Where do investors place their bets next year? Amnesty International, Amnesty International, Amnesty International.

Investors at TechCrunch Disrupt haven’t been shy about admitting that they’re primarily interested in one thing: artificial intelligence.

Nina Akajian of Index, Jerry Chen of Greylock, and Peter Ding of Physys talk about the latest craze in venture capital and how startups can stand out in a quickly crowded market. The environment is moving quickly, and companies are experiencing unprecedented growth, Ashajian told the crowd.

“We spend a tremendous amount of time evaluating entrepreneurs and their resilience in a moment when things are changing rapidly,” Ashadjian said. Now more than ever, she said, founders must lean into their passion and expertise in the field, and remain honest about their product-market fit.

“There is a huge demand from enterprise companies to try out the latest and greatest AI technologies, and sometimes there are false positives for product-market fit, and you can get a lot of revenue without getting a real ROI,” she explained, meaning customers getting a return on their investment.

This leads to another consideration that venture capital firms look for: the ability to pivot with market fluctuations. “There’s a joke that 1,000 startups die, so that’s why resilience is really important,” Ashadjian continued.

Ding, who used to work at OpenAI, added to Ashadjian’s statements. He said founders need to find their own unique flywheel that will separate them from the hordes of everyone pitching the exact same idea, especially since enterprise companies that are likely testing their products are also testing a few other competitors at the same time.

“If you’re able to dig deep into solving a real need for them” in a way they can’t do themselves, data management “is the important part,” he said.

Founders must also have an answer for why their product isn’t just a feature added to the founding models, Achadjian said. It may be acceptable for a founder not to know whether model makers are working on a competitor, but they should have a hypothesis about how to defend the company when pitching to investors.

Right now, what works in AI seems to be three things, Chen noted: chat apps, programming apps, and AI in customer service. But there is still a lot of change that needs to happen in every sector and industry.

Ding is passionate about AI-enabled markets. Meanwhile, Ashajian believes this may be the right time for robotics, while Chen is curious to see how AI impacts SaaS and other markets not yet directly impacted.

As for what is not artificial intelligence and exciting? “Pen and paper processes it and converts it into digital form,” Ashadjian said. “There are a lot of blue-collar industries that, incredibly, still do many processes manually,” she continued. But they acknowledge that the time has come for automation with AI to play out.