Natasha Malpani: «Why AI’s Real Payoff Starts Now»
After years of outsized promises and escalating compute budgets, artificial intelligence is finally being judged by a harder metric: real-world performance, Natasha Malpani, founder of Boundless Venture, writes in an exclusive opinion piece for finews.asia.
As outlined in a recent media release by Boundless Ventures, 2025 marked the inflection point when AI stopped chasing scale for its own sake and started proving its economic value.
For investors and executives, this shift reframes AI from a speculative technology story into an integration and infrastructure play with tangible returns.
2025 – The End of the Scale Illusion
The past year quietly closed the chapter on the trillion–parameter arms race. Smaller, more efficient, retrieval-grounded systems consistently outperformed monolithic models on practical tasks.
Architecture, not sheer size, emerged as the driver of productivity gains. For capital allocators, this signalled a welcome moderation in cost curves and a clearer path to defensible margins.
Modular Intelligence Takes Hold
AI systems began to resemble engineered products rather than experimental demos. Modular designs – combining perception, reasoning, and action – enabled models to simulate environments, understand causality, and operate with greater reliability. This transition reduced deployment risk and made AI easier to embed into existing enterprise workflows.
The hype around autonomous agents met a reality check. Only systems capable of logging decisions, self-critiquing, and rolling back errors survived early enterprise scrutiny. In regulated industries, auditability evolved from a technical feature into a prerequisite for adoption, directly influencing procurement decisions and risk assessments.
Infrastructure Turns Geopolitical
AI infrastructure emerged as a strategic asset. GPUs and compute capacity became bargaining chips, fragmenting the global technology stack along national and regional lines. For markets, this introduced a new layer of geopolitical risk – and opportunity – as sovereign compute corridors formed and cloud neutrality eroded.
Away from online debate, edge–based AI quietly generated returns. Drones, factory robotics, and inspection systems demonstrated clear cost savings and productivity improvements. Intelligence embedded directly into machines proved more valuable than AI confined to dashboards, reinforcing the business case for capital expenditure on edge inference.
2026 – From Proof to Performance at Scale
If 2025 proved AI could work, 2026 will test whether it can scale reliably across industries. Persistent memory is set to become core infrastructure, allowing systems to retain context across sessions while balancing privacy and data decay. This evolution shifts AI from reactive tools to compounding assets.
Multimodal models are moving beyond description toward prediction, enabling forward-looking applications in logistics, healthcare, and security.
At the same time, accountability is becoming non-negotiable. Autonomous systems that can explain decisions and demonstrate internal controls will earn trust – and budget approvals.
Compute as the New Measure of Power
Sovereign AI stacks are maturing. Data residency rules, export controls, and regional compute alliances are reshaping supply chains. For policymakers and investors alike, compute capacity is increasingly viewed as critical infrastructure, comparable to energy or transport networks.
The takeaway for financially savvy audiences is clear. The next decade of AI value will not be captured by the biggest models, but by the most integrated systems – those embedded in physical operations, capable of explaining themselves, and resilient to geopolitical and regulatory shifts.
Intelligence That Compounds
AI is leaving the cloud and entering factories, cities, and markets. As the Boundless Ventures perspective underscores, 2025 delivered intelligence that worked in theory. 2026 will reward intelligence that works in context – consistently, predictably, and at scale.
For those allocating capital today, the winners will be the builders and backers who treat AI not as a novelty, but as durable infrastructure for the real economy .
Natasha Malpani’s career spans science, venture, and storytelling. She began in cancer research at Oxford, earned an MBA from Stanford, invested in health at a $1billion fund in London, and backed early AI companies at Kae Capital. She also founded Boundless Media, produced the acclaimed film «Uunchai», and scaled Dice Media to reach over 200 million viewers.
