The frontier AI companies are moving deeper into vertical, workflow-specific software.
Last week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Financial Services. Yesterday, Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Advisors.
The frontier AI companies are moving deeper into vertical, workflow-specific software.
The product increasingly looks like: frontier intelligence + proprietary data + enterprise systems + workflow automation + domain-specific controls
AND finance is a particularly good place to see the pattern because so much professional work is information-intensive.
Of course, this also means giving AI access to some of the most sensitive information inside a firm. Privacy, security, permissions, and TRUST will become just as important as the intelligence itself.
Historically, firms built large teams and elaborate software stacks to move information through those workflows. Now the AI layer can increasingly sit across the stack and coordinate the work.
That changes the economics.
The first-order benefit is obvious: fewer hours spent gathering information, moving data between systems, formatting outputs, and documenting work.
The more important effect is what happens after those costs fall.
- A financial advisor will be able to serve more households.
- An investment team will be able to cover far more companies.
- Firms will be able to provide hyper-personalized services at scale.
- Small orgs will have access to capabilities only available to large orgs.
- And eventually, some services that were economically impractical may become viable.
That is the part I think is easy to miss when we talk about AI as a productivity tool. The real opportunity is to change the set of workflows that are economically possible in the first place.
AND, as AI becomes embedded in these workflows, privacy, security, and trust become part of the infrastructure required to make it work
The next phase of AI is about embedding "trusted intelligence" into the operating system of every profession.
Until next time,
Ram
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Ram Srinivasan
MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.
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