Companies are now leveraging the latest advancements in AI to power customer-facing AI chatbots and assistants. AI is also enhancing workflow automations, for critical business processes such as document analysis and contract reviews.
Although many companies want to harness the power of generative AI, the challenge of developing effective solutions at scale remains. Companies still need an efficient, reliable, and cost-effective way to employ AI in their applications and workflows.
While some companies initially turn to vertical SaaS solutions to solve industry use cases, this method is inflexible and unscalable. That’s why more companies are now turning to AI builders to perform their enterprise AI use cases.
Why should you use an AI builder? In this article, we’ll explain why, and show how AI builders are becoming more viable than vertical SaaS solutions.
Vertical Solutions: Built for Specific Industries & Use Cases
Given the challenges of in-house development, some companies turn to vertical SaaS solutions to solve their business use cases. Vertical solutions solve problems in specific industries, including healthcare, finance, and education. They are built to address industry use cases, such as:
- Insurance reviews (Healthcare)
- KYC (Finance)
- Document analysis (Education)
Vertical solutions are pre-built SaaS platforms and require no in-house development work. They also offer built-in support channels, along with workflows and features that are specific to each vertical.
Since vertical solutions are industry-specific, they often offer high levels of customization. They are designed to meet the requirements of industries with complex or technical use cases. These customizations might include building bespoke workflows or serving updates to keep up with regulatory changes.
Vertical platforms can also provide solutions for many industry use cases all in one place. For instance, a vertical solution for fund managers will solve many different use cases for that persona. But a problem occurs when a fund manager encounters an unsupported use case. At that point, fund managers will need to acquire another vertical solution for that use case, or utilize in-house development.
Vertical solutions are niche products, and as such they lack out-of-the-box integrations for other software solutions. Vertical solutions are also generally more expensive, given their specialized utility. Finally, vertical solutions can lead to vendor lock-in, with product suites that are difficult to disentangle from.
AI Builders: Horizontal Solution for Deploying AI Apps
While vertical solutions address specific industries, horizontal solutions are designed for a wide variety of companies. Horizontal solutions provide a broad software service that can cover a large breadth of the market. For example, consider solutions such as Microsoft Word, QuickBooks, and HubSpot.
In recent years, a new kind of horizontal solution has emerged: AI builders. An AI builder streamlines the process of creating, deploying, and managing AI agents. As no-code or low-code platforms, AI builders are horizontal solutions that allow non-technical users across industries to build AI agents.
AI builders allow users to construct agents with simple UIs and drag-and-drop functionality. Users build AI applications and LLM workflows by connecting flexible components in a GUI. AI builders empower non-technical users to leverage a number of capabilities, including:
- Integration with other services: You can integrate AI builders with various AI models, data sources, and SaaS services.
- Customization options: AI builders offer broad customization options. You can control the logic of the AI application on the backend. You can also customize the user interface you display to your end users.
- Deployment options: Deploy to various environments, including cloud and on-premise, while scaling as needed.
- Monitoring and management: Leverage tools for performance, version control, user management, and more, to monitor and manage your agents.
AI builders are horizontal not just across industries, but across teams. Any non-technical team can utilize AI builders to create AI agents, from investment memo generators, to contract redliners, to call center compliance agents. This puts the power of generative AI into the hands of teams across your company.
At Stack AI, our AI builder possesses a number of features that make us incredibly easy to use and effective for building AI solutions:
- User Experience – Our platform is designed to be user-friendly, enabling anyone to build AI applications without technical expertise.
- Customization – We offer a pre-built interface that you can customize to reflect your company’s brand guidelines. Use Stack AI to power the application underneath, while incorporating a custom design.
- AI Models – We offer leading AI models, from closed to open source, updating them as new versions are released. This allows you to easily switch models with a simple click, ensuring optimal performance.
- Knowledge Bases – We integrate with the most common data sources in the market, enabling you to connect your data securely to your AI models. Now you can apply the power of AI to your business data to generate unique insights.
- Security – Stack AI is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant. Data security is our number one priority, especially for companies in sensitive industries such as healthcare and finance.
- Performance – Our algorithms, crafted by engineers from MIT, Ubuntu, NASA, and other top orgs, maximize the performance of your AI agent. This ensures precise data handling and minimizes errors, enhancing reliability. Stack AI’s RAG system leads the industry.
Although vertical solutions offer industry-specific specialization, horizontal AI builders such as Stack AI offer teams more flexibility. Now let’s take a look at the pros and cons of Stack AI versus vertical solutions side-by-side.
Comparison: Stack AI vs. Vertical Solutions
Vertical solutions are ideal for highly specialized use cases in specific industries. In those situations, adopting a vertical solution allows you to solve a specified problem with a single tool. This also affords you access to consistent product updates, specialized SaaS support, and niche features.
However, issues arise when companies need solutions for multiple use cases. Each vertical solution solves a narrow set of problems. Some vertical solutions focus on a single industry, but can still only handle a limited number of use cases. This is how companies end up with multiple vertical solutions, an expensive and complicated proposition.
This is where Stack AI comes in. As a horizontal AI builder, Stack AI enables companies to build AI applications for any number of use cases. Instead of buying vertical solutions to solve for each use case, Stack AI allows you to develop custom AI agents to address new problems as they arise.
As a no-code platform, Stack AI allows non-technical users to build AI apps for any use case required. Instead of paying for expensive vertical solutions, teams can use Stack AI with today’s leading AI models to build AI agents that solve industry-specific problems, without requiring multiple platforms.
Stack AI also offers a library of pre-built templates for popular use cases across industries. You can leverage pre-designed templates for contract analyzers, document comparison, RFP assistants, and many more. Customize your own versions of each template to suit your individual needs. These templates are ready-to-launch replacements for vertical solutions that target specific use cases.
However, there are still times when vertical solutions might make sense. Although Stack AI is no-code, there’s still a learning curve when introducing builder software across teams and companies. And some vertical solutions might be better suited for specific customizations and regulations within an industry.
AI Builders: A New Path Forward for Vertical Use Cases
Although vertical solutions make sense in certain circumstances, the emergence of AI builders such as Stack AI has offered companies a new path forward. Instead of adopting many different vertical solutions, teams can now use Stack AI and the power of the latest AI models to build solutions for physicians assistants, compliance detectors, and many other industry-specific use cases.
With robust security offerings for SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR, Stack AI enables teams to build AI apps for a wide variety of industries, including healthcare and finance. Now you can drop the expensive vertical solutions and start building AI applications for use cases as they emerge in the field.
Try Stack AI for free now so your team can start building AI apps with a horizontal platform that scales rapidly.
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