10 Verticals Getting Automated by AI Agents Right Now

AI agents aren't a research project. They're in production across specific industries, handling real work, generating measurable returns. The question isn't whether automation is coming—it's which verticals are moving fastest and who's winning.

Here are ten industries where AI agents are automating work right now.

1. Legal Services

What's being automated: Contract review, due diligence, legal research, document drafting

Legal was supposed to be automation-proof. Turns out, 70-80% of junior associate work is pattern matching on documents—exactly what AI excels at.

Harvey deployed to 4,000+ lawyers at Allen & Overy, achieving 0.2% hallucination rates through citation-backed generation. Solve Intelligence is doing the same for patent law. The legal AI exception to normal enterprise sales cycles means deals close in weeks, not quarters.

For the full picture of why law adopted AI faster than anyone expected, see The State of Legal AI.

2. Healthcare Documentation

What's being automated: Clinical documentation, ambient scribing, EHR integration, medical coding

Physicians spend two hours on documentation for every hour with patients—the "pajama time" crisis driving burnout and medical errors.

Abridge solved this with deep Epic integration, parsing conversations into structured EHR fields. Their 45% error reduction on new medications versus standard transcription shows why vertical specificity matters. Nuance DAX and Suki are competing, but Abridge's Epic moat is substantial.

This is the vertical agents thesis in action: generic transcription tools can't distinguish between a patient reporting a symptom and a physician prescribing treatment.

3. Customer Support

What's being automated: Tier-1 ticket resolution, FAQ handling, escalation routing, refund processing

Customer support was the first vertical to see production AI at scale. Klarna's numbers are real: their AI assistant handles millions of conversations, directly connected to banking backend for refunds and billing changes.

Intercom's Fin charges $0.99 per resolution—outcome-based pricing that only works when you trust your agent's accuracy. Sierra and Zendesk are scaling similar approaches.

For the full breakdown of who's winning and how the economics work, see Customer Support Agents. For the ROI framework, see Agent Economics.

4. Software Development

What's being automated: Code completion, debugging, PR review, test generation, autonomous implementation

The coding vertical is the most competitive. GitHub Copilot has distribution; Cursor has architecture (the Shadow Workspace that validates code before showing it); Devin has autonomy (attempting full task completion without supervision).

Cursor's bet—fork VS Code, own the environment—is winning. Model agnosticism let them switch to Claude when it outperformed GPT-4 for coding. The 28% higher acceptance rate on Cursor Tab versus standard autocomplete shows what happens when you predict the next edit, not just the next token.

5. Sales Development

What's being automated: Lead research, prospect enrichment, outbound sequencing, meeting scheduling

SDRs spend most of their time on research and initial outreach—work that's largely automatable. The math is compelling: if an AI can do 80% of SDR work at 20% of the cost, the ROI case writes itself.

11x, Artisan, and Clay are leading the charge. The winning pattern: AI handles research, personalization, and sequencing; humans handle the actual conversations.

See Sales Automation Agents for who's winning and Agent Economics for the unit economics.

6. HR & People Operations

What's being automated: Benefits questions, onboarding workflows, policy lookup, PTO tracking, compliance

HR teams drown in repetitive questions: "How do I change my benefits?" "What's the PTO policy?" "How do I submit an expense?" These are perfect agent candidates—structured data, clear policies, low risk.

Rippling, Leena AI, and Moveworks are embedding agents directly in Slack and Teams. The pattern is assisted autonomy: agents handle routine queries, escalate ambiguous cases.

For the full analysis, see HR Agents. For how we think about this problem, see The Momentum Thesis.

7. Finance & Accounting

What's being automated: Expense auditing, invoice processing, spend management, policy enforcement

Finance teams hate expense auditing. It's tedious, reactive, and universally despised. Ramp's Policy Agent sits between transaction and ledger, using LLMs to understand context that rule-based systems miss—distinguishing "Client Dinner" from "Team Party" based on receipt details.

Brex and Vic.ai are competing. The common pattern: LLM for interpretation, hard-coded rules for constraints. You can't be "talked into" approving a $10,000 expense via prompt injection.

This is the neuro-symbolic architecture at work.

8. Security Operations

What's being automated: Threat detection, incident triage, vulnerability prioritization, response playbooks

SOC analysts face impossible alert volumes. Most alerts are false positives, but missing a real threat is catastrophic. AI agents can triage at machine speed, escalating only the credible threats.

7AI is betting on autonomous incident response. Torq and Tines focus on playbook automation. The agent attack surface becomes critical here—security agents must themselves be secure.

See Agent Safety Stack for defense-in-depth patterns.

9. Data & Analytics

What's being automated: Report generation, data pipeline management, query optimization, insight synthesis

The vision: analysts describe what they want in plain English; agents write the SQL, build the pipeline, generate the visualization.

Databricks is positioning as the data foundation for AI workloads. Snowflake, Hex, and Mode are all adding agent layers. The bottleneck isn't capability—it's RAG reliability and context management.

10. Professional Services

What's being automated: Research, slide decks, financial modeling, junior analyst work

McKinsey's Lilli, BCG's internal tools, Goldman's Project Mercury—the biggest professional services firms are automating junior work aggressively. Kate Smaje at McKinsey: "Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that."

The Hollow Firm 2.0 is emerging: senior experts leveraging AI agents, minimal middle layer. Short-term margin expansion is clear. The open question is whether AI-trained juniors will develop the expertise to become tomorrow's seniors.

For the economics driving these decisions, see Agent Economics.

The Pattern

What do winning verticals have in common?

The verticals automating fastest share these traits. Verticals that lack them—creative work, physical labor, novel research—are further out.

For the full thesis on why vertical agents are winning over horizontal ones, see Vertical Agents Are Eating Horizontal Agents.

What This Means

The common thread across all ten verticals: AI agents are replacing the grunt work that used to train juniors. Document review, ticket triage, data entry, slide decks—the work that filled the first 2-3 years of professional careers.

This is The Momentum Thesis: we sell time and momentum by handling the work that must exist so your business can exist. The operational substrate nobody starts a company to do.

If you're evaluating where agents make sense for your organization, start with our solutions or explore the platform architecture that powers these deployments.