As the year’s final calendar quarter approaches, strong signals are emerging about AI opportunities within vertical-industry use cases and how vendors are pushing to help their customers capitalize.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen strong customer involvement in the design of industry AI suites from top AI providers; evolving approaches to connecting AI platforms to data sources that provide critical industry context; and delivery of industry-centric skills — prebuilt instructions or workflows — that accelerate AI’s ramp-up and impact.
Partnering to inform product development is an encouraging sign that vendors are responding to customer needs for tangible return on AI investment and to move up the food chain from horizontal productivity use cases to vertical applications that address the nuances of their industry.
Google Cloud detailed customer design partnerships related to its new Gemini Enterprise platforms for financial services and legal. OpenAI took a similar tack with ChatGPT for Financial Services.
Deutsche Bank, a Google Cloud design partner, is leveraging the relationship to shape products “in view of the realities of a highly regulated industry — from data protection and governance to the workflows our teams use every day,” said Marie-Jeanne Deverdun, the bank’s Chief Technology, Data and Innovation Officer. That industry specificity can only come from customers; by directly capturing customer requirements in product design, Google Cloud and OpenAI should help a wider range of users realize faster results.
Top vendors have been embracing connectors — typically based on Model Context Protocol (MCP) — to connect AI platforms to systems and data sources. It came as a mild surprise, then, when OpenAI said it has directly integrated third-party financial data into its new financial services software to “remove the challenges with MCP connectors.”
OpenAI’s approach: indexing and hosting some partners’ data directly for higher accuracy, lower latency, and an optimal user experience. It’s not an all-or-nothing approach — OpenAI still highlighted MCP-centric partnerships — but it will be important to track these direct integration-vs.-MCP connector developments in the weeks and months to come.
Building on concrete customer design input and expanding ways to connect to third-party data for vertical use cases, top AI vendors are also ramping up pre-built skills that tie specifically into industry processes. AI skills have been rolling out rapidly over the past year or so, but now the focus is shifting to industries.
Consider this common scenario and how it might be impacted by industry-specific AI skills: When you hold an annual meeting with a financial advisor, it’s common to have a range of follow-up communications on topics such as balancing portfolio allocations and optimizing withdrawals for tax considerations. With new skills, such as Anthropic’s Post Meeting Notes and Follow-up, a pre-built workflow can convert a transcript into a client summary and a recap email. That’s AI realizing the promise of “routine” followup while eliminating lots of manually created follow-ups.
Google Cloud, OpenAI, and Anthropic are delivering powerful new industry-specific value. I think these developments portend a larger industry-wide vertical push in the fourth quarter and into 2027. That should pave the way for customers to begin reporting AI wins in customer- and revenue-driving functions with the greatest business impact.
