ServiceNow is buying AI startup Moveworks for $2.85 billion, the enterprise software firm announced first thing this morning, an effort by ServiceNow to get a jump on agent-powered services. We included Moveworks in our Generative AI Takeover List, which you can see here. And now on to the rest of the column…

We’ve written a lot about how investors have warmed to AI applications businesses, in part because of how much faster those companies’ revenues have grown compared to other types of apps that launched in the past decade.

Many of these AI app businesses focus on specific verticals, like law or healthcare. One industry that’s gotten attention recently is manufacturing—specifically, attention from Larry Page, a Google cofounder whose new AI manufacturing startup was scooped by Jessica last week. Page’s company, Dynatomics, aims to use large language models to design objects that could then be manufactured. Perhaps it’s a kind of Autodesk for the AI age.

Vertical-specific AI is attractive for a variety of reasons. AI models must be customized with special data—for a lawyer, examples of editing legal contracts would be ideal, or for a doctor, medical test results—that can be hard to get. And many of these vertical-specific firms are often niche enough that large model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t as tempted to go after them.