Enterprise companies and generative AI: Just looking?

W
elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

This week, I am diving deeper into what generative AI means, or doesn’t mean, for enterprise buyers. I also have some notes on why your company may want to be like Figma, and how the investing side of the market is adjusting to down rounds being the new normal. — Anna

Not-yet-unlocked potential

When The Exchange looked into Battery Ventures’ state of cloud software spending report, we started by focusing on what the title promised: fresh data on cloud software spend. And it turned out to be more encouraging than we expected.

We then looked into another piece of good news for founders: that startups building tech to automate tasks and drive quick productivity gains might be able to duck the downturn. It was based on a report data point showing that automation had risen among enterprise budget priorities.

But in the back of my mind, I also kept thinking about some of the report’s comments about generative AI — and not just because superlative takes on the topic have been ubiquitous ever since.

If anything, you could call Battery’s view on generative AI conservative, but that would be unfair. After all, the VC firm was just relaying findings from its Q1 survey, which gathered responses from 100 C-suite execs (CXOs) managing around $30 billion in spend.