AI Investment Story, Not Efficiency Story

Emergence Capital's Beyond Benchmarks 2026 counterintuitive finding: across every revenue segment non-AI companies out-earn AI companies on revenue-per-employee (~39% at the top decile — the only percentile the report splits AI vs non-AI), so AI is still an investment/staffing bet rather than a realized efficiency gain — reconciled with the lean-unicorn narrative via investment-phase staffing and the complements-lag (gains trail adoption), with AI-native RPE growing faster and starting to close the gap; AWS's 2026 founder survey is the vault's third RPE reading and points the other way (55% of AI-natives clear $400K/head, 156% growth); ICONIQ's Q2-2026 exec survey is the fourth, adding a forward RPE projection ($272K→$496K at high-growth firms by 2027) — flagged as a survey-self-report vs cap-table instrument split, projections marked prediction-grade, not averaged