Specialist and industry tools

What a vertical product adds, and what it does not

Every profession now has AI products aimed at it: legal research and contract review, clinical documentation, accounting and audit, recruitment, property, insurance, education. They cost several times a general assistant and sometimes considerably more.

The honest position is that some are worth it and many are a general model with a prompt and an industry logo. The difference is checkable, and it comes down to four things.

Does it have data you cannot get? A legal tool with a licensed case database, a medical tool with a drug interaction dataset, an accounting tool connected to current tax tables. This is the strongest form of added value, because no prompt substitutes for it.

Does it cite into a source you can verify? In professional work this is the difference between a usable tool and an unusable one. An answer with a link to the paragraph is checkable; an answer without one has to be re-derived, and you have saved nothing.

Is it integrated with the system you work in? The practice management system, the electronic health record, the ledger. Integration is expensive to build and valuable.

Does anyone stand behind it? Professional indemnity, an accuracy commitment, a support arrangement with somebody accountable. Most general tools explicitly disclaim all of this.

If the answer to all four is no, you are looking at a wrapper, and the useful comparison is against a general assistant with a well-written prompt.

The evaluation that settles it

Take five real matters from your own work where you already know the answer, and where you remember the subtlety that made each one difficult. Run them through the specialist tool and through a general assistant.

Then score three things: was it right, did it cite something you could check in under a minute, and did it notice the subtlety. That third column is where the specialist products either justify themselves or do not, and it is the one no demonstration will show you, because demonstrations use straightforward cases.

The questions a demonstration will not answer

Three things to ask a salesperson, in these words.

”Which model is underneath, and what happens when it is deprecated?” A product built on somebody else’s model inherits that model’s retirement schedule, and a wrapper that cannot answer this has not thought about it.

”What happens when it is wrong, and how would I know?” The good answer describes a citation you can check or a confidence signal you can act on. The bad answer is that it is rarely wrong.

”What is in your training or reference data, and when was it last updated?” For anything governed by rules that change (tax, regulation, clinical guidance) a reference set updated annually is a different product from one updated weekly, and the difference is invisible in a demonstration.

Where the responsibility sits

This matters more in professional work than anywhere else in the course, and it is stated: the professional remains responsible for the advice.

Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filed citations that did not exist. Regulators have acted on clinical documentation errors. In every case so far the answer has been that the tool is not the professional, and using one does not transfer the duty of care.

Two things follow. Read your professional body’s guidance, because most now have some, and it is usually more permissive and more specific than the rumours circulating in your field. And where you use one of these tools on a client matter, know whether your engagement terms and your insurer require you to say so.

The free comparison worth running

Before buying anything in this category, spend an hour building the general-assistant version of it: a well-written prompt describing your jurisdiction, your standards, your format, and the checks you always apply, saved as a project or a custom instruction. Attach your own reference documents where the tool allows it.

That takes an hour and costs nothing. Sometimes it is 80% of the specialist product, and knowing that changes what you are willing to pay for the remaining 20%. Sometimes it is visibly worse, and then you have learned that the specialist tool is doing something real, which is exactly what you wanted to find out.