The Rise of Foundation Models in Industry: A Cross Domain Survey of LLM Applications in Healthcare, Finance, Legal, and Education

Large Language Models (LLMs) transform artificial intelligence applications across industries. This paper presents the DOME (Domain-Operation-Model-Evaluation) framework, a novel taxonomy for systematically defining and assessing industrial LLM implementations across healthcare, finance, legal services, and education sectors. Through systematic analysis of published case studies, this research identifies domain adaptability patterns and evaluates performance criteria across sectors. Results reveal significant maturity variations: healthcare and finance demonstrate advanced implementations, while legal and Education sectors remain largely experimental. The study identifies critical deployment constraints, including hallucinations, domain adaptation complexity, and regulatory barriers. Key emerging trends include retrieval-augmented generation systems, domain-specific fine-tuning, and edge computing paradigms. The framework provides researchers and practitioners with systematic guidelines for responsible AI deployment in regulated industries, advancing the field’s understanding of effective cross-domain LLM implementation strategies.