AI Market Maker
3 Honorees
They are selling a category before the category has a budget line.
The market maker's problem is not competition. It is that the buyer has no existing line item, no internal owner, and no vocabulary for what is being sold. These operators spend as much of the year defining the purchase as closing it.
What separates the fifty from the merely loud is evidence of the definitional work: published frameworks, reference architectures other companies adopt, and pricing that survived contact with procurement.
