5 Lessons From an AI Startup That’s Quietly Disrupting a $30 Billion Industry

I’ve spent years writing about how entrepreneurs can leverage AI in their businesses and the non-obvious ways AI is changing the game. But I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last two decades surrounded by entrepreneurs who look at massive industries and ask one simple question: Why does this still work this way? My friend Trevor Sumner is one of those entrepreneurs. Trevor is the CEO of an AI company that’s shaking up the consumer market research industry—a space worth more than $30 billion that, until recently, still relied heavily on the same methods it used before the internet existed. Think focus groups, quarterly surveys, and PowerPoint decks that arrived months after the question was asked. As I’ve written before, your network is often worth more than your startup—and it was through my network that I first connected with Trevor and learned about what he’s building. Trevor’s company uses AI to analyze millions of real consumer signals online—social conversations, reviews, search behavior—and turns them into the kind of insights that used to take months and cost a fortune. And they’re growing fast: revenue up significantly, team quadrupled in a year, working with major global brands across 30-plus countries. But here’s what I find most interesting. The lessons from Trevor’s journey aren’t just about market research. They’re a blueprint for any founder trying to build a company in an industry being disrupted by AI. And let’s be honest—that’s almost every industry right now. Here are the five lessons that stood out to me. 1. Find the industry still running on fax machines Every industry ripe for disruption has a tell: the output is genuinely valuable, but the process is stuck in a different era. In market research, major brands desperately need consumer insights to make billion-dollar decisions. But the way those insights were generated hadn’t fundamentally changed in decades. Surveys designed before TikTok—or even the internet—existed. Reports delivered months after the question was asked. I see this pattern everywhere. When I was building Likeable Media in 2007, the advertising industry was still spending the majority of budgets on TV and print while consumers were spending their time on social media. The gap between how an industry operates and how the world actually works—that’s where the opportunity lives. The lesson: Look for industries where the process is visibly broken but the need is undeniable. That gap is where AI creates the most dramatic ROI. 2. Don’t sell AI—Sell the outcome AI makes possible This one is huge, and I see founders get it wrong all the time. Nobody signs a contract because they’re excited about your algorithm. They sign because you can deliver a result they couldn’t get before—faster, cheaper, or more reliably. Trevor told me that when his team pitches major brands, AI is never the headline. The headline is: What if you could understand what millions of consumers actually think about your brand—in real time, instead of waiting three months for a survey? The moment you make AI the hero of your pitch, you’ve invited a procurement committee to debate whether AI is ready, safe, or overhyped. When the outcome is the hero, the conversation shifts to: Can you deliver this result? That’s a much better meeting. I think about this with my own ventures. When Carrie and I built Likeable Media, we didn’t sell “social media management.” We sold the ability to turn your customers into your marketing department. The technology was the how. The outcome was the why. The lesson: Position the result, not the technology. AI is how you do it. The outcome is why they buy. 3. Your first five clients should scare you a little Trevor’s company didn’t start by landing small, safe clients to cut their teeth. They went straight after some of the biggest consumer brands in the world—and they did it before they’d even raised outside funding or built a formal sales team. That’s not recklessness. That’s strategy. I learned this lesson the hard way. Early in Likeable Media’s life, we spent too long working with small accounts that were easy to manage but didn’t push us to be better. It wasn’t until we landed bigger clients that our product, our team, and our confidence leveled up. Big logos validate your product, compress future sales cycles, and set your pricing floor permanently higher. The lesson: Don’t wait until you feel ready. Punch up. Your first five clients should stretch you and push your vision forward. 4. Context beats capability in a disrupted market Here’s something that keeps coming up in every AI-disrupted industry I watch: incumbents fight back by slapping the word “AI” onto their existing products. Traditional research firms are rebranding legacy tools as “AI-powered,” creating confusion for buyers who can’t tell the difference between a company built on AI and one that just bolted AI onto the side. But here’s what separates the winners from the noise: deep domain expertise. Anyone can access powerful AI models these days. Not everyone understands the problem well enough to apply AI in a way that actually matters. Trevor’s co-founders spent decades inside the world’s biggest consumer brands. They know how brand equity works, how category dynamics shift, what a CMO actually needs on their desk Monday morning. That kind of context can’t be replicated by fine-tuning a model. I see this as the single biggest differentiator for AI startups right now. The founders who win won’t necessarily have the most powerful technology. They’ll be the ones who understand their buyer’s world better than anyone else. The lesson: Anyone can access powerful AI. Not everyone understands the problem well enough to apply it. Domain expertise is your moat. 5. Build for the transition, not just the transformation This is the lesson I think most founders miss entirely. Enterprise clients aren’t going to abandon their existing tools and processes overnight—no matter how much better your solution is. Trevor’s company was designed to complement existing workflows first, and replace them over time. They even provide playbooks for managing the internal transition—helping their clients navigate change management and stakeholder buy-in. That patience, counterintuitively, accelerated their adoption. I think about this with my own ventures too. When you’re building something that asks people to change how they operate, you can’t just show up with a better mousetrap and expect everyone to switch. You have to earn the transition by meeting people where they are. The lesson: The boldest disruption often wins by moving slowly enough for the buyer to say “yes.” The AI gold rush is real, but the founders who win won’t just be the ones with the most powerful models. They’ll be the ones who found the broken process, led with the outcome, punched up early, earned domain trust, and respected the buyer’s journey. That’s the playbook. And from what I’ve seen, it works. EXPERT OPINION BY DAVE KERPEN, CEO, KERPEN VENTURES @DAVEKERPEN