72% of VCs Now Use AI to Review Pitch Decks, Survey Finds

Seventy-two percent of venture capitalists use AI to review pitch decks, according to a LinkedIn poll run a couple of weeks ago by a VC and Fast Company contributor. That's a dramatic flip from just two years ago, when the contributor estimates 99% of VCs used no AI at all. The trend, they write, is "definitely moving toward more AI, not less."

The poll broke down the workflow: 39% of VCs run decks through AI review before a human reads them, and 29% do human review first, then AI. Twenty-eight percent use no AI for this at all. Only a tiny number rely on AI alone, with no human review.

The contributor's August plea for founders to stop sending "AI slop decks" went viral. The trigger was personal: Monday-morning deck review had gone from exciting to "downright soul-sucking" in a year. Decks, they wrote, used to be like Bertie Botts Every-Flavored Beans — "some blah, some gross, some absolutely delightful. Today, it's all vanilla and completely indistinguishable."

Are investors even reading decks anymore?

Fellow investors agreed with the plea, the contributor reports. Most VCs can spot an AI-generated deck, and the deeper problem is when "AI didn't just design it — it did the thinking, too." Journalists and editors report an even worse flood of PR pitch slop, at exponentially higher volume than VCs see.

One founder pushed back directly: "What's the point? If VCs are using AI to review them, why shouldn't I use AI to write them?"

VCs gave two reasons for turning to AI. The first is volume. Rebecca Mitchell, GP at Scrub Capital, said: "We get over 50 deals a week, sometimes two dozen a day. I couldn't possibly look at it all properly." B. Pagels-Minor, founder of DVRGNT Ventures, framed it as scale: "I do want to use technology to help us see how much of the world we could potentially diligence without major human interaction."

The second is full automation. Ben Orthlieb, GP of Blue Moon VC, a fully AI-operated firm, has AI running "everything, including LP comms, accounting, company analysis, meeting prep, founder screening." He reviews no decks at all. "My AI associate gives me an in-depth review of the company, its market, and its competition. . . . I don't need a deck." His model is still unusual in venture capital. The open question is whether it stays an outlier.

What's driving the rush?

The contributor points to industry-wide shifts. In Q1 this year, 75% of all LP dollars went to just five funds. USV, historically disciplined, announced its latest fund at close to a billion dollars — more than three times its previous one.

Winners also move faster. Stripe acquired OpenRouter for $7.5 billion just three years after its founding. Anthropic, five years old, is widely expected to IPO this year, with some analysts predicting a trillion-dollar valuation. A trillion dollars in enterprise value in five years, the contributor notes.

There are more founders, too. Twenty years ago, an estimated 3% to 5% of Harvard Business School graduates started a company around graduation; last year it was 17%. Jeff Bussgang, a VC at Flybridge and senior lecturer at HBS, told the contributor this past spring that about 30% of HBS students are doing "something entrepreneurial" while in school.

The result, the contributor writes, is "consensus capital": VCs furiously competing for "legible" founders likeliest to deliver a hyperscaling win. The gap between legible and illegible founders "is not so much a gap anymore; it's a chasm."

What should founders do instead?

The contributor coins the "3 T's of Founder Legibility":

• Trajectory. A past record — like Mira Murati leaving OpenAI, or PhDs pushing boundary science — that signals how fast and far you can go.
• Trusted relationships. Referrals from trusted sources make a founder legible to a wider investor base.
• Traction. "Some founders raise on faith, but eventually, all founders raise on evidence," the contributor says — though the bar for traction and TAM is now "crushingly high."

Founders shouldn't lie or fake FOMO, the contributor argues — hype gets meetings, but it won't build a strong cap table. A deck or memo is still needed as an AI-parsable instrument, along with a compelling story and a clean data room, but it doesn't have to look like a traditional deck.

And there's the other path: don't raise VC at all. Bootstrap, and get to "the best possible source of capital: revenue from loyal and happy customers." VC, the contributor writes, "is not for everyone and it's bad for most" — and AI has made bootstrapping more powerful than ever.