The workflows that leak money, and the agents that stop it.

A vertical AI agent is an agent built for one industry workflow, such as claim pre-checks in healthcare, laytime calculations in shipping or RFQ responses in manufacturing. Unlike a general chatbot, it reads your documents, follows your rules and writes into your systems. At XDQ Labs every vertical agent runs on XDQ AgentOS, with a human approval gate on consequential actions, an audit log of each step and guardrails on what it may touch.

The best candidates are document-heavy, deadline-driven workflows with clear rules and a measurable cost of delay. Common examples are answering enquiries within seconds, turning contracts and invoices into structured data, reconciling purchase orders and payments, and chasing overdue receivables. We usually pick one such workflow, run a three to four week pilot with a defined outcome, and only then expand to the next workflow.

We keep agents safe by limiting what they can do, recording everything they do and requiring a person to approve anything consequential. On XDQ AgentOS, money movements, contract changes and external messages default to a human checkpoint. Access is least-privilege, data stays in your environment where required, and each action is logged with a rationale. Before launch we also test the agent layer for prompt injection and tool abuse.

Yes, XDQ AgentOS is designed so several agents share one platform, one audit log and one set of guardrails. A company might start with an enquiry agent for sales, then add a collections agent for finance and a document agent for operations. Each new agent reuses the integrations already built, so later agents typically take two to three weeks rather than starting from zero.

A single-workflow agent pilot usually falls in the USD 1,000 to 5,000 or 5,000 to 20,000 band, depending on the number of integrations and channels. Multi-agent programmes across departments typically sit in the 20,000 to 50,000 band or above. We give a fixed quote within two working days of receiving a brief, and the code, configuration and IP belong to you at handover.