The AI Illusion - Building Products Investors Fund
About This Event
Right now, almost every startup pitch deck claims to be an "AI company." The market is flooded with apps that are really just cheap interfaces hooked up to someone else's model.
But investors have wised up. They are moving past the initial hype and starting to look under the hood for real software value, ironclad data pipelines, and true business logic. If a founder can't prove their system is robust and secure, they fail technical due diligence and the deal collapses.
In this episode of Capital & Craft, John Radford (Client Partner at Tappable) sits down with Kevin Jackson, Chairman of AI Forge.
Kevin evaluates thousands of AI applications a year for AI Forge’s incubator cohorts. He knows exactly why most AI products are an illusion, where early-stage founders waste their development budgets, and what VCs actually want to see before they write a check.
We are skipping the fluffy marketing talk and getting straight into the commercial reality of building an investment-ready product.
What We Will Discuss:
Real Software vs. Cheap Wrappers: How to tell if your product has proprietary value or if it’s just a fragile layer on top of an OpenAI API.
Fixing Your Data First: Why putting AI on top of a messy, broken process just automates mistakes faster.
The Development Budget Trap: The exact features founders waste their cash building too early, and how to focus your runway on what drives ROI.
What investors actually fund: What makes them say 'yes'!
Who This Is For:
Founders & Product Owners looking to raise capital or scale an AI-driven product in the next 6–12 months.
Established SME Operators who want to use automation to protect their margins without breaking their current systems.
Angels & Investors who want a sharper framework for evaluating technical risk during due diligence.