AI Vertical Applications: Where Domain-Specific Stacks Are Beating Foundation Models
8 min readThe era of the AI wrapper is over. Harvey AI crossed $190M ARR in legal, Abridge $100M+ in healthcare, and Vanta $300M in compliance — all built on proprietary data, workflow lock-in, and regulatory moats that generic foundation model APIs cannot cross. Here is why vertical AI application stacks are winning enterprise budgets in 2026.