Anthropic just raised $65 billion.
Good for them. Doesn't fix your D30 retention.
The AI funding wave is a bet on infrastructure. Whoever wins the model layer wins enterprise budgets. That may be true. It's also largely irrelevant to the problem a growth operator faces on Monday morning: why is CAC climbing while conversion stays flat, and is the retention problem a product problem dressed up as a CRM problem.
I've been running AI tools inside my growth stack for about 18 months now. Here's what actually changed — and what didn't.
Changed: SQL query drafting in BigQuery went from 20 minutes to 3. Briefing synthesis — turning a raw data export into a leadership narrative — dropped from two hours to twenty minutes. Designing MoEngage lifecycle journeys is faster when I can talk through trigger logic instead of clicking through a builder.
Didn't change: Whether the journey was worth building in the first place. Whether our attribution model is lying to us (it is — it always is). Whether we're measuring the right north star metric. Whether what looks like a retention problem is actually a pricing problem or an onboarding problem.
AI makes the right motion faster. It also makes the wrong motion faster.
The $65B is a bet on the shovel. Most growth teams still haven't figured out where to dig.