Trading Desks to Clinical Trials: Parallels in Applied Vertical AI — Ayush Bhardwaj, Allos AI
Applied vertical AI engineering patterns are consistent across industries despite vastly different domain constraints.
“My job increased, but the core part of my job, applied AI, remained the exact same”
Ayush Bhardwaj, who moved from building AI at a hedge fund to a pharma tech startup (Allos AI), argues that 'applied vertical AI' — AI engineered for a single specific industry — shares a common engineering core regardless of domain. Despite the stark cultural contrast between finance (fast, mostly-right) and pharma (slow, absolutely-right), he found the underlying AI iteration loops identical. The insight is a practitioner-level signal that vertical AI specialization lives in the domain layer, not the engineering layer.