By Michael Quigley, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Co-Founder at Impel
Catching up on some reading this holiday season, I happened upon a piece of AI lore that I’d forgotten about. It will prove to be more relevant than ever to the state of Vertical AI in 2026.
Most people with even fleeting knowledge of AI can remember the 1997 chess match between reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov, and IBM’s Deep Blue. The match marked the first time that an AI had beaten a world champion. It was documented broadly throughout the media and highlighted AI’s growing power to the general public.
What many, including myself, tend to forget is what happened next. When Kasparov was defeated back in 1997, he didn’t give up the game. A year later, he returned to competitive play with a new format: advanced–or centaur–chess. In centaur chess, humans partner with AI, rather than competing with it. It rapidly became clear that something very interesting resulted from this approach. Pairing even an average AI with an average player allowed them to beat even the most accomplished grandmasters, or the most advanced of AIs standing alone.
It would not be until a full two decades later (around 2017) that ‘pure’ AI on its own would come to consistently triumph over AI-human centaur teams, with any human involvement in decision-making proving to be a liability relative to AI operating on its own.
We find ourselves today in the Age of the Centaur in Vertical AI. Vertical-specific AI applications (like Impel for the automotive industry) are technologically advanced enough to beat their human counterparts 1v1 in most face-offs. For instance, Impel’s Sales AI wins against the average car sales person in most instances— Sales AI responds to any customer inquiry 24/7 with near-perfect vehicle product knowledge, instantaneously. Compare this to a human car sales person who naturally must clock out at day’s end, requires time to research vehicle information, and might occasionally make errors in communicating information back to a car buyer.
That said, there are still certain nuanced use cases, like price negotiation, where humans win over AI. With something as complex as price negotiation, there simply are not yet enough inputs available for AI to make perfect pricing negotiation decisions for a given vehicle, with given incentives, on a given day, for a given dealership, given its particular P&L.
Two key truths are emblematic of this Age of the Centaur in Vertical AI, and those that internalize them will deliver winning experiences to customers and shareholders alike:
1) AI beats its human counterparts in many use cases, but it does not beat them in ALL use cases. Pointing to a narrow instance when AI loses to humans to defer AI adoption is a recipe for being outcompeted by those that see the forest for the trees.
2) AI, when coupled with a human, beats any AI, and beats any human standing alone. Expecting AI to do your business’s bidding 100% unmonitored is unrealistic today, but those businesses that implement AI thoughtfully and monitor it actively—that is, take a truly centaur-like approach—will win big.
Will it take twenty years, as it did in chess, for Vertical AI solutions to outperform their human counterparts in 100% of use cases? I suspect not. It was largely the development of deep learning that enabled AIs to trounce centaurs, and deep learning is already powering most Vertical AI applications— gaps today are largely a function of missing data sets or integrations, which leading Vertical AI companies like Impel are addressing in real time. This underscores the urgency of adopting a centaur-like approach to AI now. Once everyone has installed and implemented the ‘perfect’ AI solution, how will you find leverage?
Become a centaur now and break away from the herd, before the AI race in your vertical is won. In automotive alone there are trillions of dollars of market cap in play. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” goes the quote often attributed to Henry Ford. In today’s world of automotive retailing the answer is clear: centaurs win.
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