Microsoft Just Proved Our Thesis: The Future of VC is an AI Judgment Partner.

A new research paper from Microsoft, “Working with AI,” is a critical read for any leader in the investment space. It is not an academic curiosity; it is a strategic brief on the future of high-stakes knowledge work, and its findings have profound implications for the venture capital industry.

The paper’s data, drawn from over 200,000 real-world interactions, reveals three critical implications that every VC, from solo GPs to established funds, must now confront.

1. The Automation of Analysis is Accelerating
   The core tasks of a “Market Research Analyst”—the O*NET proxy for a VC analyst—are now proven to have one of the highest “AI applicability scores” of any profession. This signals the rapid and irreversible commoditization of information retrieval, data summary, and surface-level analysis. The historical competitive edge of having a larger junior team to “crank through the numbers” is evaporating. The “what” is becoming a commodity. The entire calculus of value in the diligence process is shifting.

2. The “Judgment Gap” is Now the Central Bottleneck
   As AI automates information, the value shifts entirely to the “so what.” The Microsoft paper proves that users are already pulling AI beyond simple queries and into a role of “advising.” This creates a critical strategic challenge we call The Judgment Gap: firms are flooded with more data than ever, but they struggle to scale the seasoned, senior-level judgment required to interpret it. A generalist AI can summarize a deck; it cannot determine if the core thesis is coherent. It cannot spot the hidden, unstated assumption that will kill the company. This gap is where multi-million dollar mistakes are made and where winning deals are missed.

3. The New Strategic Imperative: Build Judgment Infrastructure
   If judgment is the new bottleneck, the old model of scaling a firm by adding junior analysts to a human-led apprenticeship model is now fundamentally broken. It is too slow, too subjective, and unscalable for the speed of the modern market. The future competitive advantage will not be in having better data, but in having a more reliable, scalable, and defensible process for exercising judgment. The strategic imperative for forward-thinking investment firms is to build Judgment Infrastructure.

Our Response: Building the Solution

This is the precise thesis we are building at askOdin. We are not creating a better analytics tool; we are building the judgment layer for the new era of investment. Our approach is a deliberate, three-phase journey from insight to infrastructure:

1. Prove the Insight: We begin with a high-touch, “Judgment-as-a-Service” offering, applying our proprietary Clarity Framework™ in strategic partnerships with a select cohort of foundational partners.

2. Codify the Engine: Every engagement systematically builds our core asset: a proprietary dataset on decision-making. We are codifying the “scar tissue” and pattern recognition of a seasoned partner into a scalable AI engine.

3. Scale the Platform: This foundational dataset will fuel our V1 SaaS platform, the world’s first true AI Judgment Infrastructure.

The Microsoft research is a clear signal of a market pull that is already happening. The demand for scalable, defensible judgment is no longer a future prediction; it is a present-day reality.