AI tools won’t unlock real value or recurring revenue until they can automatically understand user context — turning today’s “vibe-driven” hype into tomorrow’s invisible, truly useful infrastructure, says Lewis Liu

There’s a funny TikTok/Instagram meme going around, clearly targeted at people like me, where a male influencer interviews attractive women asking, “What’s most attractive about a guy?” The women all invariably answer, “When they’re building vertical AI agents, of course!”

Naturally I am building vertical AI agents, and here’s my take on what is a far more complex task than just “building vertical AI agents”. As a side note, the term “AI agent” is super overused, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s define it as an AI application with some kind of conversational interface that can execute specific tasks: making slide decks, inputting Salesforce entries, redlining contracts, etc.

I was recently having lunch with a senior partner at a top law firm when the conversation inevitably turned to AI agents in legal practice. He described how whilst lawyers are experimenting with and deriving some initial value from legal tech AI tools like Harvey and Legora, for the vast majority of non-document data extraction tasks (which is mature technology that my first start-up Eigen pioneered), it takes longer to prompt these new legal AI tools than to do the job yourself. The example he gave was redlining: it takes longer to prompt the Harvey redline agent than, as an experienced lawyer, to redline the contract........

© City A.M.