The best AI opportunities for investors may not look like AI companies

AI may be the hottest label in tech investing right now, but Stanislav Shabaiev thinks the label is starting to matter less than the workflow underneath it. He runs STNL Media Invest Holding, and his view is blunt: the real opportunity is in businesses that use AI to quietly make old industries faster, cleaner and harder to copy.

His argument starts with a simple shift. AI is no longer a category on its own, he says, but a layer that spreads across the economy. That means the interesting companies are not necessarily the ones shouting the loudest about models and features. They are the ones that use the technology to remove manual work between systems that already exist. A customer sees an order in an app, while someone behind the scenes is still shuffling data and making phone calls. That gap, he thinks, is where the value sits.

Shabaiev has spent more than 15 years moving across software, media and digital innovation, and his own portfolio reflects that mix. It includes online media, advertising technology, SaaS and information systems, plus investments in healthcare, logistics, construction and e-sports. He is drawn less to a sector label than to businesses that become more scalable, efficient and defensible once technology is embedded in them.

Defensibility, in his view, comes from things that are hard to copy: proprietary data, deep integration into a customer’s day-to-day process, and switching costs that actually hurt. If a product can be swapped out over a weekend, he does not see much of a moat there, no matter how impressive the AI under the hood may look.

He is also wary of where some of the money is coming from. A lot of AI spending today, he says, comes from experimental budgets rather than the budget of the team that owns the problem. That matters because experimental money is usually the first thing to disappear. Which is why he pays more attention to renewals than to pilots. A pilot gets a company listened to. A renewal shows someone is willing to own it.

That logic leads him toward companies that combine AI with specific industry knowledge, especially in places like manufacturing, construction and agriculture. He thinks Europe has room for that kind of software. And if the pattern from advertising technology repeats, the noise will fade, the tech will become widely available, and the winners will be the ones who understand customers best.