Open Future Forum released the first edition of the VC & CVC AI Investment Report this week. It is a companion to the CFO, CMO, CISO, and CEO AI Leverage Reports, the Executive AI Leverage Report, the AI Transformation Report, and the YC Founder AI Report. Edition 1 is now live. It is independent research from our investor rooms, with the response base printed on every first-party figure.
I built this report because the funding datasets can tell you how many dollars went to AI, but not what the people writing the checks actually believe. In 2025, by the OECD's count, AI firms took 61 percent of all global venture capital, $258.7 billion of $427.1 billion, a share that has more than doubled since 2022. The number is staggering, and it is also silent on the question that decides returns: can the investors see AI working inside the companies they back, and do they know who is accountable for making it work? Open Future Forum convened an investor room in Silicon Valley in July 2026 with more than 290 distinct applicants and asked exactly that.
What the Report Covers
The VC & CVC AI Investment Report reads the investor, not the vendor, and it does two things.
One. It reads conviction. The flagship AI Investor Conviction Index is the share of investors who, looking across their portfolio, see AI already producing a measurable difference somewhere rather than nothing measurable yet. Edition 1 reads 86 percent (base 237). Better products leads the way investors describe that value at 51 percent, ahead of cutting costs at 35 percent and helping customers at 34 percent. An investor-only cut of the same question reads 83 percent (base 126), so the headline is not carried by the operators in the room.
Two. It reads control. Asked who increasingly owns the AI buying decision across their portfolio, the room names the CEO most often at 51 percent, roughly double the CIO or CTO at 24 percent, with individual teams at 18 percent and finance last at 12 percent (base 245, any-mention). AI is being bought high, as a bet on the whole company rather than a tool for one function. Yet 22 percent still say it is too early to say who owns the decision at all. Conviction that AI matters has arrived before conviction about who runs it.
Why This Report, Now
The money is concentrating faster than the answer is arriving. The six largest venture rounds of 2025 all went to AI companies and together took $111 billion, roughly half of all AI funding, led by OpenAI at $41 billion and Anthropic at $32.5 billion (CB Insights). Set that against the sharpest counter-evidence in the market — roughly 95 percent of enterprise AI pilots still show no measurable profit impact (MIT) — and the tension of 2026 is plain. Capital has decided AI matters. The operating record has not yet decided whether the money was right.
That gap between 86 percent conviction and a thin record of measured returns is exactly where an early investor either finds an edge or takes a loss. Reading it directly, in the investors' own words, in the same community over time, is the reason to build this report rather than wait for the answer to show up in aggregate returns several years too late.
How the Data Was Built
The first-party figures come from the application instrument embedded in Open Future Forum event registration, read for the investor lane and supported by adjacent finance and founder rooms. Applicant counts are distinct emails reported as rounded floors, with invitation outreach excluded from every count. Opinion figures are application-stage answers, role-tagged, with the base on the face of every figure; multi-select questions are reported any-mention and can sum past 100. The sample is a selective community of senior investors and operators convened in Silicon Valley, not a nationally representative panel, and the report says so on every figure. Findings are the community aggregate; no participant, firm, or sponsor is named.
Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley in 2019, whose network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. External benchmarks in the report are attributed to their sources — OECD, CB Insights, Silicon Valley Bank, Menlo Ventures, and MIT — and used for context only.
A Few Numbers from Edition 1
The portfolio is deployed, and investors can see it. Only 16 percent say nothing is measurable yet across most of their portfolio (base 237). In the adjacent finance rooms, 71 percent of teams say they are already running an AI tool, against 22 percent still evaluating (base 185). When investors say AI already makes a measurable difference, this is the ground truth underneath it.
The value lands on the product line, not the cost line. Better products at 51 percent outpaces cutting costs at 35 percent. That ordering matters for how investors underwrite AI: a cost-cutting story is a margin story with a ceiling, while a better-product story is a growth story with a market. The room is telling us AI is being valued, so far, more as a top-line lever than as a headcount substitute.
And the supply side agrees on the direction. Founders in our rooms, asked who owns the buying decision inside the companies they sell to, name the business-unit leader and the CIO or CTO first, and not one of 148 named security (base 148). Set against the investor read that the CEO increasingly owns the decision, both ends of the market point the same way: AI buying is drifting up and toward the business, away from the traditional technology gatekeeper.
Read the full VC & CVC AI Investment Report →
What Comes Next
This is Edition 1, and it is candid about what it is: an early, directional read on a selective community, with the portfolio-impact question standing as the labeled seed for the AI Investor Conviction Index while the sharpest form of the question — how far AI has changed your investment pace, diligence, and conviction — enters the field at upcoming investor events. The Index and the buyer-ownership read are the lines we will track edition over edition, against the external market record. A conviction reading that keeps rising while measured returns stay flat is the signal of a concentrating market; a conviction reading that falls is the first sign of repricing. If you invest in AI, in venture or from a corporate balance sheet, and want a seat at the next investor gathering, reach out through Open Future Forum.
Read the full VC & CVC AI Investment Report →