By now, the transformation of corporate procedures into artificial intelligence (AI) activities is no longer news. This year, companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Hubspot revealed a plethora of AI “agent” capabilities for commercial operations like sales and customer support.

Currently, a number of privately funded software companies are utilizing AI to create entirely new apps, reimagining sectors like healthcare and legal services that have historically been resistant to technology, according to Bank of America.

In a December 13 report, Alkesh Shah, the firm’s software and services analyst, writes, “We expect AI-native startups to proliferate over the next several years and increasingly cannibalize the significantly larger $12.3 trillion US Services industry.” The report is based on a virtual conference that was held last week to discuss trends in AI.

Shah compares today’s new wave of venture-backed businesses to the early days of the Internet, saying they are “emerging like it’s 1996.”

Among the firms showcased at the conference is Hippocratic AI, a San Francisco-based company launched in 2022 that automates non-diagnostic healthcare duties like evaluating patients to determine whether they require an ER visit using massive language models.

Munjal Shah, the CEO and co-founder of Hippocratic, informed the analysts that “adoption is ramping and agents receive high satisfaction scores, while costing significantly less at $9-10/hour vs $50-90/hour for human nurses.”

According to the company, AI-based software can outperform human nurses in certain activities, like determining which over-the-counter medications might be harmful for a particular patient or what quantities of those meds could be hazardous.

Another business, vLex, based in Barcelona, Spain, employs massive language models to help lawyers and paralegals prepare by, among other things, creating hypothetical arguments that opposing counsel in a lawsuit might use.

Vincent AI, the company’s software, can also expedite the process of searching through a large number of papers. The Bank of America analysts write, “The time required to analyze privacy law regulations across seven different countries could be reduced to minutes from weeks.” Eight of the top 10 legal firms in the world are among the two million customers of the Vincent AI platform.

According to Shah, both businesses are instances of automation that could eventually replace human labor. “Competing with AI agents may grow more challenging. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 366,000 paralegals and legal assistants ($29/hour average pay), 859,000 lawyers ($70/hour average pay), 55,000 medical scribes ($18/hour average pay), and over 3.3 million registered nurses ($41/hour average pay).

According to the Bank of America analysis, generative AI applications are beginning to expand beyond the “experience” of sales and customer service to include additional “vertical” activities that are industry-specific.

The emergence of AI-focused commercial software packages could help close the gap for the vast majority of businesses that find it difficult to employ the technology effectively on their own.