These days, plenty of venture capitalists are trying to spot the next big thing in artificial intelligence. For some, the best way to do that is to use the technology themselves.
For a generation raised on Google Docs and Slack, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s NotebookLM have become a core part of the job. They offer ways to learn new markets faster, spot non-obvious companies, stress-test investment theses, and turn a swamp of meetings into searchable insights.
Business Insider asked its 2026 Rising Stars of Venture Capital honorees how they use AI in their day-to-day work — and which tools they rely on most.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Finding new investments
Miloni Madan Presler, partner at IVP:
“In sourcing and thesis work, AI helps me map emerging categories. For example, if I’m exploring vertical AI in legal or healthcare, I can synthesize thousands of company descriptions, research reports, and job posts, then cluster them by workflow, buyer, and data advantage. That surfaces non-obvious adjacencies and edge cases where new category leaders might emerge. Our investment in Laurel came out of that kind of bottom-up work in legal.”
Shruti Kumar, vice president at Tusk Ventures:
“In addition to organic sourcing, we use AI tools to surface companies and isolate specific quality signals we care about. This has significantly expanded our outbound sourcing capacity, allowing us to refresh our top-of-funnel each week without adding investment team head count. We then layer in CRM AI features to identify warm introduction paths, prioritize outreach, and automate pipeline management to improve follow-through.”
Getting up to speed before a pitch
Sophie Beshar, vice president at Insight Partners:
“When I prep for first-time meetings with founders — particularly in categories where I have less exposure — AI allows me to quickly get up to speed on a new space. Understanding the landscape, key terminology, and relevant trends helps me identify where to dig deeper ahead of the conversation.”
Meera Oak, partner at Alumni Ventures:
“One area where I get the most leverage is information consumption. I genuinely love the audio medium, and podcasts have become my dominant source of news and media. As such, I’ve really enjoyed using NotebookLM’s Audio feature to turn often dense material into podcast-style briefings ahead of meetings with prospective founders. It helps me quickly come up to speed on core ideas and questions while commuting or running errands.”
Turning a conversation and materials into a second brain
Angèle Sahraoui, investor at Slow Ventures:
“Call transcripts have been a total game-changer. Days are filled with conversations where the information density is extremely high, and there’s only so much a human can retain in real time. My favorite workflow is creating a ChatGPT channel per deal where I drop all related materials and call transcripts from Granola. AI helps synthesize that information so I can reduce time-to-decision while actually increasing decision quality.”
Manmeet Gujral, vice president at CapitalG:
“I always use AI to transcribe my meetings and save documents and blog posts I’ve read for my AI to reason about in my daily work. Outside of my day-to-day, I love tapping into my long-lost programming skills and ‘vibe coding’ with Lovable, which I used recently to build a mini app to help my wife and me decide on the perfect movie for a date night.”
Stress-testing a deal before a check gets written
Lexi Henkel, managing director at Maverick Ventures
“I use ChatGPT and other tools to challenge my own thinking. I’ll share my logic and supporting data and ask it to take the opposing view. ‘What would someone who disagreed with this poke holes in?’ ‘How could someone react poorly to this news if I shared it in this way?’ I’ll go back and forth from there. I find this especially useful because it forces me out of confirmation mode and helps me see where my arguments are weakest. One day it might even change my mind!”
James Flynn, partner at Sequoia Capital:
“For market diligence, I am easily 10x faster from using Rogo to quickly go deep on public companies and markets. The ability to ask questions using natural language and get back hard data, along with an understanding of what public market investors and investment research firms are saying about markets, is incredibly helpful.”
Mapping an industry
Adil Bhatia, vice president at Redpoint Ventures:
“One of the first ways I started using Deep Research and ChatGPT‘s thinking modes was market deep-dives. It’s a helpful starting point when diving into a new market and understanding some of the constraints that may have historically hindered startups and how they are changing. Where I’ve found it most useful is brainstorming how a given company could become really big. Maybe it’s ChatGPT’s inherent optimism, but I’ve found it interesting to debate with the AI about how things go right and ultimately result in a company becoming bigger than we originally imagined.”
Max Abram, partner at Scale Venture Partners:
“AI has dramatically changed how I learn new markets. When I started in venture, getting up to speed meant hours of searching for good literature and then many more hours consuming repetitive content across articles, papers, and videos. Today, much of that work has collapsed into iterative engagement with ChatGPT. I typically spin up a dedicated ‘Project’ for a market, upload any relevant materials I’ve found, and then use the model to quickly get myself conversant on the existing state of play in the market, and begin playing around with different hypotheses for how a startup could successfully enter and scale within that market.”
Buying back time and mental bandwidth
Sudhee Chilappagari, principal at Battery Ventures:
“One tool I use heavily is Wispr Flow, which lets me dictate emails, documents, and even ChatGPT prompts. It allows me to free-flow complex thoughts quickly, then use AI to refine them while preserving my original voice and intent.”
Gloria Zhang, vice president at DCM Ventures:
“I love using Grok while commuting, as my Tesla’s full self-driving software drives me to a meeting. I use Grok to prepare for founder meetings, interviews, or panel discussions.”
Christine Esserman, partner at Accel:
“For me, the most useful role AI plays isn’t in replacing judgment or decision-making — it’s in handling everything around the job. I use AI to take care of life admin that would otherwise eat up time and mental energy: planning meals, organizing schedules, and streamlining logistics outside of work. Reducing that friction makes it easier to stay focused and present when it matters.”
Julia Hornstein contributed to this report.
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