Vertical AI products and tooling for other builders
Given how fast AI-native products can be prototyped, it might seem like the field only rewards whoever moves first with the most funding, but that undersells where small, focused teams genuinely have room to win. The clearest opportunity is vertical AI products built for a specific industry's real workflow: a generalist AI product provider has little incentive to deeply understand the particular data formats, compliance requirements, and daily pain points of one narrow industry, whether that's a specific kind of legal work, a specific healthcare administrative task, or a specific slice of logistics. A small team that genuinely understands that one industry's workflow, and is willing to handle its unglamorous edge cases, real messy documents, domain-specific terminology, integration with legacy systems, can build something a horizontal, general-purpose AI product will not bother matching.
A second real opportunity is building tooling and infrastructure for other AI builders themselves: evaluation platforms, observability tools that help teams understand why a model or agent failed, data pipeline tools, agent orchestration frameworks. As more companies build AI products, the tooling market around that work grows with it, and this category rewards teams that have genuinely felt the pain of building AI systems themselves, since the best tools in this space tend to come from builders solving their own real problem first, then generalizing it, not from guessing what other teams might need.