I think the author makes excellent points.
It's hard to build a general AI business. E.g. a computer vision API provider. The technology is so democratized that you can't compete on algorithms alone. These APIs/services are more or less commodities nowadays.
Compare that to credit card fraud detection. For many years, there was one company/product (HNC/FICO/Falcon) that dominated the market (and largely still does) because they had a monopoly on the data. They smartly created a consortium and only they have the rights to train models on the data. They still use a relatively simple feedforward neural network with a ton of hand-tuned features. This is an example of vertical AI that created a wildly successful company.