Every founder and investor in 2026 already has a working hypothesis: AI is concentrating capital, leaning out teams, and reshaping who gets funded.
You've seen the anecdotes. You've felt it firsthand. The directional story isn't a surprise.
But 2026’s Beyond Benchmarks isn’t designed to simply confirm what you already know. The most useful data is the kind that shows you where your intuition was wrong, and what to do next.
For this year’s report, Emergence partnered with Carta, Ashby, Pave, Stackpack, and Standard Metrics to bring together proprietary data from thousands of operating companies. Not survey data. Not sentiment. Actual cap tables, actual software spend, actual comp decisions, actual hiring outcomes. By bringing this data into one view, this report reveals how companies are operating beneath the surface.
Some of the findings confirm the consensus. Others will genuinely surprise you.
One of the biggest takeaways from the report data is that AI isn’t yet delivering the efficiency gains most expected. Across every segment, non-AI companies still generate more revenue per employee. Today, AI remains an investment story more than a productivity one, and it's changing how businesses measure success.
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It’s no longer enough to simply measure the business. Founders need to measure what AI is actually doing inside of it.
This is a moment of transition, and the companies that adapt the fastest will define the next decade. Our goal is to help founders make better decisions about where to build, hire, invest, and compete in an AI-native economy.
For the full data, five concrete actions from the most surprising findings, and our perspective on what the patterns are telling us about what’s next, download the report.
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