Are Vertical AI Agents still worth building?
I recently came across some news:
Claude for Financial Services officially launched in mid-July. It’s designed specifically for the finance industry, integrating data from platforms like PitchBook, Morningstar, Snowflake, S&P Global, and Databricks to support market research, due diligence, and investment decisions. During early testing, Claude Opus 4 hit 83% accuracy on complex Excel tasks.
It really makes me question how much room there is left for AI Agent startups ----LLMs are getting better at handling more and more tasks on their own.
For an AI Agent to have long-term value, it must be able to understand, remember, and adapt to a user's evolving preferences and context ---- something LLMs still struggle with due to their limited memory and continuity.
Also, not many vertical AI Agents seem to be breaking out yet. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Icon, telli, and Exa. Curious to see what other intereating vertical AI Agent products show up on Product Hunt.
Replies
I think LLMs will naturally expand into verticals where there's clear profit and productivity gain, like coding. It's already proving to reduce costs and speed up work.
But for narrower verticals, going too deep would cost them time and focus. LLM providers are in a constant race on general performance, so diving into niche domains isn't a top priority.
That leaves room for specialized AI startups to build where LLMs won't go (yet).
If you look at YC startups, it went from general AI solutions into more vertical AI agents that focusing on solving specific problems.
One of the example is insurance verification & billing at dentist clinics.
A lot of companies are implementing SLM instead of LLM due to the limitation of LLM and the cost of hosting it, in the end, all the products are aiming for make the work easier, faster and cheaper. If your product does all LLM offers but cheaper than why not?