Meet Vertical AI, Today’s Most Powerful Tool

Key Takeaways

• Vertical AI targets industry-specific challenges with deep domain expertise.
• It automates entire workflows, reducing manual tasks and human error.
• Finance and insurance gain benefits in fraud detection, underwriting, and compliance.
• Vertical AI outperforms traditional SaaS by delivering high ROI and streamlined operations.

What Is Vertical AI?

Vertical AI is industry-specific artificial intelligence designed for targeted sectors. Unlike general-purpose AI, or horizontal AI, it is built with deep domain expertise to solve industry-specific challenges.

Businesses adopting vertical AI gain a competitive edge. These tools enhance productivity, reduce human error, and drive significant value. They leverage advanced AI capabilities and large language models (LLMs) to process complex data, streamline operations, and deliver actionable insights.

One of vertical AI’s key strengths is its ability to process unstructured data, which has traditionally been a barrier for many industries. Traditional software struggled with complex workflows and fragmented information. 

Vertical AI Agents, like our Unstructured AI (UAI), extract meaning from documents, emails, tables, and other unstructured sources, helping businesses unlock new opportunities.

From financial institutions to insurance companies and law firms, vertical AI is reshaping industries. It enables businesses to work more efficiently and reach previously hard-to-access sectors with complex data challenges.

Key Features of Vertical AI

Vertical AI stands out due to its domain-specific focus and robust AI capabilities. These key features enable businesses to unlock greater efficiency and precision in industry-specific workflows:

• Deep domain knowledge: Vertical AI leverages industry-specific data to provide highly accurate and relevant insights tailored to specialized needs.
• Actionable insights: AI models extract meaningful, real-time, data-driven insights that help businesses make informed decisions.
• Seamless integration: These AI tools integrate directly into existing enterprise workflows, reducing friction in adoption and ensuring immediate value.
• Fine-tuned models: Vertical AI is trained and optimized for specific industry use cases, enhancing accuracy and performance, unlike general-purpose tools.
• Regulatory compliance: Many industries have strict regulations, and vertical AI ensures solutions align with compliance standards and transparency requirements.
• Enhanced customer engagement: AI-driven insights help personalize interactions, improve response times, and optimize customer service.

Below is a table summarizing these key features:

What Is the Difference Between General AI and Vertical AI?

The main difference between general AI and vertical AI lies in their scope and application. 

General AI, often called horizontal AI, provides broad solutions across industries. Models like ChatGPT and Gemini excel at handling generic tasks such as customer inquiries and text generation due to their general-purpose capabilities. However, they lack the depth needed to address industry-specific challenges effectively.

In contrast, vertical AI focuses on tailored solutions for specific industries such as finance, insurance, healthcare, and legal services. It achieves greater precision and delivers significant and faster ROI by targeting a narrow set of tasks. 

See what our founder and CEO, Ankur Patel, says about what makes our platform different from horizontal AI.

Vertical AI Agents, like those we offer through AgentFlow, are designed to meet the unique needs of businesses within these industries. These agents solve critical challenges such as regulatory compliance in finance or audit trails in insurance, ensuring seamless integration into existing workflows and maximizing efficiency.

Vertical AI Agent vs. Horizontal AI Agent

Multimodal is a vertical-specific Agentic AI provider tailored for industries like finance and insurance. Unlike many players in the field, we offer comprehensive vertical solutions, not just point solutions, effectively addressing multiple parts of the workflow. 

Our autonomous AI Agents are transforming business operations by enabling AI-driven systems to execute tasks independently, further enhancing efficiency and scalability.

• Vertical AI Agents: Tailored for industries, they leverage domain-specific data and deep understanding to deliver precise results. 

For example, our Document AI Agent, tailored with in-context learning, excels at classifying and extracting data from diverse document types. By training it on Direct Mortgage Corp.'s unique internal documents, we automated its lending workflows, achieving straight-through processing and cutting loan processing costs by 80%.

Read the full customer story. 

All of our agents that can be built and managed using AgentFlow integrate seamlessly with existing workflows to address specific challenges in finance and insurance. 

• Horizontal AI Agents: Offer generalized solutions with broader use cases but lack the depth to solve complex, industry-specific problems.

Why Vertical AI Is the Future

Vertical SaaS has dominated the past decade, proving that software tailored to specific industries best serves customer needs. Vertical AI will deepen that impact even more because it merges deep domain expertise with advanced AI. This will allow many businesses to automate entire workflows in a way that wasn’t possible before. 

Previous AI models lacked the data quality and sophistication needed for industry-specific tasks. Today, large language models like GPT-4 and o1/o3 have improved reasoning and accuracy, clearing the path for high-impact AI solutions.

Finance and insurance organizations face strict regulations and data complexities. Vertical AI handles these challenges with fine-tuned, purpose-built workflows. It offers measurable gains in productivity, reduces human error, and boosts customer engagement.

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a U.S.-based venture capital firm, predicts that vertical AI's market capitalization will outgrow legacy vertical SaaS by at least 10x.

Many promising startups succeed by solving just one or two workflows for their target customers with vertical AI. These workflows fall into two categories:

• Core workflows: Primary functions within a job. For banks and lenders, this includes underwriting, credit approvals, or loan origination. For insurers, this includes claims processing or policy management.
• Supporting workflows: Secondary tasks that still require focus. For banks, examples include compliance reporting or sales support. For insurers, it might be renewal outreach or cross-selling.

Vertical AI automates these workflows end-to-end, integrating with existing systems and accelerating decision-making.

Vertical AI vs. Vertical SaaS

Vertical AI isn’t just another artificial intelligence tool everyone is talking about. Y Combinator, a startup accelerator company, predicts that vertical LLM agents are the new $1 billion SaaS opportunities. This type of end-to-end automation drives higher value, positioning vertical AI as the future of specialized software.

Vertical AI in Finance and Insurance

The finance and insurance sectors are prime examples of industries benefiting the most from vertical AI. Due to their highly regulated nature, these fields require explainability, transparency, and audit trails. Vertical AI solutions meet these demands while addressing specific challenges like fraud detection and risk assessment.

The Power of Niche Data

Vertical AI excels by leveraging niche, industry-specific data that horizontal AI struggles to access. This focus enables deep domain expertise and the creation of proprietary datasets tailored to unique challenges. 

Fine-tuning these models for specific needs delivers more accurate, actionable insights. Over time, vertical AI companies can build a data flywheel, continuously improving models and strengthening their moat that horizontal AI cannot easily replicate.

Opportunities in Finance and Insurance

1. Real-time insights: Vertical AI systems provide real-time analytics, enabling financial institutions to make data-driven decisions quickly.
2. Fraud detection: AI can analyze complex datasets to identify anomalies and prevent fraud.
3. Risk assessment: Vertical AI’s domain-specific expertise helps insurers evaluate risks accurately, reducing underwriting errors.
4. Customer engagement: AI-driven insights improve customer experiences by offering personalized solutions and faster claim processing.

We always emphasize to our customers the importance of focusing on solving specific problems. Addressing a clear pain point (e.g., automating time-consuming tasks like document review) will save you tremendous time by freeing your employees to focus on more complex problems. 

This laser-focused approach will help businesses achieve faster ROI and lay the groundwork for sustained growth.

Companies Offering Vertical AI Solutions for Finance and Insurance

Multimodal leads the way in delivering vertical AI solutions for finance and insurance. Our tailored AI tools address industry-specific challenges, offering significant value to businesses. 

With a focus on explainability and transparency, our systems provide actionable insights and ensure compliance with industry regulations. Our AgentFlow is an all-in-one, API-first platform for building and managing dozens of AI Agents for several workflows across your organization.

Other companies already offering vertical AI for these sectors include those specializing in fraud prevention (e.g., Socure, TransUnion) and those handling claims processing or underwriting (e.g., Tractable, WorkFusion). 

Each focuses on different aspects, such as risk management, identity verification, policy automation, or data extraction—helping both finance and insurance firms streamline critical operations. 

Creating a Business Vertical AI Adoption Strategy

Adopting Vertical AI requires a structured approach to ensure seamless integration and maximum impact. Here’s our recommendation for a step-by-step approach:

1. Identify industry pain points: Understand the specific challenges your industry faces. Focus on areas where vertical AI can deliver the most value, such as reducing manual work or improving customer experience.
2. Evaluate AI capabilities: Assess the features and benefits of vertical AI tools. Look for solutions offering fine-tuning, domain-specific datasets, and seamless integration.
3. Ensure data readiness: Clean, standardized data is the lifeblood of any Vertical AI system. Outline data governance protocols and build a strong data pipeline before deploying AI solutions.
4. Align stakeholders and measure success: Get key stakeholders early on board to set clear success criteria and ROI benchmarks. Regularly review performance metrics to keep projects on track and justify further investment.
5. Develop an AI stack: Build a solution stack tailored to your business needs. Incorporate Vertical AI Agents to automate targeted workflows and boost efficiency.
6. Pilot and scale: Start with a pilot project or proof of concept (POC) to test the effectiveness of vertical AI in your workflows. Once successful, scale the solution across your organization.
7. Monitor and optimize: Continuously monitor AI performance and optimize it to align with evolving business processes and industry trends.

Rigorous testing and prompt engineering in vertical AI are also crucial for successful adoption. By breaking down complex tasks into smaller steps, enterprises can achieve higher accuracy and reliability. This iterative approach mirrors test-driven development in software engineering.

Challenges and Considerations for Vertical AI Adoption

A major challenge in vertical AI is the talent gap in many industries, like insurance. They often lack professionals with domain expertise and AI skills needed to develop effective solutions. This gap presents a unique opportunity for vertical AI companies to stand out by building specialized teams.

Our experts combine deep domain knowledge with cutting-edge AI skills. This allows us to create solutions tailored to industry nuances, seamlessly integrating into existing workflows and delivering real value. 

Unlike horizontal AI, which struggles to address specific pain points, our vertical approach ensures specialization and effectiveness. Companies that bridge this talent gap can capture market share and drive innovation in their chosen fields.

Future-Proof Your Business with Vertical AI

Vertical AI is redefining how finance and insurance organizations operate—automating workflows, enhancing compliance, and unlocking high ROI. With AI trained on your industry’s unique data, you can streamline processes, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge.

Whether you're looking to improve underwriting, mortgage processing, or regulatory compliance, our Agentic AI is built to deliver results where they matter most.

Adopting vertical AI today ensures a future-ready business equipped to thrive in a competitive landscape. Schedule a free 30-minute demo with our experts and see our AI Agents in action.

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