.
Enterprises “don’t know where to start,” she said. Internal politics, integration risk and change management slow everything down.
Consumers and prosumers are the opposite. “The fun thing about consumer and prosumer…is that people already have in mind what they want to use it for,” she said. They buy, they try, and if the product works, they stick with it.
That makes product‑market fit brutally clear:
- If you’re selling to consumers, “you’ll know very quickly if it’s fitting a need or not.”
- You’ll also know just as fast if you need to “pivot or make some changes…or totally scrap it and start something totally different.”
In a fragile, inflation‑hit economy, any consumer product that still manages to scale is sending a strong signal: the value prop is real.
OpenAI, concierge AI and who survives
Larco points to early signs that consumer AI is already shifting behavior. Late last year, OpenAI rolled out apps inside ChatGPT, letting people:
- Shop via Target
- Hunt for homes with Zillow
- Book trips with Expedia
- Build playlists with Spotify
All from a single chatbot interface.
“AI is gonna feel like concierge‑like services, which will do everything for you that you have in mind,” Larco said. The strategic question: what should stay general‑purpose inside something like ChatGPT, and what should be specialized products that live on their own?
As OpenAI pushes to become the de facto operating system of the consumer internet, legacy players face a blunt reality check. Which companies — think Tripadvisor or WebMD — still have a reason to exist as standalone destinations, and which just become pipes feeding an AI layer on top?
Larco expects 2026 to be a “gangbuster” year for M&A. Her investment focus: startups that “OpenAI isn’t going to want to kill.”
Her read is that OpenAI “doesn’t manage real‑world assets.” She doesn’t see the company building an Airbnb rival, or any marketplace “that require real humans because they don’t want to manage the humans.” That leaves room for founders who own offline logistics, inventory or services with heavy human involvement.
She’s also watching what happens if OpenAI “decides to pull an Apple or Android where they take a 30% cut of all the traffic they send you.” If that happens, platforms like Airbnb will have to decide whether they “want to play ball.”
One way or another, she expects new monetization strategies and business models to emerge from this remixed consumer experience.
Social media’s AI slop problem
Larco is equally convinced that consumer internet habits are about to change — because trust in what we see online is collapsing.
She described doomscrolling Instagram coverage of Donald Trump’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and realizing her feed was “overwhelmingly flooded with AI‑generated Maduro slop.” Deepfakes and synthetic content have been edging into the mainstream for years. This was one of the first big, fast‑moving news cycles where AI‑made junk really blurred what was real.
“At that point, I was like, if I’m just gonna be watching AI‑generated videos and photos, I want it to be funny,” she said.
Larco says she now basically assumes everything on major social platforms is AI. She’s not alone. If users collectively stop believing that anything on Meta’s apps or TikTok is real, the next question is obvious: where do you go for the “real stuff”?
She thinks other players may fill that gap as platforms like Reddit — and even older names like Digg — experiment with verifying human users. Meta, meanwhile, may lean into what it already is for many people: a place for entertainment, not information.
“I think we should move on from getting your news from [Meta],” Larco said. “You are just getting funny videos from there. It’s not social media. It’s just gaming and entertainment media.”
When voice beats screens
One more consumer shift Larco is betting on: voice‑first interfaces that finally don’t suck.
When Meta acquired AI agent startup Manus last week, many read it as a pure enterprise move. Larco sees another angle: using agent tech to make Meta’s Ray‑Ban smart glasses genuinely useful.
She’s already a power user. With the glasses, she can answer calls, reply to messages, shoot photos and videos, and query Meta AI without reaching for her phone.
“Some things are better with voice than a screen,” she said. For years, voice assistants weren’t good enough, so “we needed the screen as a crutch.” With better models and more compute, she thinks truly helpful assistants are “on the cusp of happening.”
Everyday questions from her kids — like asking about the tallest building in the world — now feel like a pure voice use case. Taking out a phone to type the query already feels “archaic,” she said.
For designers and product teams, that opens up a new frontier. “They finally get to pick and choose what form factor is better for what use cases,” Larco said. Some flows stay on glass. Others move to audio, wearables and ambient agents that live around you.
If Larco is right, 2026 won’t just be the “year of the consumer” for VCs. It will be the year consumers quietly change how they search, shop, watch and talk to software — and force the rest of the stack to catch up.
