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AI agents are autonomous software that can independently execute tasks on the Internet, just like a human. These agents have widespread applications in marketing, coding, software development, virtual assistants, healthcare, management, and many other fields.
Types of AI Agents
On the basis of their application, AI agents can be categorized into Horizontal AI agents and Vertical AI agents. Horizontal AI refers to general purpose agents that can perform a wide range of tasks, such as Operator by OpenAI. A vertical AI agent refers to an agent that has been built for a specific purpose, such as web scraping, research, medical applications, and other similar single-purpose tasks.
General Application AI Agents
General-purpose AI agents or Horizontal AI refers to those agents that are created to assist you in a wide range of daily tasks such as searching the web, booking a meeting, sending an email, or just chatting with you.
Vertical AI Agents
Vertical AI agents are specific purpose tools that are designed to perform complex tasks to achieve a single goal. These tasks can be detecting cancer, doing research on nanomaterial, creating trading strategies, rebalancing your portfolio, and similar tasks.
Future of AI Agents
According to YCombinator, AI agents have the potential to create a 10x larger market than SaaS. At present, i.e., in early 2025, SaaS has a market size of $300 billion in 2025.
Among all AI agents, vertical AI agents, i.e., those created for a specific purpose like research AI agents or medical AI agents, will have the largest growth. YCombinator executives claim that these AI agents will create the next tech giants in the near to medium term future.
On the other hand, the current SaaS giants are expected to dominate the general-purpose AI landscape, such as those for LLM applications and virtual assistants.