Before we dive into the menu, there's one distinction that'll save you a lot of confusion: vertical vs. horizontal AI agents.
Vertical agents are pre-packaged "digital employees" built for one specific job. Think 11x's Alice (an AI SDR that does outbound sales), or Artisan's Ava (an AI BDR that handles lead generation). You don't build anything — you sign up, connect your CRM, and let them work. They're great if you need that exact role filled and you want to move fast.
Horizontal agents are platforms where you build the agent for any use case. Relevance AI, Lindy AI, n8n — these let you create agents for research, content, ops, support, or whatever workflow you can imagine. You define what the agent does, what tools it uses, and how it thinks. More setup, but way more flexibility.
Which is better?
It depends on what you need.
Both vertical and horizontal builders have their place, and each comes with trade-offs. Vertical agents can deliver immediate impact — they're pre-built for a specific job and get you results fast. But horizontal platforms are where power users unlock long-term leverage: you can customize workflows, stack agents together, and compound your productivity over time. If you're a creator or professional looking to build a personal "AI staff" that handles research, content, planning and documentation your way, horizontal builders are the better long-term bet (and that’s just my opinion).
The 8 categories below are your building blocks.
Think of the following as your 2026 "agent menu." I've tested all of these and can vouch for them, but as you know AI moves fast. Probably by the time you're reading this, each category will have a new player better than the previous. But what's important to note IS the category.
You don't need all of them — start with two or three categories and grow as your workflows mature. That's how I approached it.
1. No‑code agent builders (e.g. Relevance AI, Lindy AI, n8n)
Platforms like Relevance AI let you build custom AI agents without code. You describe what the agent should do and the system builds it; it can integrate with your tech stack, learn your processes and complete tasks on autopilot. You can create any type of specialised agents (marketing, research, support) from templates and customise them via natural language.
2. Browser agents (e.g. Perplexity Comet)
Perplexity's Comet turns browsing into thinking. Instead of opening dozens of tabs, you ask questions anywhere on the web; Comet reads pages, compares sources, summarises information and even books meetings or makes purchases on your behalf. It can do all of this with it's built in computer use agent that can see, type, click, scroll and more. It makes any complex browser workflows into a conversation: "compare all products, find the applicable discount codes and add it to my cart".
At the time of writing, I have tried ChatGPT Atlas (OpenAI's new AI browser) and I still think Comet is better. I don't have access to Gemini in Google Chrome yet, so I can't comment on that.