Forerunner's Kirsten Green on the $1.8T wellness economy, AI-enabled consumer products, and why personalization is finally possible

Summary

Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, makes the case that the $1.8 trillion wellness economy is the biggest consumer trend of her nearly 30-year investing career — and that AI is about to make it significantly larger.

The wellness economy is growing six times faster than the broader economy, Green says, driven by a shift toward proactive health rather than reactive care. 60% of survey respondents ranked health as their number one priority, above friends and family. Consumers are spending more on supplements, biomarker testing, MRIs, and therapies — largely outside the traditional healthcare system — fueled by both distrust of institutional medicine and greater access to personal health information.

The AI unlock

Green's core argument is that generative AI finally delivers on a promise the industry has been making for 20 years: genuine personalization. Website experiences today are essentially identical regardless of who is visiting. That is about to change, and she frames the opportunity in stark terms — going from 2D to 4D, skipping 3D entirely.

Forerunner categorizes companies as AI-led, AI-enabled, or AI-boosted. The enabled category is where she sees the most defensible venture opportunity: products that were not cost-possible before AI existed. A therapy platform that started with human one-to-one matching online can now layer AI to create a fundamentally different product, not just a cheaper version of the same one.

On the "GPT wrapper" debate, Green is direct: not all wrappers are equal, and any business that benefits from the underlying LLM getting better is in the right position. The fundamentals still apply — who needs it, why, and how does the business compound over time.

Consumer health as the investment frame

Green draws a sharp distinction between lifestyle wellness businesses and venture-scale ones. Private equity rollups of gyms or a profitable bone broth brand are real businesses, but venture requires flywheels, compounding advantages, and the potential to define a category. The business model shift — not the product category — is what Forerunner has always backed.

Education and voice

Green argues education is the most under-transformed pillar of modern life, behind healthcare, finance, and careers. School textbooks look the same as they did 40 years ago. The right frame, she says, is not worrying about students using ChatGPT to cheat but teaching them to use generative AI as a tool for deeper thinking — posing questions, following threads, iterating on an argument. Voice is the next unlock: people share roughly ten times more information verbally than they do by typing, which means voice interfaces could dramatically improve the personalization loop. She names Sesame as a company generating early buzz in the space.

AI adoption

Forerunner's survey data shows roughly 60% of respondents report using AI regularly. Green treats this as early-stage trial rather than full adoption, but the trajectory is clear. Her analogy: ChatGPT is to this generation what Google was to the last — a front door. What Google spawned were vertical destinations: Zillow, Glassdoor, Indeed, Kayak, OpenTable. The same build-out is waiting to happen on top of AI, and she is actively looking for founders doing exactly that.

On tariffs

Green is candid that she has not fully processed the second-order effects of the current tariff environment. Even businesses manufacturing entirely in the US will feel it indirectly, because consumer spending patterns and disposable income are shifting around them. Her advice is blunt: get clearer on who needs your product and why, because the competitive environment just got harder for everyone.