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CB Insights - AI Agent Bible - 2025 (69 PGS)

The AI agent landscape is rapidly evolving, with over 500 startups founded since 2023, focusing on various industries and use cases. Enterprises face pressure to implement AI agents as they transform operations, with significant trends and predictions for the future outlined in the document. Key challenges include data integration, security, and the need for oversight tools to manage AI agent reliability and effectiveness.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
809 views69 pages

CB Insights - AI Agent Bible - 2025 (69 PGS)

The AI agent landscape is rapidly evolving, with over 500 startups founded since 2023, focusing on various industries and use cases. Enterprises face pressure to implement AI agents as they transform operations, with significant trends and predictions for the future outlined in the document. Key challenges include data integration, security, and the need for oversight tools to manage AI agent reliability and effectiveness.

Uploaded by

infonarchitect
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1

AI Agent
Bible:
The ultimate guide to agent disruption

0
AI Agent Bible

The AI agent landscape is evolving rapidly, with


500+ startups founded since 2023. Here is our top
AI agent research — featuring the trends, key
players, and 6 predictions to watch all based on ​
CB Insights predictive intelligence.

AI agents are defining the next wave of tech innovation.

Every big tech company and a rapidly growing private market landscape are building agent
offerings targeting horizontal use cases and industries from financial services to
manufacturing.

For enterprises across sectors, one question is becoming unavoidable: Which AI agent
strategies will separate market leaders from those left behind?

Enterprises are under pressure to build and implement agents as these LLM-based systems
change how companies operate, hire, and scale.

Across 9 reports, discover where startup innovation is pointing, promising partnership and
acquisition targets, and key trends to watch based on CB Insights predictive intelligence.

© 2025 CB Insights | 1
AI Agent Bible

Foreword
Manlio Carrelli​
CEO of CB Insights

Seven years ago, I watched companies struggle with primitive chatbots that broke the
moment customers went off-script.

Today, those early systems have given way to AI agents, which in 2 short years have moved
from experiment to enterprise priority. I’m seeing agent mentions on earnings calls 10x
since 2023. The velocity is unlike anything we’ve tracked before.

What strikes me most: agents are climbing the value chain faster than any technology I’ve
seen. They gained traction in customer service – which made sense, given the sector’s early
AI adoption. 82% of organizations we surveyed in June 2025 said they will be using AI agents
in customer support in the next 12 months. But now they’re supporting clinical decisions at
hospitals, assessing financial risk at banks, and drafting legal memos at law firms.

This is why 25% of AI agent startups founded since 2023 are already deploying, achieving
levels of commercial distribution that previously took startups 5+ years, according to our
Commercial Maturity scores.

The momentum is accelerating. Among the 1,500+ tech markets CB Insights tracks, five of
the top 10 by deal activity in 2025 are agent-related. One in five new unicorns is building
agent technology. Half of the top 20 revenue-generating agent startups didn’t even exist three
years ago.

But here’s what I keep telling our enterprise clients: agents are only as good as the data they
run on. The real competitive advantage isn’t in the AI – it’s in operationalizing accurate,
comprehensive data and the orchestration layers that make agents actually useful.

That’s where the roadblocks are. Enterprises understand agents matter, but they’re struggling
with integration complexity, security concerns, and vendor sprawl. The opportunity is
massive for those who can navigate this transition.

The research and data that follows breaks down this rapidly evolving landscape by vertical,
maturity, and momentum. Remember: in the age of AI agents, the edge doesn’t live in the
model. It lives in connecting purpose-built agents to purpose-specific data.

Those who get this right will shape the economy agents are creating.

© 2025 CB Insights | 2
AI Agent Bible

Predictive Intelligence on Private Companies


With CB Insights, you see your next move – first. Rare data straight from companies
building the future. Powerful AI that automates the analysis.

© 2025 CB Insights | 3
AI Agent Bible

Table of Contents
Outlook on AI agents​ 5

6 AI agent predictions looking into 2026​ 7

The AI agent ecosystem​ 13


The AI agent market map​ 13
The AI agent tech stack​ 19
The AI agent revenue race​ 29

AI agents make inroads across enterprise workflows​ 31


Y Combinator’s 2025 Spring batch reveals the future of agentic AI​ 31
Building the agent economy: How cloud leaders are shaping AI’s next frontier​ 36
The summer of vibe coding is over​ 43

Industry-specific applications gain momentum​ 51


3 markets fueling the shift to agentic commerce​ 51
The industrial AI agents & copilots market map​ 58
100 real-world applications of genAI across financial services and insurance​ 64

Additional resources​ 68

© 2025 CB Insights | 4
AI Agent Bible

Outlook on AI agents
2025: Agents with guardrails
An AI agent is an LLM-based system designed to independently perform tasks on a user's
behalf by reasoning, planning, leveraging memory, and interacting with external tools and
other agents.

Most agents today operate within constrained environments, utilizing structured workflows
and “guardrails” to complete specific objectives while retaining some decision-making
control.

As foundation model capabilities improve, agents are expected to become increasingly


autonomous.

Beyond 2025: Fully autonomous agents


Agents will operate without human involvement, with more sophisticated decision-making,
adaptability, and task execution.

Looking into 2026, watch for new form factors outside of the copilot/chatbot interface that
will push the boundaries of what an “agent” is.

© 2025 CB Insights | 5
AI Agent Bible

Early indications of this include “AI-native” workspaces — tools and platforms built from the
ground up around AI capabilities, rather than layering AI features on top of a traditional
product. Other examples include web browsing interfaces and voice-driven applications.


AI agents are nowhere near their final form. What we mean is this: today we’re in a “copilot”
era where we get outputs via AI chat. But agents are already transforming into something more
like a superpowered instrument or tool. Tools shape the work we do, so an AI supertool will
allow our work to go in all kinds of previously impossible directions.
In enterprise, the copilot model has helped in areas where knowledge work is both routine and
high-stakes, like support, training, onboarding, and compliance. But the next profound shift will
be for agents to cease waiting for input, instead acting as proactive collaborators and
extensions of our minds. Interacting with an agent will not just help solve one problem; it will
actually shape how an organization functions and reacts to change.
Over time, enterprises that embrace AI supertools as core learning systems will find their
cultures and capabilities transformed in ways that go far beyond efficiency gains; they will
unlock entirely new ideas, solutions and ways of working.

Michael Mignano
Partner at Lightspeed

© 2025 CB Insights | 6
AI Agent Bible

6 AI agent predictions looking into 2026


1) Voice AI sprints ahead
Early-stage genAI companies with the fastest-growing headcounts are concentrated in AI
agent applications — and more specifically in voice AI development.

Companies are now positioning themselves for a future where humans interact with AI via
conversation rather than text interfaces. For agentic AI development, implications are
significant across customer service, sales, and IT support where voice agents can handle
complex conversations without human intervention.

© 2025 CB Insights | 7
AI Agent Bible

Watch voice AI development startups for partnership, investment, and acquisition


opportunities. Signaling the potential for increasing consolidation, Meta acquired voice AI
startups Play AI and WaveForms AI in 2025. ​

2) Wave of AI M&A comes for agents


Agentic solutions led the top AI exits to kick off the year in Q1’25. Moveworks, Weights &
Biases, and OfferFit secured the 3 largest deals among 85 acquisitions — establishing agents
as the primary focus of industry consolidation.

Overall, there have been 35+ acquisitions in the broader AI agent & copilot space in 2025 so
far. In the last quarter, that includes Orby AI (acquired by Uniphore), Windsurf (acquired by
Cognition), Cognigy (acquired by NICE), and Flowise and Sana Labs (acquired by Workday).

Enterprise buyers are increasingly seeking to build comprehensive agent solutions to gain a
competitive edge.

Two further areas of consolidation we predict:

1.​ Sales and marketing AI agents offer low-hanging fruit for SaaS leaders’ agent plans.

2.​ The coding AI agent & copilots market is ripe for consolidation amid explosive growth,
soaring valuations, and a fractured landscape. Partnerships with major tech and AI
players set apart top coding M&A targets.

CB Insights Acquisition Hunter


Identifies promising early-stage disruptors and acquisition ready assets precisely and before competitors
even notice them.
Learn More

3) The margin squeeze hits beyond coding


AI agent startups across verticals will face the same economic pressures that reshaped
coding AI margins in 2025. Reasoning models, which sparked the rise of “vibe coding” (giving
a high‑level goal and delegating multi‑step implementation to the AI), also translated into
higher compute costs as they inflated output-token volume roughly 20x.

© 2025 CB Insights | 8
AI Agent Bible

Expect other agent categories with growing usage to rework pricing and contracts as
reasoning costs mount. For example, in May 2025, Salesforce’s Agentforce shifted prices
from $2 per conversation to a hybrid-usage Flex Credits system, tying credits to necessary
actions for an outcome.

As margins compress, struggling players will seek exits — see for example Cognition’s
acquisition of Windsurf after the startup’s licensing deal with Google.​

4) The foundations for agentic commerce solidify


One of the biggest barriers to fully autonomous shopping is enabling secure, real-time
transactions. A new class of startups is tackling this challenge head-on, building AI-native
payment rails and digital wallets that let users authorize — and limit — spending by AI agents.

Overall, the AI agent payments infrastructure market is one of the more nascent markets in
the AI agent tech stack, with an average Commercial Maturity of 2.4 (validating) and an
average Mosaic score of 697. ​

Mosaic score

Evaluates the overall health and growth potential of private companies based on performance, financial stability,
market conditions, and management strength. It combines these factors into a single score (out of 1,000).


In an indication of the tech’s potential and the technical hurdles that must be overcome,
established card and payment networks are investing and partnering with startups in the
market (see graphic).

© 2025 CB Insights | 9
AI Agent Bible

Stripe meanwhile announced in September 2025 it’s launching an API for agentic payments.
The $107B payments giant also launched with OpenAI the Agentic Commerce Protocol,
which will eventually enable AI agents to complete purchases on behalf of users by providing
a standardized communication framework between buyers, AI agents, and businesses.

As fintech giants, AI startups, and commerce platforms converge on the agentic payments
challenge, this early collaboration will shape how future transactions will happen: securely,
autonomously, and inside the AI interfaces consumers already trust.​

4) “Data moat wars” reshape enterprise software


Software incumbents are walling off access to their customer data as AI agents become
more capable. Salesforce’s new Slack API rate limits in 2025, which prevent external apps
from accessing chat data in bulk or storing it long-term, are a clear example. Atlassian
similarly announced additional rate limiting for its Confluence and Jira APIs in 2025.

© 2025 CB Insights | 10
AI Agent Bible

This creates problems for AI startups that depend on accessing data across multiple
systems of record to automate workflows (e.g., knowledge management platforms like
Glean). But it also creates friction for enterprises who want to integrate data across their
apps.

A counter movement is emerging. In September 2025, Snowflake launched a consortium


with over a dozen providers (including Salesforce) committing to standardized data formats
that enable AI to access information across multiple applications. While representing a small
fraction of the market, it signals enterprise demand for openness over vendor lock-in.

This tug-of-war will play out in a few ways. We expect incumbents will continue restricting
API access to protect their AI product revenues. Enterprises that want more control over their
data will push back, driving demand for solutions that help them own their data infrastructure
directly. Some startups will go “up the stack” to build agents that work despite limited API
access (e.g., via computer use), while others will move closer toward where data is stored
and processed. ​

5) Agent monitoring tools emerge as an essential enterprise category


AI agent reliability remains a major challenge in the landscape. Agents that fail, hallucinate,
or behave unpredictably create immediate operational problems.

This is driving activity in oversight capabilities to manage agent risk. Analyzing the 7
early-stage deals ($30.9M total funding) in the AI agent observability, evaluation, &
governance market so far this year highlights emerging technical needs:

●​ Voice agent testing: Cekura ($2.4M seed) and Coval ($3.3M seed) both focus on ​
voice AI testing and simulation, signaling that conversational agents require distinct
observability approaches.

●​ Synthetic user generation: Multiple companies (Cekura, Coval, Janus) focus on


synthetic user generation for agent testing.

●​ AI productivity measurement: Larridin’s $17M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz


shows enterprise demand for quantifying AI agent ROI, with a focus on measuring
human-AI workforce productivity.

© 2025 CB Insights | 11
AI Agent Bible

2025 early-stage deals to AI agent observability, evaluation, and governance companies

Companies Latest round Deal size Deal date Round investors

Cekura Seed VC - II $2.4M 7/1/2025 Alan Rutledge, Allen Wu, Allport Capital

Traceloop Seed VC $6.1M 5/27/2025 Grand Ventures, Ibex Investors, Samsung NE

Larridin Seed VC $17.0M 4/2/2025 Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg

Janus Convertible note $0.5M 4/1/2025 Y Combinator

LangWatch Pre-Seed - II $1.1M 2/25/2025 Antler, Passion Capital, Volta Ventures

Coval Seed VC - II $3.3M 1/23/2025 Fortitude Ventures, General Catalyst

Lucidic AI Convertible note $0.5M 1/1/2025 Y Combinator

Source: CB Insights Business Graph. Data as of 8/26/2025.

Companies deploying agents at scale will need proper oversight tools to avoid costly failures
and maintain operational control.


As security agents become more prevalent, the next generation of cybersecurity
professionals will evolve into “generals” managing armies of AI agents and “special forces”
handling tier-3 incident response and large cross-functional architecture changes. To
support these roles and address explainability challenges in critical security decisions, most AI
security agents leverage LLMs not only to perform tasks but also to convert complex actions
and enrichment into easy-to-understand reports with citations on key information sources.

Edward Wu
Founder & CEO, Dropzone AI

© 2025 CB Insights | 12
AI Agent Bible

The AI agent ecosystem


Mapping the landscape of startups, infrastructure providers, and emerging revenue leaders
reshaping the market

The AI agent market map


We mined the CB Insights database to map 170+ AI agent startups across 26 categories. We
also provide an outlook on AI agents’ progress, limitations, and future directions.

Published 3/6/2025 — Link to report

KEY TAKEAWAYS
●​ AI agent funding is exploding as “digital coworkers” become reality: AI agent startups raised
$3.8B in 2024 (nearly tripling 2023's total), with every major tech player now developing agents or
agent tooling. The shift from AI copilots to autonomous agents with greater decision-making
scope is happening quickly, promising to alter workforce composition and maximize operational
efficiency through task automation.

●​ Customer service and software development lead commercial adoption: These two horizontal
markets show the strongest traction based on median Mosaic health scores (714 and 737
respectively), with two-thirds of surveyed organizations already using or planning to use AI agents
in customer support within 12 months. These markets benefit from well-defined workflows and
testable environments that make agent deployment more straightforward.

●​ Trust remains the biggest barrier to full autonomy: Despite rapid growth, fully autonomous agents
remain limited due to reliability, reasoning, and access issues. Startups are addressing this through
5 primary trust-building methods: transparency, human oversight, technical safeguards, security &
compliance, and continuous improvement. Most current applications still operate with “guardrails”
within constrained architectures rather than true autonomy

We selected companies for inclusion based on Mosaic health scores (500+) and/or funding
recency (since 2022). We included private companies only and organized them according to
their primary focus. This market map is not exhaustive of the space.

Want to be considered for future AI agent research? Brief our analysts to ensure we have the
most up-to-date data on your company.

© 2025 CB Insights | 13
AI Agent Bible

© 2025 CB Insights | 14
AI Agent Bible

AI agent infrastructure

This segment covers companies building agent-specific infrastructure. (We excluded general
genAI infrastructure markets like foundation models and vector databases from the map.)​

Development tools

A diverse ecosystem of tools has emerged to support agents’ development. These range
from memory frameworks like Letta that enable persistent, retrievable memory across
interactions; to tools that allow agents to take action via integration (e.g., Composio),
authentication (e.g., Anon), and browser automation (e.g., Browserbase).

Another set of companies is giving agents more utility across payments (which includes
companies developing crypto wallets for agents as well as virtual cards) and voice
(development platforms and tools for testing AI voice applications as well as speech
models).

Meanwhile, demand for simplified, comprehensive deployment options is driving the rise of
AI agent development platforms — the most crowded infrastructure market on our map.

LLM developers including Cohere (with its North AI workspace) and Mistral have launched
their own agent development frameworks, while Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia all
offer AI agent development tooling. With many enterprises favoring established vendors due
to lower risk, big tech companies have significant advantages here.​

Trust & performance

Concerns around reliability and security have helped establish a market for agent evaluation
& observability tools. Early-stage companies are targeting applications such as automated
testing (e.g., Haize Labs) and performance tracking (e.g., Langfuse).

Multi-agent systems, where specialized sub-agents work together to complete tasks, also
show promise in improving accuracy. Insight Partners-backed CrewAI’s multi-agent
orchestration platform is reportedly already used by 40% of the Fortune 500.

© 2025 CB Insights | 15
AI Agent Bible


Multi-agent orchestration will evolve into an OS for enterprises — governing thousands
of agents with rules for autonomy, oversight, and auditability. Pre-built agents may help
early adopters, but long-term, enterprises will favor platforms that let them compose and
govern custom agents at scale.

João Moura
CEO, CrewAI

Vendors are also tackling reliability concerns directly. Based on our briefings with 20+ AI
agent startups in Q1’25, companies are using 5 primary methods to build user trust:

1.​ Transparency
2.​ Human oversight
3.​ Technical safeguards
4.​ Security & compliance
5.​ Continuous improvement

© 2025 CB Insights | 16
AI Agent Bible

Horizontal applications & job functions

Horizontal AI agent startups make up nearly half of the map and overall landscape.

This segment primarily features startups targeting enterprises, with industry-agnostic


applications across job functions like HR/recruiting, marketing, and security operations.
Companies in the productivity & personal assistants market, including OpenAI with its
Operator agent, are targeting consumers and employees directly.

The AI agent markets with the most traction — based on companies’ median Mosaic health
scores — are customer service and software development (which includes coding and code
review & testing agents). These markets are also among the most crowded due to the value
agents bring to well-defined workflows and testable environments.

We see this reflected in adoption, particularly at the customer service layer: Among 64
organizations surveyed by CB Insights in December 2024, two-thirds indicated they are using
or will be using AI agents in customer support in the next 12 months.

Overall, horizontal AI agent applications are more commercially mature compared to the
infrastructure and vertical segments, with over two-thirds of the market deploying or scaling
their solutions based on CBI Commercial Maturity scores. ​

© 2025 CB Insights | 17
AI Agent Bible

Vertical (industry-specific) applications

We expect increasing verticalization as startups carve out niches by solving industry-specific


customer problems, especially in areas with strict regulatory scrutiny and data sensitivity.

This category features companies catering to industries including:

●​ Financial services & insurance: The most crowded vertical category on the map with
11 companies, startups here are targeting a variety of finserv workflows such as
financial research (Boosted.ai and Wokelo), insurance sales & support (Alltius and
Indemn), and wealth advisory prospecting & operations (Finny AI and Powder).

●​ Healthcare: Solutions in this market aim to reduce the volume of manual tasks for
healthcare professionals across use cases like clinical documentation, revenue cycle
operations, call centers, and virtual triage. Solutions from companies like Thoughtful
AI (revenue cycle operations) and Hippocratic AI (staffing marketplace) are targeting
end-to-end healthcare workflows.

●​ Industrials: These companies look to optimize processes and equipment — including


control systems, robots, and other industrial machines — without relying on consistent
human intervention. For example, Composabl launched an agent platform in May
2024 that uses LLMs to create skills and goals for agents that can control industrial
equipment. Public companies like Palantir are also active in this space. Learn more in
our industrial AI agents & copilots market map. ​


The promise of autonomous agents cannot be fulfilled without solving context engineering.
Agents need the right context at the right time and in the right format to make reliable
decisions. Enterprises also require provenance and governance: knowing where information
originated, how it evolved, and ensuring compliance across sensitive domains. Current
approaches to agent memory still treat each user interaction in isolation, with little connection
to other touchpoints such as email, support cases, CRM data, or SaaS usage. Enterprises will
need context systems that unify these signals, track evolving relationships and business
states, and maintain controls and audit trails that make agents trustworthy at scale.​

Daniel Chalef
Founder and CEO, Zep AI

© 2025 CB Insights | 18
AI Agent Bible

The AI agent tech stack


We mined the CB Insights Business Graph to map the 135+ startups across 17 markets
forming the new AI agent tech stack. Discover which markets are gaining momentum,
identify investment opportunities, and find partners for building AI agents.

Published on 8/22/2025 — Link to report​

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●​ Voice AI emerges as a new battleground with an average Mosaic score of 756 and $400M raised
in 2025, while Meta acquired its first companies since 2022 (PlayAI and WaveForms AI) in this
space.

●​ Tech giants race to own agent communication standards with Anthropic's MCP, Google's A2A
Protocol, and IBM's Agent Communication Protocol all launching within a year. Professional
services firms and cloud providers are rapidly adopting these protocols, making them table stakes
across the value chain.

●​ Critical white space opportunities emerge across monetization, marketplaces, and cost
management as the AI agent stack matures

In under a year, the AI agent landscape has grown from roughly 300 players to thousands.
Agents are making their way into workflows across verticals, from e-commerce to
industrials.

Underpinning this momentum is an emerging tech stack. Infrastructure layers — from


foundation models to oversight — are helping enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI
agents more effectively.

Using the CB Insights Business Graph and proprietary signals, we mapped 135+ promising
private companies building infrastructure for AI agents.

Below the map, we outline the emerging markets and trends investors and strategy leaders
should be watching.

© 2025 CB Insights | 19
AI Agent Bible

We selected companies for inclusion based on Mosaic health scores (500+) and funding
recency (since 2023). Includes private companies only, organized according to their primary
focus. Excludes general enterprise workflow automation platforms and non-pure-play LLM
developers. This market map is not exhaustive of the space.

© 2025 CB Insights | 20
AI Agent Bible

Outlook & key takeaways

Private market momentum points to payments, voice, and security as key markets to watch

The AI agent tech stack is a high-momentum landscape, based on CB Insights Mosaic


startup health scores. Private companies across the markets outlined below have an average
Mosaic score of 768 — more than double the average of 370 for all private companies. They
also have an average Commercial Maturity Score of 3, indicating widespread solution
deployment.

A deeper dive into these scores, partnerships, and funding reveals 3 emerging markets to
watch:

●​ Voice AI is the new battleground for the next wave of AI agents: With an average
Mosaic score of 756 and nearly $400M in funding in 2025 so far, voice AI development
platforms are building momentum. Big tech also recognizes voice as an essential AI
building block — Meta’s first acquisitions since 2022 this year were PlayAI and
WaveForms AI, both operating in audio and voice AI.

●​ AI agent security startups see rapid momentum growth: AI agents create new attack
surfaces and data breach risks, driving urgency for agent security startups.
Companies in the market averaged a 56-point Mosaic score growth over 12 months,
with Zenity, WitnessAI, and TrojAI each gaining 100+ points. The companies with the
highest jumps in Mosaic score are partnering with larger tech firms and cybersecurity
leaders. Public and established companies have also entered the conversation, with
identity leader Okta and cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks both building agent
security into their platforms.

●​ AI agent payments startups get backing from incumbents: Agent payments


infrastructure is one of the more nascent markets in this tech stack, with an average
Commercial Maturity of 2.4 (validating) and an average Mosaic score of 697. The
barrier to entry in payments is high, requiring complex technical and regulatory
infrastructure. In an indication of the tech’s potential, established card and payment
networks are investing and partnering with startups in the market: Coinbase backed
Skyfire and Catena, Visa invested in Payman, and American Express participated in
Nekuda’s recent seed round. Others like Crossmint and pre-funding PayOS have
partnered with Visa and Mastercard.

© 2025 CB Insights | 21
AI Agent Bible

Major LLM providers and tech incumbents all try to own a piece of the open standards pie

The growth of AI agents and development platforms has created a need to facilitate
communication between agents and access to context. LLM developers and major tech
companies are competing to own these standards.

In less than a year:

●​ Anthropic launched Model Context Protocol (MCP), standardizing how AI agents


connect to external tools and data sources

●​ Google created the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol that allows agents to collaborate
with each other, regardless of underlying framework

●​ IBM introduced Agent Communication Protocol, which enables inter-agent


communication across technologies and systems within a local environment

These protocols have quickly become table stakes across the AI agent value chain.
Professional services firms like Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, and KPMG contributed to
Google’s A2A, and big tech companies like Microsoft and AWS support MCP. Meanwhile,
startups in the tool libraries & integrations platform market like Speakeasy and Stainless are
helping companies build MCP-compatible interfaces for their APIs (known as MCP servers),
enabling AI agents to interact with their services.

MCP for the win: Make your AI


smarter with our data and tool
Any MCP-compatible AI agent can tap
into CB Insights’ datasets and tools –
including ChatCBI – without a single line
of code. Install our server into your
environment to get started.

Learn more here

© 2025 CB Insights | 22
AI Agent Bible

Big tech pushes deeper into AI agent development

While the above market map highlights the private landscape, tech giants and incumbents
are also active across the AI agent infrastructure landscape. The top 3 global cloud providers
— Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — are expanding their AI agent offerings across
development tooling, hosting, orchestration, and more.

© 2025 CB Insights | 23
AI Agent Bible

With many enterprises favoring established vendors, big tech companies have significant
advantages in AI agent development. Similarly, enterprise software incumbents like
Salesforce (Agentforce) and ServiceNow (AI Agent Marketplace) have launched agent
platforms and marketplaces targeting their installed bases.

Yet startups across the stack are carving out defensible positions by solving specific
technical challenges and pushing the boundaries of what agents can do across areas like
multi-agent orchestration (CrewAI) and enterprise data preparation (LlamaIndex). In the
crowded AI agent development market, end-to-end platforms like WRITER and Dust are
differentiating with vertical-specific implementations and promising speedy deployments. ​


High-value agents deeply understand the nuances of a business and its compliance
requirements. They can access relevant contextual information about their environment such
as user identities, business rules, knowledge graphs, and historical data. They can use
different reasoning patterns to make decisions and adapt their approach when problems
change. And they can remember their decisions across sessions and improve based on
feedback. Building these agents on a platform like WRITER, where you can set guardrails for
agent activities and control the systems they have access to, is how businesses achieve
next-level scale and ROI.

May Habib
CEO, WRITER

© 2025 CB Insights | 24
AI Agent Bible

Autonomous agents drive the need for an oversight layer

AI agent reliability remains a major challenge in the landscape. Agents that fail, hallucinate,
or behave unpredictably create immediate business risk.

This is driving activity across observability, evaluation, and governance applications. The
market has already seen 2 acquisitions in 2025 YTD. Early-stage activity highlights emerging
technical needs, such as voice agent testing, with both Cekura ($2.4M seed) and Coval
($3.3M seed) focusing on evaluating and monitoring voice AI agents via simulated
conversations.

Securing agents is a growing priority across the stack. Based on one-year funding activity,
the AI agent security & risk management market is the fastest-growing cybersecurity
segment we track as agents proliferate across enterprise environments. ​

White space opportunities for the AI agent ecosystem

As the AI agent tech stack matures, we predict the following areas will attract increasing
innovation based on early-stage activity and recent product launches:

●​ AI agent marketplaces: Distribution is a competitive advantage, with all major cloud


providers launching dedicated AI agent marketplaces, including AWS in July 2025.
Companies like Olas and Agent.ai are looking to differentiate through specialized
agent discovery and customization.

●​ AI agent monetization: Monetization emerges as an untapped opportunity, with


companies like Paid giving visibility into AI agent costs and profit opportunities, and
AGI Open Network tokenizes AI agents as tradable assets on blockchain networks.

●​ Cost management: At the end of the AI agent value chain, cost monitoring &
productivity measurement will become more important as agents operate
autonomously. For example, a16z-backed Larridin aims to give organizations visibility
into AI spend and tool effectiveness. Other companies like coding AI agent Cline are
building cost control solutions directly into their platforms to manage AI inference
expenses.

© 2025 CB Insights | 25
AI Agent Bible

Source: CB Insights Deal Agent​

Category overview

Click into each market to view the full description and market players on the CB Insights
platform.

Foundation models & infrastructure

Large language models (LLMs) form the cognitive core of AI agents. This layer also covers
the compute, hosting, and inference systems required to serve models at scale.

●​ LLM developers
●​ Model deployment & serving

© 2025 CB Insights | 26
AI Agent Bible

Agent frameworks & development platforms

Companies in this layer provide the software frameworks, SDKs, and low-code environments
used to design, build, and deploy AI agents across different modalities and use cases.

●​ AI agent development platforms (including developer frameworks & platforms and


low-code platforms)
●​ Voice
●​ Payments infrastructure

Tool integration

AI agents leverage “tools” to interact with external systems and perform real-world actions,
such as browsing the web. This includes Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations
that standardize how agents connect to data sources and tools.

●​ Browser infrastructure
●​ AI web search APIs & scrapers
●​ Tool libraries & integration platforms

Context

This layer supplies agents with structured data, embeddings, and memory systems so they
can retain, retrieve, and apply relevant information over time.

●​ LLM data preparation platforms


●​ Vector databases
●​ Memory management

Orchestration

This is the coordination layer that manages complex workflows involving multiple AI agents
or models.

●​ Multi-agent systems & orchestration


●​ LLM benchmarking & model routing

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Oversight

Companies here target authentication, security, monitoring, and governance functions that
ensure agent actions remain safe, compliant, and aligned with intended outcomes.

●​ Authentication platforms
●​ Security & risk management platforms
●​ Observability, evaluation, & governance


Enterprise AI’s value multiplies when specialized agents collaborate across vendors and
organizations. The bottleneck isn’t smarter individual agents — it’s the missing infrastructure
that lets them discover each other, verify identities, and coordinate securely at machine
speed. Think early internet before TCP/IP: brilliant isolated systems that couldn’t talk. The
Linux Foundation AGNTCY project solves this with open components for agent discovery,
identity, messaging, and observability. We’re building the plumbing that turns agent islands into
collaborative workflows, because enterprises need specialized agents from multiple vendors
working together, not vendor lock-in.

Guillaume de Saint Marc


VP Engineering, Outshift by Cisco


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The AI agent revenue race — September’s top earners show


coding dominates commercialization
AI agent companies continue to grow revenue at lightning speed. We used CB Insights
revenue data to rank the top private startups offering AI agents as of this month.

Published 9/22/2025 — Link to report

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●​ Coding AI agents are racing ahead in commercialization, with 6 software development agents making
the top rankings, including market leaders like Anysphere’s Cursor ($500M in ARR) and Replit ($150M).
These startups have demonstrated that they’re the most capital-efficient category, averaging $1.4M
revenue per employee (compared to $594K per employee across all top agent categories). We recently
identified the leaders of coding AI by market share — read more here.
●​ Customer service AI agents command the highest valuation premiums, averaging 219x revenue
multiples (compared to 80x across all top revenue-generating AI agents). This valuation gap reflects
investor confidence in the sector’s applicability and the expectation that businesses will rapidly replace
human support teams with AI agents.
●​ These revenue leaders average just 3.8 years old. Despite their youth, CB Insights’ Commercial
Maturity data shows the majority are already deploying or scaling their products, demonstrating the
industry’s compressed timelines from startup to commercial success.

AI agent startups are showing no signs of slowing down.

Since we published our first agent revenue ranking in July, the sector has continued to gain
significant momentum: Harvey reached the $100M revenue threshold, category leaders like
Sana Labs are exiting (Workday’s $1.1B acquisition), and startups like Sierra are raising
mega-rounds ($350M Series D at a $10B valuation).

Using CB Insights revenue data, we identified the top private startups generating $10M+ in
revenue that offer AI agents as their primary offering and analyzed their revenue
performance across categories (see the graphic below).

If you are an AI agent startup and want to submit your company’s revenue data, please reach
out to [email protected].

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AI agents make inroads across enterprise


workflows
From Y Combinator’s latest batch to cloud giants’ strategies, how agents are transforming
coding, customer service, and backend operations​

Y Combinator’s 2025 Spring batch reveals the future of agentic AI


We analyze Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch to uncover the top trends in agentic AI,
spanning workflow automation, software development, and applications in highly regulated
industries.

Published 6/20/2025 — Link to report

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●​ Software development agents are evolving beyond coding to include critical guardrails: With 11
companies in this category and 2025 funding (for the broader market) already outpacing 2024 by 3x,
startups are moving beyond basic coding assistance to provide testing, QA, code review, and
debugging solutions. Over half focus specifically on making “vibe coding” less risky through
browser-based testing agents and automated review systems, addressing reliability concerns that
have hindered wider enterprise adoption.
●​ Web-browsing agents gather steam beyond general-purpose use: Y Combinator backs over 50% of
the existing web-browsing agent market, but these startups are differentiating through targeted
applications like legacy system integration, software testing, and quality assurance. This shift toward
specialized browsing agents provides more contextual data access, improving decision-making and
autonomy compared to general-purpose alternatives.
●​ Highly regulated industries are becoming prime targets for vertical AI agents: Healthcare and
financial services represent 19% of agentic AI companies in this batch, with 32% of verticalized agents
actively deploying solutions and another 45% in emerging/validating stages. Beyond traditional
customer service applications, startups are tackling industry-specific workflows like mortgage
processing and healthcare operations, with some beginning to handle autonomous research functions
that could eventually replace human roles entirely.



Y Combinator‘s Spring 2025 batch is a preview of agentic AI’s future: over half of the 144
companies are building agentic AI solutions, providing valuable insights for enterprise AI
strategies.

The accelerator that spotted OpenAI, Airbnb, and Stripe before they became household
names is now placing bets across 4 key agentic AI areas: software development guardrails

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that de-risk “vibe coding”, web-browsing agents, backend workflow automation, and vertical
agents penetrating highly regulated industries.

For strategy teams, this represents both a roadmap of where agentic AI is heading and a
curated list of potential acquisition targets, partners, and competitive threats.

Using CB Insights, we mapped the 70+ agentic AI companies in the Y Combinator’s 2025
Spring batch across 18 different categories.

De-risking AI software development

Software development and testing is the second-largest agentic AI category of this batch,
with 11 companies. This reflects the fact that software development AI agents are still
booming, with 2025 funding already outpacing 2024 by 3x. Yet this cohort goes beyond
coding AI agents, providing engineering support, QA, and guardrails to make vibe coding less
risky.

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A key focus of these companies is to make vibe coding less risky. For example, over half of
the startups in this category focus on testing and review. Operative deploys browser agents
that can test coding agents. Docket and Propolis use web agents to QA code and products.
Startup Cubic reduces code review bottlenecks, and Jazzberry debugs code, both of which
are issues becoming more prominent with the rise of vibe coding.

A handful of companies are developing solutions to support software engineers in vibe


coding and automated code generation. Delty is an AI agent that helps with system design
and architecture based on deep codebase understanding, and StarSling provides AI agents to
augment DevOps.

These new tools will accelerate the growth of more reliable AI software development,
boosting existing leaders in the space such as Cursor who could look to acquire them.​

Web-browsing agents gather steam beyond general-purpose use

Y Combinator’s dominance in web-browsing agents – backing over 50% of the existing


market — signals this emerging category’s potential to become critical infrastructure for
agentic AI. LLM giants like OpenAI are already building their own browser agents, but this
isn’t deterring startups from entering the space

The Spring 2025 batch reveals how these startups are differentiating themselves by targeting
high-value, specific applications rather than building general-purpose agents.

For example, Kaizen provides browser agents that enable outdated, legacy systems to
connect with websites without the need for an API. Operative and Propolis are pioneering the
use of browsing agents for software testing and quality assurance, areas where automation
has historically struggled.

Agents capable of accessing and browsing the web can access more data and information
than what is typically available in a company’s systems. This helps provide more context to
agentic systems, improving decision-making, and ultimately autonomy. ​

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Agents are coming for the backend

Today, most AI agents focus on frontend interactions and applications, with customer
service and enterprise workflow being 2 of the most well-funded AI agent markets. This Y
Combinator cohort signals how agents are moving to the backend.

Cactus, Combinely, and Hemut are building back-office systems in areas like accounting and
reporting. Caucus and Cohesive developed agent-based CRMs that go beyond the traditional
enterprise space to target small businesses and government. Odapt allows custom
application development in areas like finance and marketing, built on top of existing tools
and systems. Cleon and Auctor AI are automating system implementations.

Currently, these companies focus on narrowly defined, specialized backend workflows.


Expanding into more end-to-end workflows will require greater trust in agentic AI
applications.

This trust can be partially built through the ability to benchmark AI agent performance.
Kashikoi, Janus, and The LLM Data Company – all part of this Spring cohort – are working on
this today. ​

AI agents keep making inroads in highly regulated industries

Once an obstacle for new AI applications, the most highly regulated industries have emerged
as targets for agentic AI startups. 32% of verticalized AI agent companies are actively
deploying solutions, and 23% and 22% are emerging and validating, respectively, suggesting
an oncoming growth spurt.

This impending growth is fully displayed with this batch of Y Combinator companies,
particularly in healthcare and financial services, which represent 19% of the agentic AI
companies in this year’s Spring cohort.

Customer service and engagement are common areas of focus within these verticals, with
companies like Eloquent AI (financial services), Trapeze (healthcare), and Kaelio (healthcare).
Other startups are delving deeper into industry-specific workflows, like Chestnut Mortgage
and Approval AI (lending and mortgage), and Bitboard (healthcare operations).

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We expect the next generation of industry-focused AI agent companies to go beyond


operational support and handle research autonomously.

A handful of companies in this batch tackle research assistance today, like Bramante
Biologics and SynthioLabs in healthcare and Scalar Field for investment research. These
startups lay the foundation for a future in which AI agents can proactively source, digest, and
deliver information to human users or automate their roles altogether.​

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Building the agent economy: How cloud leaders are shaping AI’s
next frontier
The top 3 cloud providers globally are racing to support AI agents and the companies
enabling them. This report analyzes their strategies — based on partnerships, startup
investments, and internal projects — to see how they're capitalizing on this next wave of
monetization in AI.

Published 5/7/2025 — Link to report

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●​ Amazon positions itself as a neutral infrastructure layer for the agentic ecosystem, betting on
in-house chips and seeding its ecosystem with 16 total investments in agent startups. These
investments, which primarily take the form of cloud credits rather than equity, form a low-risk,
high-volume strategy to lowering the barriers to building on AWS. Amazon’s approach combines
enterprise enablement with strategic consumer-facing investments, signaling potential integration ​
with its broader ecosystem.
●​ Google’s agentic offering centers around its Gemini foundation models, creating an open
marketplace for partner-built agents leveraging its technological leadership — supported by 46 total
partnerships and its Agent2Agent protocol. This partner-centric approach means Google can quickly
populate its marketplace with specialized agents while maintaining Gemini as the differentiating
foundation technology.
●​ Microsoft emphasizes a pre-built suite of agentic solutions to drive enterprise adoption, embedding
Copilot agents throughout its productivity ecosystem. The company recently achieved 15M GitHub
Copilot users, up 4x YoY, and recorded 1M custom agents created on its SharePoint and Copilot Studio
platforms. Microsoft’s expansive enterprise client base gives it an in-built audience for new agent
products.



As the AI boom accelerates, the top 3 global cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, and
Google — are racing to capture a larger share of enterprise AI spend. Central to this shift is
the rise of AI agents: intelligent systems capable of performing multi-step tasks, interacting
autonomously with tools and data, and automating business workflows.

Drawing on CB Insights’ Business Graph, which links data across private investments,
business relationships, and public company disclosures, we surface key signals on how each
cloud player is positioning itself in the agentic AI space and what their next move could be.

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Note: Since publication, Amazon also adopted Google's A2A protocol and launched its own
dedicated agent marketplace.

While all 3 providers are investing heavily in infrastructure to support agentic AI, they are
taking distinct paths to monetization and market control — from proprietary models and
low-code build tools to strategic partnerships and go-to-market accelerators.

Understanding these differences will prove critical in evaluating cloud alignment, competitive
positioning, and agent-enabled product strategy.​

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Amazon positions itself as the neutral infrastructure layer for the agentic ecosystem

Amazon is approaching the agentic AI landscape as a pragmatic infrastructure provider, with


a strategic bias toward enabling partners rather than competing with its own agent suite.
This partner-first approach comes at a critical time, as Amazon has been playing catch-up in
the agentic race — although recent moves, including forming a dedicated agentic AI group in
March 2025 and unveiling its Nova foundational models in December 2024, signal a growing
focus.

Amazon is betting on its in-house chips, Trainium and Inferentia2, to attract agentic AI
workflows, as these chips can help reduce the cost and energy consumption associated with
AI model training and inference. Amazon has already formed several partnerships with
agentic AI startups such as Poolside and NinjaTech for them to train and run their AI agents
on its in-house chips.

This approach — of providing robust infrastructure and letting specialized partners build
solutions on top — is also reflected in its agent development tool offerings. While developers
can build agents using Amazon Bedrock Agents, Amazon (unlike Google or Microsoft)
doesn’t directly emphasize low-code/no-code solutions, instead enabling partners like
SnapLogic to build such tools on its platform.

The company has also been investing heavily in agentic AI startups, with 16 unique
investments since 2023 — more than both Google and Microsoft combined. However, 12 of
these were made through non-equity accelerator programs that provide cloud credits and
technical enablement rather than capital.

This low-risk, high-volume approach lowers the barriers to building on AWS while seeding
future clients at minimal cost. It also embeds AWS infrastructure into early-stage agent
development, capturing mindshare before competitors can gain traction.

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Amazon’s investments reveal a strategic interest in consumer-facing AI applications that


complement its existing business. Three of its four equity investments are in
consumer-focused companies — Please and NinjaTech (personal AI agents) and Cartesia
(voice AI) — aligning with Amazon’s consumer strategy and the recent launch of Nova Act, its
web-browsing agentic AI targeting developers.

These investments suggest AWS is taking a dual strategy: framing itself as an enterprise
infrastructure provider for partners while developing consumer-facing capabilities that could
enhance Amazon’s broader ecosystem, including potentially a revamped Alexa.

This could lead Amazon to make an acquisition that accelerates monetization of


consumer-facing agents. Acquiring a startup developing agent payment infrastructure, for
instance, would support efforts to enable autonomous transactions.​

Google’s agentic offering centers around its Gemini foundation models

Google has positioned itself as the central platform provider in the agentic AI landscape,
building a comprehensive ecosystem centered around its proprietary Gemini foundation
models. Unlike Amazon’s infrastructure-focused approach or Microsoft’s enterprise
application strategy, Google is creating an open marketplace for partner-built agents that
leverage its technological leadership.

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To boost adoption of its Gemini models for agentic AI, Google unveiled its AI Agent Space
last year, a dedicated marketplace exclusively for partners’ agents. This is complemented by
Google’s agent interoperability initiative, the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, which enables AI
agents to communicate effectively regardless of their underlying frameworks or vendors. As
a sign of traction for A2A, Microsoft recently announced it would adopt the protocol, in
addition to the 50+ supporting partners Google already unveiled early April this year.

Google leads in agent-related partnerships with 46 collaborations — 2x as many as Microsoft


and Amazon. Almost half of these are with agentic AI startups, including AI coding agents
like Cursor, Augment Code, and Replit. This partner-centric approach means Google can
quickly populate its marketplace with specialized agents while maintaining Gemini as the
differentiating foundation technology.

Source: CB Insights — Google’s business relationships. Note: includes business relationships for Google Cloud.

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Enterprise partnerships also demonstrate Google’s strategy in action. Its recent Salesforce
collaboration will empower Salesforce customers to build Agentforce agents using Gemini,
while Deloitte has launched over 100 ready-to-deploy AI agents powered by Google’s models.
According to Google Cloud, more than 60% of generative AI startups are now building on its
platform.

Google has also been partnering with leading venture capital firms and accelerators, like
Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator, to promote the use of its technology (such as TPUs
and Gemini models) to fast-growing startups that are building with AI.

Google’s development toolkits — Vertex AI Agent Builder, Agent Designer in Agentspace, and
Agent Development Kit — offer solutions for both technical developers and non-technical
users, reflecting Google’s goal of becoming the complete platform for agent creators and
consumers alike.

Rather than building a comprehensive first-party agent suite, Google is embedding itself into
the tech stack of emerging agentic players, making Gemini the platform of choice for agent
innovation.

To maintain its edge in safe scaling and cross-agent coordination, Google may look to
acquire companies focused on monitoring, governance, and lifecycle tooling, such as Galileo
— a leader in AI evaluation backed by Databricks and ServiceNow.​

Microsoft emphasizes a pre-built suite of agentic solutions to drive enterprise


adoption

Microsoft’s offerings center around a comprehensive suite of pre-built agents deeply


integrated into its productivity ecosystem. While Amazon focuses on infrastructure and
Google on promoting its foundational models, Microsoft aims to deliver immediate business
value through turnkey solutions.

The company leads the market in pre-built agent offerings, with its Copilot suite including
Analyst, Researcher, Security, and Dynamics 365 autonomous agents — all powered by its
exclusive access to OpenAI’s models.

This strategy has driven strong adoption: Microsoft’s Q3 FY’25 earnings call revealed that
GitHub Copilot’s developer base has surpassed 15M users (up 4x YoY), while 1M custom
agents were created during that quarter through Copilot Studio and SharePoint.

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Source: CB Insights — Microsoft Earnings Insights

Microsoft’s development tools (Copilot Studio, Azure AI Agent Service) cater to both
technical and non-technical users, but the company’s primary advantage comes from
embedding agentic capabilities throughout its productivity ecosystem. The November 2024
launch of Magentic-One, a multi-agent system for enterprise deployment, further enhances
Microsoft’s position in business workflows.

Unlike Amazon’s broad ecosystem-seeding or Google’s push to embed Gemini models into
any agentic workflow, Microsoft concentrates on initiatives that complement its in-house
agentic tools. Its partnership with Moveworks exemplifies this strategy, allowing employees
to access Moveworks’ specialized agents directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams.

Microsoft’s approach demonstrates the power of integration over technological


differentiation in driving enterprise adoption. By leveraging its existing relationships and
software suite, Microsoft has established dominance in high-value business workflows
where agentic AI delivers immediate productivity gains — and where competitors must
overcome Microsoft’s entrenched position.

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To round out its Copilot suite and reinforce its workflow ownership strategy, Microsoft may
seek acquisitions in sectors where it lacks native agent offerings, like recruiting, healthcare
administration, or logistics.​

The summer of vibe coding is over — How reasoning models


broke the economics of AI code generation
Reasoning models have supercharged coding AI agents, driving adoption and growth, but at
the cost of higher inference expenses that are squeezing margins. This report explores how
these companies are adapting and what lessons other AI agent markets can take from
coding.

Published 8/28/2025 — Link to report


What started as a gold rush in AI-powered coding may be turning into a money pit, offering a
preview of challenges awaiting other AI agent categories.

Companies that hit $100M+ ARR in months, like Anysphere (maker of Cursor) and Lovable,
now face LLM inference costs growing up to 20x, forcing rate limits and price hikes, and
putting reverse acqui-hires (hiring founders and licensing the tech) on the table as some
founders seek exits.

Using CB Insights’ data on company momentum, exit probabilities, and customer sentiment,
we analyzed how the coding AI market is adapting to this economic shock and what other AI
agent companies (and their backers) can learn:

●​ Reasoning models spark vibe coding’s explosive growth


●​ Reasoning token shock pushes adoption of new pricing models
●​ Margin pressure drives consolidation of talent in the coding AI agents market
●​ Open models and usage-based pricing offer solutions to the market’s current
challenges

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Reasoning models spark vibe coding’s explosive growth

The coding AI agents and copilots market has been on a roll, generating an estimated $1.1B
in revenue in 2024 and minting unicorns in as little as 6 months, which is 4x faster than the AI
industry average.

Anthropic’s release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024 has primarily driven this early
momentum. This technology helped developers transition from autocomplete to partial
delegation of coding tasks with a model that could reliably call tools and handle multi-file
edits.

But it is the emergence of reasoning models, and specifically Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s
reasoning mode in February 2025, that made vibe coding possible — giving a high‑level goal
and delegating multi‑step implementation to the AI. Developers could now set goals like
“make this component responsive” or “add error handling throughout” and let the AI plan and
execute the changes, sparking explosive growth in the space:

●​ Anysphere’s ARR grew 5x in 6 months, from $100M in December 2024 to $500M in


June 2025.
●​ Replit’s ARR increased from $10M at the end of 2024 to $144M in July 2025.
●​ Lovable became one of the fastest-growing software startups, reaching $100M in ARR
just 8 months after launching.

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Reasoning token shock pushes adoption of new pricing models

As revenue surged on the back of reasoning, costs rose even faster.

Reasoning models inflate output‑token volume roughly 20x, according to Artificial Analysis.
Because inference is billed per token — and output tokens are typically priced higher than
input — that surge translates directly into higher compute cost. Anthropic’s May 2025
step‑ups on Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 (priced at roughly 5x prior models) added further pressure
just as adoption was accelerating.

This is particularly impacting enterprise deals, which businesses often negotiate on an


annual, per‑seat basis. That structure leaves vendors carrying the risk of uncapped compute
costs while revenue stays fixed.

Using CB Insights Customer Sentiment data, we find most contracts fall between roughly
$6K and $100K a year, with a median around $25K for a 50‑developer team. While margins
once sat at 80%-90% on these contracts, compute costs from reasoning models can flip
margins deeply negative.

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The strain showed up quickly. Cursor tightened rate limits and introduced overage charges
despite crossing $500M in ARR, prompting backlash and refunds. Anthropic throttled Claude
Code after individual users exceeded $10K in monthly compute on $200 plans.

Vendors are shifting to pass‑through and usage‑based pricing to align revenue with compute
cost. Companies employing usage‑based approaches show stronger momentum in our
Mosaic data (median Momentum Mosaic of 683 vs. 671 for the broader market), but
enterprise buyers are pushing back on variable bills and month‑to‑month swings.

Expect coding AI agent vendors to adapt pricing and GTM: moving to seat‑plus‑usage
hybrids, stricter per‑seat compute guardrails, and model tiering that reserves reasoning for
high‑impact work. ARR growth will moderate as flat‑fee expansion gives way to
usage‑aligned pricing.​

Margin pressure drives consolidation of talent in the coding AI agents market

Reasoning-driven margin compression is forcing consolidation in a category that has seen


dozens of new entrants over the past 12 months.

Traditional acquisitions aren’t off the table, but acqui‑hires and reverse acqui‑hires have
become the most active exit structures recently — albeit with trade‑offs.

OpenAI and Anthropic have logged 3 acqui‑hires since early 2025. Across AI, recent moves
(e.g., Microsoft–Inflection AI, Amazon–Adept, and Meta–Scale) signal a tilt to
talent‑plus‑license amid potential antitrust scrutiny. In coding AI agents, Windsurf’s failed
sale and Google’s follow‑on reverse acqui-hire underscore the pattern of buyers taking teams
and leaving products behind.

In these deals, acquirers hire the team and license the tech, leaving customer contracts and
infrastructure — and the associated compute liabilities — outside the transaction. What
they’re buying isn’t raw model IP; they’re buying proven operators with successful track
records.

CB Insights’ exit probability analysis points to the next likely targets: companies with high
Momentum Mosaic scores but lower probabilities of traditional exits.

The likely cause: private‑market valuations have outrun what strategics or public investors
will pay given reasoning‑driven margin pressure, product overlap, and antitrust scrutiny —
making full‑company M&A or near‑term IPOs harder to underwrite.

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Seven stand out as potential targets: Sourcegraph, Augment Code, JetBrains, Qodo, Lovable,
Cognition, and Harness.

Expect more reverse acqui-hire deals over the next few quarters as big tech continues to
push for talent while coding AI agent companies struggle under margin pressures.​

Open models and usage-based pricing offer solutions to the market’s current
challenges

Against that backdrop, two levers dominate today: open models and usage‑aligned pricing.
Here’s how each is playing out — and where it falls short.​

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Open models cut costs, but enterprise requirements slow adoption

Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2, Alibaba’s Qwen-Coder, and Z.ai’s GLM-4.5 approach Claude on coding
tasks at a fraction of the cost, and OpenAI’s gpt‑oss goes a step further by offering a model
that can run on consumer hardware.

Yet users need to access these models either through self-hosting or a third party. For
enterprises, that means fresh security reviews, stringent uptime service level agreements
(SLAs), multi-hour agent-run testing, and new infrastructure to manage.

The result is slower adoption, especially for six‑figure contracts that expect Claude‑level
reliability.​

Usage-based pricing fixes vendor margins, but most enterprises resist variable bills

Buyers tell us that token-metered pricing is difficult to budget, and expectations around costs
for these tools are already set. CFOs want to anchor budgets and avoid month-to-month
swings tied to release cycles, while usage-based pricing is the exact opposite.

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In the near term, expect a shift from per‑message metering to effort‑based task pricing:
agents quote a fixed rate for a defined outcome (e.g., “add error handling across this service”
or “convert this component to TypeScript”), bundling planning, tool calls, and verification into
a single charge with a visible pre‑estimate. Tasks are tiered (S/M/L) with caps on reasoning
usage and admin‑approved overages, giving CFOs predictable bills while keeping compute
under control.​

This dynamic won’t be limited to coding

Other agent categories with surging usage are likely to rework pricing and contracts as
reasoning costs mount.

Customer service is already operating on usage/outcome models. For example, in May 2025,
Salesforce’s Agentforce shifted prices from $2 per conversation to a hybrid-usage Flex
Credits system, tying credits to necessary actions for an outcome. Zendesk did a similar shift
in pricing strategy in November 2024. Yet reasoning‑heavy workloads still create margin risk
when the compute to achieve a resolution outstrips the value captured.

Beyond customer service, expect similar recalibrations across legal, healthcare, and sales
agents. Outcome‑ or usage‑based models don’t fully eliminate compute risk. Explosive
top‑line growth can mask deteriorating unit economics as reasoning workloads scale, and
recent mega‑rounds may not be enough to foot the bill. Many players will reprice, add stricter
usage guardrails, or raise additional capital to stay in the game.

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Industry-specific applications gain momentum


Vertical-specific agents gaining traction in retail, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing with
real-world deployments and measurable ROI​

3 markets fueling the shift to agentic commerce


The building blocks of agentic shopping are emerging. In this report we highlight the markets
gaining traction, who’s leading, and what’s next.

Published 8/4/2025 — Link to report​

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●​ Generative engine optimization (GEO) is emerging as the next frontier in digital visibility. As AI
platforms become major gateways to online shopping, startups and established SEO firms alike are
racing to help brands measure and boost their visibility in AI-generated responses. Nearly 40% of
players in this market have launched in the last 2 years, and early leaders like Profound are gaining
traction from major investors and brands. AI summaries on Google are already leading to declines in
clicks across industries – as the trend accelerates and more consumers shop directly on AI
platforms, GEO will become essential to shaping AI-driven commerce.
●​ Retail AI agents are evolving beyond chatbots — and setting the stage for fully autonomous
shopping. Retail AI agents are expanding beyond customer support to play a larger role in
personalization and shopper engagement. Startups building purpose-built agents for retail and
consumer use cases are seeing the fastest growth in CB Insights Mosaic scores, which measure
company health and potential. For instance, the Mosaic score for Decagon, which serves brands
including Gopuff and Curology, climbed 33% in the last year. Early adoption will give merchants a
strategic edge: introducing and training agents now can build consumer trust, gather data, and
prepare retailers’ operations for the leap to autonomous commerce.
●​ Agentic payments are quickly moving from concept to infrastructure. Almost half of the companies
in the growing AI agent payments infrastructure market have partnered with or raised money from
established payment leaders. While the startups developing solutions for AI payment rails have the
agility and technical infrastructure that the incumbents need, the major players offer the early-stage
companies long-built customer trust. Effective and multi-pronged partnerships will be essential as
these tools develop.


Agentic shopping is the next big opportunity in commerce. Tech and payments leaders are
already betting on the shift to AI-driven interfaces. But a growing wave of startups is also
emerging, developing the building blocks for fully autonomous shopping.

Investors, merchants, and brands can seize this opportunity now, targeting the early movers
for investment or partnership ahead of agentic shopping’s arrival.

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We’ve been tracking these emerging solutions on our agentic commerce Watchlist. Within
this list, we’ve identified 3 breakout markets, each accelerating a different piece of the
agent-led shopping journey.

Using CB Insights’ Business Graph, which connects data across private investments,
partnerships, and public company moves, we surfaced the key signals showing how startups
and incumbents are building the infrastructure for agentic commerce.

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Generative engine optimization (GEO) is emerging as the next frontier in digital


visibility.

As AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews become entry points for
commerce, a new ad model is taking shape. Adobe reported a 1300% year-over-year spike in
holiday traffic to US e-commerce sites from generative AI platforms — a trend that’s only
accelerating. With OpenAI testing native checkout in partnership with Shopify, the urgency for
brands to understand and shape their presence on these platforms is growing fast.

A wave of GEO-focused startups is racing to define the space. Nearly 40% of players in this
market have launched in the last two years, including 4 of the 5 companies with the highest
CB Insights Mosaic score, which measures company health and momentum. The companies
are building tools to monitor brand visibility in AI-generated answers and optimize positioning
across AI interfaces.

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Profound, ranked at the top for Mosaic, is setting the pace. Since August 2024, it’s raised 2
early-stage rounds and landed clients like Indeed, U.S. Bank, and Mejuri. Its platform helps
brands audit how AI sees their sites, understand what users are asking, and increase visibility
through features like ChatGPT Shopping.

Traditional SEO firms and marketing agencies are also taking notice. Players like Surfer and
Thrive Internet Marketing are adding GEO capabilities to stay competitive, signaling a coming
convergence between established players and AI-native upstarts.

With more AI platforms enabling purchases directly through their interfaces, GEO is
becoming a critical layer in digital commerce strategy. Merchants that build GEO muscle now
will be better positioned to influence the AI-driven journeys of tomorrow.​

Retail AI agents are evolving beyond chatbots — and setting the stage for fully
autonomous shopping.

A new wave of AI agent companies is building tools that integrate directly into merchants’
e-commerce infrastructure. These agents don’t yet handle checkout, but they’re already
managing product recommendations, support requests, order tracking, and customer
preferences — expanding their role in shaping the digital shopping experience.

Enterprise platforms like Sierra and DRUID are moving into the space, but it’s the rise of AI
startups developing applications specifically for retail that are accelerating adoption in the
industry. These early movers are helping retailers gather critical consumer data and refine
agentic interactions long before agents begin transacting on behalf of shoppers.

Startups building purpose-built agents for retail and consumer use cases are seeing the
fastest growth in CB Insights Mosaic scores, which measure company health and potential.

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Decagon’s Mosaic score climbed 33% in the last year following its $131M Series C round in
June 2025, which pushed the company to unicorn status. Its agent helps consumers manage
billing, preferences, and support across brands like Gopuff, Oura, Curology, Hertz, and Bilt.

Big Sur AI, whose score rose 14% since 2024, is extending its product suite from AI sales
agents to include content marketing and data science capabilities. Its tools, available
through Google Cloud Marketplace, are already helping clients like Rad Power Bikes and
Wyze improve product discovery and merchandising.

As agent-based tools scale across commerce, early deployment offers a critical advantage.
By introducing agents now, retailers can build consumer trust, gather behavioral data, and
prepare their systems for the next leap — from support to autonomous commerce.​

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Agentic payments are quickly moving from concept to infrastructure.

One of the biggest barriers to fully autonomous shopping is enabling secure, real-time
transactions. A new class of startups is tackling this challenge head-on, building AI-native
payment rails and digital wallets that let users authorize — and limit — spending by AI agents.

But solving agentic payments goes beyond infrastructure. It requires seamless


authentication, fraud detection, and above all, consumer trust that these agents can transact
safely on their behalf.

These hurdles have accelerated collaboration between fintech incumbents and startups.
Strategic investments and partnerships are laying the foundation for the next phase of
agentic commerce.

Skyfire, the second-highest ranked company by Mosaic score, raised $1M in October 2024
from Coinbase Ventures, with prior backing from Circle and Ripple. Its platform gives AI
agents dedicated digital wallets, allowing users to preload funds for controlled purchasing.

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Nekuda, another early mover, raised a $5M seed round in May 2025 from American Express
Ventures and Visa Ventures. The company’s tools include secure agent wallets and
programmable guardrails that let users set spending limits and authentication protocols.

Incumbents are also building their own capabilities. In April 2025, Mastercard and Visa
revealed they were developing agentic payment systems — coinciding with the launch of
PayOS, a startup partnering with both companies. While no public solutions have launched
yet, the timing signals a major push into AI-native commerce, despite the technical and
regulatory complexity.

Perplexity’s approach points to what’s next. The company launched its agentic commerce
feature, Buy with Pro, in late 2024 with support from Shopify and Stripe’s one-time virtual
card system. In 2025, Perplexity expanded with PayPal, allowing in-platform purchases via
Venmo and PayPal’s secure tokenized wallet, and began working with embedded checkout
provider Firmly.

As fintech giants, AI startups, and commerce platforms converge on the agentic payments
challenge, early collaboration is shaping how future transactions will happen: securely,
autonomously, and inside the AI interfaces consumers already trust.​

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The industrial AI agents & copilots market map


We map out 60+ companies developing AI agents & copilots for industrial applications,
including manufacturing, logistics, semiconductors, defense, and construction.

Published 12/23/2024 — Link to report

From early-stage startups to established firms, companies are racing to develop AI agents &
copilots across the industrials sector.

While AI copilots — which work alongside humans to speed up their workflows — currently
comprise 90% of company activity, the tech will serve as a stepping stone to more
autonomous solutions in the coming years. Eventually, AI agents could manage entire
industrial processes, shifting human roles from operational tasks to strategic oversight.​

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●​ 75% of deals in the space go to early-stage startups, suggesting high development potential in the
years ahead, especially as copilots gain more agent-like capabilities. The nascent space has no clear
leaders yet, signaling a window of opportunity for industrials players to gain an early edge.

●​ Manufacturing is seeing the most activity compared to verticals like defense, warehousing, and
semiconductors. The most crowded markets are manufacturing optimization and digital work
instructions, where vendors are building copilots on top of existing technologies like analytics
platforms and augmented reality headsets. Improving on current workflows with a copilot likely offers
the quickest path to commercialization vs. developing autonomous agents as standalone products.

●​ Big tech is laying the groundwork for industrial AI agents & copilots, with Microsoft forming
partnerships with all 14 of the public industrials companies in this map. Google has also inked
notable partnerships here. By owning the infrastructure, these tech giants will control how AI
develops across industries, creating both dependencies and efficiencies for businesses adopting
their solutions.

To help industry leaders understand the current landscape and identify key players, we
mapped 68 AI agent & copilot developers across 12 markets.

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In the future agents will work truly end‑to‑end: reading demand signals, engaging suppliers,
negotiating, issuing/expediting POs, and closing the loop in the ERP. Medium‑term we’ll see
agent‑to‑agent handshakes for routine transactions; humans stay on exceptions, lead strategy
and focus on important human vendor relationships. The outcome is a procurement function
that’s finally living up to its true value potential with what we think will be very significant
margin lifts for companies that deeply adopt AI.

Lorenz Pallhuber
Co-Founder, Didero

Early-stage startups dominate deal share while major corporations battle across
tech verticals

Early-stage startups are highly active in this area: 75% of deals since 2022 involve early-stage
companies (seed/angel and Series A).

Meanwhile, established companies like Palantir, SAS, and Siemens have also developed
solutions. For instance, Palantir’s AIP, an AI platform with copilot and agent-building
capabilities, caters to a diverse range of applications such as aerospace and automotive fleet
maintenance, manufacturing production scheduling, grid planning, and construction
procurement.

As AI agents become more common over the coming years, human roles will gradually
transition from operational tasks to strategic oversight, ensuring efficient collaboration
between advanced AI systems and human expertise.​

Manufacturing is seeing the most activity compared to verticals like defense,


warehousing, and semiconductors

AI copilots comprise 90% of companies here — with manufacturing solutions as the primary
focus — yet copilots ultimately lay the groundwork for more autonomous solutions.

Copilots assist manufacturing workers in real time with tasks such as monitoring production
processes, while in areas like defense and supply chain, they can support military mission

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planning and optimize logistics routes. Autonomous agents, on the other hand, would be
capable of performing tasks independently, such as controlling production processes,
conducting surveillance missions, and managing entire supply chains.

Developers are in the early stages of releasing agentic solutions, so industrial users should
expect significant improvements over the coming years. Augmentir claims it was the first to
release a genAI-powered frontline worker copilot in 2023, while Siemens released its
Industrial Copilot for Engineering, in partnership with Microsoft Azure, in July 2024.

We highlight activity in key industrial sectors below, alongside select companies with
commercial traction or unique product offerings.

Manufacturing

Initial manufacturing pilots of AI agents & copilots show commercial promise, with
companies like C3 AI and SymphonyAI claiming a quick ROI in tasks like optimizing
production schedules and quality control.

Meanwhile, startups such as Augmentir and nFlux focus on copilots that deliver digital work
instructions. By incorporating AI capabilities, these copilots go beyond traditional augmented
reality (AR) worker-assist technologies, personalizing and optimizing guidance in real time to
individual worker performance and task requirements.

Source: CB Insights — Augmentir Business Relationship Insights

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Supply chain

AI agents & copilots help synthesize data from tracking and logistics systems, improving
supply chain resilience. For instance, early-stage startup Syrup Tech offers an analytics
copilot for better demand forecasting and inventory management, while Leverage develops a
copilot to extract insight from supply chain metrics.

Companies are also exploring warehouse copilots. LogistiVIEW, for one, has integrated smart
glasses into its warehouse management systems, providing step-by-step instructions for
warehouse workers in receiving, inventory, picking, and sortation.​

Defense

Leading global defense agencies — including those from the US, the UK, Israel, South Korea,
and China — are starting to implement AI across applications like unmanned vehicles,
command and control centers, and training simulations.

For instance, the US Department of Defense views AI as critical for the future of warfare,
using it to improve in areas like battlefield awareness and adaptive planning.

Potential applications for AI copilots involve interpreting surveillance and operational data,
boosting readiness, and aiding military logistics.

Notably, Palantir and Microsoft recently linked up to combine their secure cloud, analytics,
and AI tools in a joint offering for the US defense and intelligence community.​

Construction

Construction projects are often large and complex, presenting numerous chances to
mismanage costs, schedules, and resources.

Procore‘s copilot aims to combat this by assisting with various construction processes,
including project submittals, specifications, and drawings. The company plans to release a
platform for AI agents in 2025, which will automate routine tasks like quoting and
scheduling.

Other startups take a more focused approach. For example, Concrete.ai developed its copilot
to optimize the concrete recipe for various job site applications.​

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Companies are building solutions on top of big tech’s foundation

Big tech companies like Microsoft and Google are laying the groundwork for industrial AI
agents & copilots by offering the infrastructure through platforms like Microsoft Azure and
Google Cloud.

In fact, all 14 public companies in this market map — such as PTC, SAS, and Siemens — have
partnered with Microsoft to develop their copilots. Established startups such as Cognite and
Tulip have done the same.

Companies are also developing AI solutions for internal operations. Honeywell, for instance,
collaborated with Google Cloud to create AI agents that help technicians resolve
maintenance issues and engineers find the information they need across databases.

The concentration around major tech platforms creates a double-edged sword: while it
accelerates AI adoption through turnkey solutions, it also embeds companies deeply within
these ecosystems.

As Microsoft and Google amass industrial data and insights, they’re positioned to become
indispensable to industrial operations, shifting power from traditional industrial leaders to the
tech giants controlling the AI infrastructure.


Autonomous agents are only as powerful as the data they run on. The real barrier to adoption
isn’t the technology — it’s unlocking and unifying high-quality data streams that allow agents to
generate tangible value. Not more dashboards, but concrete recommendations and automated
actions. Manufacturers that solve this will gain a decisive edge, equipping themselves with
always-on companions that analyze, recommend, and optimize at a scale no human team
could ever achieve.

Matthias auf der Mauer


Founder & Co-CEO, Juna.ai

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100 real-world applications of genAI across financial services


and insurance
We use CB Insights data to uncover and categorize 100 real-world genAI applications across
financial services and insurance, as well as provide key takeaways on adoption.

Published 7/31/2025 — Link to report

GenAI adoption is increasingly measurable.

Many of the world’s most influential financial services firms — like Allianz, J.P. Morgan, and
Mastercard — have taken concrete action to adopt genAI technology.

The genAI adoption efforts have shaped 2 years’ worth of corporate strategy, unveiling key
priorities — from the rise of agentic commerce to customer service copilots — across the
competitive landscape.

Using CB Insights data, we identified and analyzed 100 real-world applications of genAI from
69 companies across banking, insurance, and payments.

Methodology

We used CB Insights’ Business Graph — including data points like Dealmaking, Business Relationships,
Earnings Transcripts, and Media Mentions — and third-party company releases to identify 100 real-world
genAI applications across banking, insurance, and payments. These applications were disclosed
between July 2023 and April 2025.

Then, using CB Insights’ Team of Agents, we analyzed these applications across 10 categories.
Applications are detailed based on disclosure date, and are not exhaustive of a given company’s genAI
initiatives. Applications and categorizations are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive of activity within
their respective industries.

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Key takeaways

1. Cross-functional platforms are now table stakes.​


24% of applications center on deploying general-use genAI platforms to employees.

Prominent firms like BBVA have established enterprise-wide genAI capabilities across their
organizations (typically via enterprise-wide deployments of platforms like Microsoft Copilot
or ChatGPT). Early adopters — like Klarna, which shared in May 2024 that 87% of its
employees are using OpenAI technology — now have over a year of genAI operational
experience at scale, which can guide the development of more complex applications in the
future.

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Looking forward, financial services firms without a plan to provide genAI access to
employees risk competitive disadvantage. Over the past 2 years, simply providing genAI
capabilities to employees has shifted from cutting-edge innovation to standard operations.​

2. Microsoft and OpenAI permeate the adoption landscape.​


33% of applications analyzed disclose involvement from either Microsoft or OpenAI.

Microsoft and OpenAI (in which Microsoft has significantly invested) overwhelmingly
permeate the landscape of genAI applications analyzed. Many of these applications anchor
on foundational capabilities, from which organizations can build more complex applications
and agents. Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud follow a similar deployment
pattern across multiple companies in the sector.

Looking forward, financial services firms should prepare for increasingly blurred “build, buy,
or partner” decisions. The prevalence of genAI model developers (like OpenAI and Anthropic)
and big tech partners (like Microsoft and Google) provide financial services executives with
more flexibility to customize their tech solutions than what has traditionally been the case
with many point-solution providers.​

3. Emerging genAI vendors face a fierce competitive landscape.​


Median Mosaic Scores among genAI startups analyzed are in the top 3% globally.

The 100 analyzed genAI applications include engagement from 25 startups as tech vendors,
ranging from pre-seed companies like Twin — which offers an agent for invoice collection —
to late-stage giants like Anthropic. These startups have a median CB Insights Mosaic Score
— which measures the overall health and growth potential of private companies — of 732 out
of 1,000, as of July 30, 2025.

Looking forward, financial services firms should prepare for increasingly capable tech
vendors seeking to sell their genAI products. These vendors must exhibit a clear advantage
over the alternative of building in-house solutions.​

4. Customer-facing genAI will become increasingly prevalent.​


16% of applications center on customer engagement & self-service capabilities.

Firms like ING, Wells Fargo, and Truist show that customer-facing genAI assistants are
capable of powering millions of customer interactions.

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Customer-facing genAI deployment will accelerate as companies like Mastercard, Visa, and
PayPal deploy applications centered on “agentic commerce,” where customers can
autonomously shop and complete transactions with AI payments agents.

Looking forward, financial services firms need to develop a gameplan for how they will
engage customers with agentic AI. The market opportunities for enterprise agents and
copilots are growing, so customer-facing applications will quickly emerge.​

5. Impact is now tangible, but success definitions remain elusive.​


Only 30% of applications disclose quantitative tangible impact from deployment.

Most of the application sources analyzed lack disclosure of tangible impact (i.e., numbers,
percentages, or figures to quantify effectiveness). Among the impact metrics that are
available, the top-cited focus on operational considerations like call-handle times.

Looking forward, any financial services firm has the opportunity to define “what good genAI
adoption looks like” across the sector. The lack of clear success definitions creates an
opportunity for financial services firms to stand out among peers.

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Additional resources
Research
The Future of Professional Services: How firms will capture value in the AI agent era

Enterprise AI agents & copilots: Our growth projections for the $5B+ market

What’s next for AI agents? 4 trends to watch in 2025

Future of the workforce: How AI agents will transform enterprise workflows

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