Tan: The best AI startup opportunities target functions with clear ROI
Kimberly Tan · Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work · Apr 3, 2025 · at 9:32
Kimberly Tan, a partner at a16z, outlines advice for founders looking to replace traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) with AI automation.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So we think that the best types of opportunities for people in that domain is Just really thinking about situations in which the ROI is so incredibly clear, which often means in types of work or types of functions where they have clear KPIs that you can assess them against.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Kimberly Tan
Tan: Emerging browser-use AI agents will soon automate complex back-office workflows
“One thing that we're quite excited about on the horizon is this emerging browser use technology, whether it's, you know, some people call it computer use, some people call it operator, where AI agents will soon actually be able to work across a heterogeneous s…”
Tan: AI agents target labor budgets, making legacy software comparisons false
“So I think it's actually like a false comparison to look at the historical software incumbents and say, oh, this is The cap on what a company could become. I think there's just so much untapped opportunity that technology just wasn't able to penetrate before.”
Tan: AI excels at synthesizing unstructured data across disparate enterprise systems
“This is actually the type of work that AI is really good at handling. It is really good at taking very disparate amounts of information that is often unstructured in different formats across different systems. Synthesizing and structuring it, making sense of a…”
Tan: Voice AI agents are now nearly indistinguishable from human operators
“Voice AI has been an incredible, I think, enabling innovation in the last few years where you can now actually talk to an AI agent on the other line. You may not even know that it's not a human because their conversational abilities and their intonation sounds…”
Tan: High call-volume industries like logistics face the most AI disruption today
“I think where we're seeing the most disruption today Is industries that have very high call volume. We're seeing it a lot in logistics in particular, because if you think about how many different nodes are in a supply chain, there's so many people who have to …”