It’s no surprise that if you bring hundreds of venture capitalists and limited partners together in 2026, most will have bought into AI—literally. So it was interesting to hear what investors gathered in Santa Monica, Calif., last week for March Capital’s annual The Montgomery Summit thought were the AI boom’s weak links. Take Matt McIlwain, a managing director at Madrona. On a panel, he said that the Seattle-based venture capital firm has seen AI-driven application businesses grow at a faster clip than other kinds of companies in the past two decades. He’s bullish on AI apps, especially ones that use many different models and fine-tune them to create a unique product—but still he asked, “Can they remain durable?”