The Smart Way to Build Vertical AI Giants

THIS WEEK’S STORY

Building a vertical AI product the right way

Most people chase broad AI ideas. The real money is in verticals.

This week I discovered Legora, a collaborative AI tool for lawyers, and their story is a perfect playbook for building vertical AI applications.

Here is how they did it:

1. Start with one customer
   They shadowed a law firm in the Nordics. They built custom AI solutions for them, learned the pain points inside out, and kept iterating until they nailed the use case.
   Lesson: build for one avatar first, obsess over their workflow, and perfect the solution before scaling.

2. Package and scale
   With a validated product and a happy client, they repackaged their core offerings and started approaching more firms with enterprise deals. It was a much easier sell because they already had proof and credibility.

3. Branding and trust
   Their website feels like Anthropic-level branding but sharper. Clean UI, professional positioning, and a dedicated Trust Center showing security frameworks, certifications, and compliance efforts. For legal firms, this is non-negotiable.

The result? They built a $675M company in 13 months. And the founder didn’t even come from the legal world.

The framework is clear:

1. Pick an industry that is old and ripe for disruption

2. Shadow one customer, build around them for free, then sell it back to them (they won’t say no)

3. Use that momentum to sign more clients and scale

4. Choose your path: raise VC if the industry requires heavy compliance and infrastructure, or stay lean and bootstrapped if you can

That’s how you build a vertical AI giant the smart way.

HEADLINES

Video Editing gets an upgrade with Nano Banana

Google just dropped a wild update to Gemini called Nano Banana. Think video editing with superpowers. You can now generate or tweak entire scenes in seconds, opening up a whole new world of creative possibilities.

This could put half of today’s editing software out of business (or actually anhence their processes 🤔?)

THIS WEEK’S TIP

Claude Code does the SEO for you 🚀 

What if I told you that you could 10x your SEO in just 2 minutes with Claude Code? Here is how 👇

1. Set up Claude Code in Cursor
   Open your project in Cursor, install the Claude Code extension, and run /init. This will let Claude analyze your codebase and project structure so it knows exactly what you are working with.

2. Give Claude superpowers with Playwright MCP
   Run this command in the terminal:
   claude mcp add playwright npx @playwright/mcp@latest
   Now Claude can interact with your live website: testing pages, checking loading speed, analyzing metadata, crawling links, and spotting technical issues.

3. Run a deep SEO audit
   Ask Claude to run a full SEO audit of the site. Tell it to analyze technical factors (page speed, mobile responsiveness, structured data, broken links) as well as keyword usage and metadata optimization.
   Have it save the results into a seo-audit.md file.

4. Implement the changes instantly
   Once you have the audit, simply ask Claude Code to apply the fixes and improvements directly in your project. It will refactor code, update metadata, and clean up your site for better rankings.

And that is it. You go from “probably under-optimized” to SEO-ready in a couple of minutes.

This is not just a time saver. It is a complete shift in how SEO is done: from weeks of manual audits and tweaks to instant, AI-powered optimization.

QUICK HITS

• Alibaba Launches New AI Chip: A versatile inference chip aims to reduce China’s reliance on Nvidia and strengthen domestic AI capacity.

• Nvidia Earnings Spark Market Rally: S&P 500 and Dow hit records; Pure Storage and Snowflake jump, while Marvell dips on data center concerns.

• Microsoft & OpenAI Advance AI Speech Tech: New models deliver natural speech generation and real-time transcription APIs for enterprise and consumer use.

• EU AI Act Rules Take Effect: Stricter compliance now applies to general-purpose AI models, with tighter enforcement due in 2026.

• GenAI Chemicals Market Set to Grow $2B: AI accelerates sustainable material discovery, cutting R&D costs and speeding innovation.

And that is all for this week!

See you next Saturday!

Filippo

Filippo Pietrantonio

Find me on X, or Book a 1:1 Call