Navin Chaddha, managing director of the 55-year-old Silicon Valley venture firm Mayfield, is betting big on AI’s ability to transform people-heavy industries like consulting, law, and accounting. The veteran investor, whose wins include Lyft, Poshmark, and HashiCorp, recently discussed at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in Menlo Park why he believes “AI teammates” can create software-like margins in traditionally labor-intensive sectors, and why startups should right now target neglected markets rather than compete head-to-head with giants like Accenture — though he acknowledged that disrupting outfits where relationships and trust matter is sometimes harder than Silicon Valley anticipates. This conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

You think that law firms, consulting companies, and accounting services — collectively a $5 trillion market — will be completely reimagined by AI-first companies that operate with software-like margins. Prove it. What have you seen beyond PowerPoint presentations?

I think an advantage of a firm that has been in business for over 50 years is that it has seen all the trends, from mainframe to minicomputers to PCs, to the internet, to mobile, cloud, social and now this AI era. The example I would give is in the late ’90s, this concept of e-business came, which was: if I’m a physical business, I cannot survive if I’m just brick and mortar; I need to be click and mortar. Then outsourcing became a trend, and offshoring became a big trend. You couldn’t build a software services company without a presence in India or one of the emerging mark