9 insights from ‘Private Tech Trailblazers’: Vertical AI becomes the growth engine

Nine key insights emerged from the recent Bank of America Private Tech Trailblazers Conference, highlighting where AI growth is currently taking place:

1. Specialized AI built around proprietary data, industry-specific workflows, and purpose-built hardware is becoming the growth engine. Competitive advantage is increasingly shifting towards domain-specific data, vertical integration, trust, and the capital required to build at scale.

2. Bear Robotics, with about 16,000 autonomous mobile robots and a backlog of 4,000, is focusing on the restaurant sector in Japan and Korea, as well as care homes, casinos, and warehouses. The company's software and cloud infrastructure share similarities with its humanoid robots.

3. Address Robotics, or All3, is tackling labor costs in the construction industry by building an integrated value chain. Their software designs building processes from plot to permit-ready documents, while their Mantis mobile robot assembles and finishes elements on-site. All3's first site is preparing for a six-story co-living building on an irregular plot.

4. In vertical AI agents, Bloomreach, with approximately 100 models, is achieving five to 10 times better performance than out-of-the-box LLMs. Their Loomi AI engine, trained on 7 billion consumer profiles, has seen a 23-fold increase in customers using four AI agents within a year.

5. Low-power AI chips are gaining attention, with Unconventional AI, led by CFO Ali Esfahani, developing hardware and software together to reduce AI system power consumption by about 1,000 times. Their new chip, powered by standard semiconductor processes, offers orders of magnitude better energy efficiency than traditional systems.

6. Electric industrial vehicles are also part of the vertical AI trend, with Harbinger Motors offering electric and hybrid medium-duty vehicle platforms at the same price as diesel. Their battery system powers Airstream travel trailers and they are expanding into autonomous ground vehicles for defense through a partnership with American Rheinmetall.

7. Agentic commerce is a growing land grab in vertical AI, with Airwallex providing a global financial operating system that enables businesses to open accounts, accept payments, and issue cards in top economies. Their AI agents act on behalf of customers and interoperability and accuracy are crucial for success in this space.