Types of AI Agents Based on Their Purpose

AI agents can simply be classified on General Purpose and Vertical AI based on what they can do the best. General purpose agents can perform a wide variety of tasks but only at a surface level. Vertical AI Agents on the other hand can dive deeper into the tasks and have specific architecture that helps them perform these tasks at the highest levels of complexity.

1. Horizontal or General Purpose AI Agents

Horizontal AI or General Purpose AI is a type of AI agents which act as your virtual assistant. They can create your schedule, plan your travel, write something for you, book a meeting, set your alarm, and many other things. It is like your phone has turned into Jarvis from Iron Man 3.

These AI agents however, lack the depth, i.e., they are not able to perform deeper tasks. For example, Operator by ChatGPT is an AI agent for general web scraping and gathering generic information. However, it cannot perform complex tasks like doing a deterministic research on “The Impact of the US Dollar on Global Economics in 2025”.

2. Vertical AI Agents

These are special purpose AI agents that are created to perform a single task like tweeting replies, replying to emails, sorting emails, blocking specific types of users to access a cloud point.

They can easily perform complex tasks but only in a specific category such as performing academic research, writing a song, composing a tune, etc.

Future of General Purpose and Vertical AI

According to the top startup incubator YCombinator, AI agents might end up creating a 10x bigger market than what SaaS has today. They can enter every one’s live and perform necessary tasks that require too much human effort otherwise.

YCombinator executives further added that in the case of General Purpose AI agents, top tech corporates like Google and X.com would continue to be on the top while in the case of Vertical AI, we could see new corporate giants emerge in each vertical sector.