AI Transforms Startup Economics, Says Microsoft VP

Amanda Silver explains how AI agents can dramatically reduce costs and boost startup valuations.

Published on Feb. 11, 2026

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According to Amanda Silver, a corporate vice president at Microsoft's CoreAI division, the rise of AI agents is having a profound impact on startups, similar to the shift to the public cloud. Silver believes AI can automate many tasks like code maintenance, live-site operations, and legal investigations, dramatically reducing costs and allowing startups to launch with fewer people while achieving higher valuations. While some uncertainty remains around fully autonomous AI deployments, Silver sees a future with more human-in-the-loop scenarios where AI handles the bulk of tasks with occasional human oversight.

Why it matters

The growing capabilities of AI agents have the potential to reshape the economics of startups, making it cheaper and faster to launch new ventures. This could lead to a wave of new startups, higher-valuation companies, and more efficient software operations across industries.

The details

Silver points to several examples of how AI agents can streamline startup operations. For code maintenance, AI can reason over a codebase and automatically update dependencies, reducing the time by 70-80%. For live-site operations, AI can diagnose and mitigate many issues without human intervention, dramatically reducing the need for 24/7 on-call staff. Silver also sees AI handling more tasks in areas like legal investigations and contract obligations, with human oversight only needed for the most critical decisions.

  • Microsoft's Amanda Silver has been working on developer tools and AI for 24 years.
  • Silver recently became a corporate vice president at Microsoft's CoreAI division.

The players

Amanda Silver

A corporate vice president at Microsoft's CoreAI division, where she works on tools for deploying apps and agentic systems within enterprises.

Microsoft

A multinational technology company that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.

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What they’re saying

“If you think about it, the cloud had a huge impact for startups because it meant that they no longer needed to have the real estate space to host their racks, and they didn't need to spend as much money on the capital infusion of getting the hardware to be hosted in their labs and things like that. Everything became cheaper. Now agentic AI is going to kind of continue to reduce the overall cost of software operations again, because many of the jobs involved in standing up a new venture — whether it's support people, legal investigations — a lot of it can be done faster and cheaper with AI agents.”

— Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft CoreAI (TechCrunch)

What’s next

Microsoft plans to continue investing in and expanding its AI agent capabilities within the Azure Foundry system to help enterprises and startups deploy more intelligent automation.

The takeaway

The rise of powerful AI agents has the potential to dramatically reshape the startup landscape, making it cheaper and faster to launch new ventures while allowing for higher-valuation companies with fewer employees. This could lead to a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurship, with AI handling more of the operational heavy lifting.