Scale & Strategy
This is Scale & Strategy, the newsletter that’s more satisfying than the obligatory slap you give to the bags of soil when cruising Home Depot.
Here’s what we got for you today:
- The End of Middlemen—and the Rise of AI Agents
but if we're being real this will probably be the most important thing you read this week. So let's get into it!
The End of Middlemen—and the Rise of AI Agents
As long as people have bought, sold, or traded, middlemen have been there—quietly orchestrating the flow of value. Whether it was Marco Polo navigating the Silk Road or market makers running trades on Wall Street, intermediaries—brokers, agents, consultants, and local fixers—have long been the connective tissue of commerce. They offered access, managed complexity, and acted as stewards of information and relationships.
But now, AI is upending that role. Rapid advancements in model capabilities are shifting power away from human go-betweens and toward systems that operate faster, cheaper, and more intelligently. The result? Entire layers of traditional value chains are being compressed—or outright erased.
Move Over, Middlemen. The Age of Agents Is Here.
Middlemen thrived by helping people navigate uncertainty. Faced with complexity, we’ve historically paid for that extra layer of reassurance—even when it was more psychological than practical. (I once hired a litigator to fight a speeding ticket at 16. Totally unnecessary. Totally worth it.)
But AI is quickly becoming the better bet. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t get emotional. It learns, adapts, and often performs with greater accuracy and speed than its human predecessors.
If 2022–2023 were about building the foundation, the last 18 months have marked a shift from copilots to agents. These aren’t passive assistants embedded into workflows—they’re active participants, reshaping how work gets done, how services are delivered, and how decisions are made.
We’re moving from human-driven ecosystems to AI-powered ones. Knowledge is instant. Relationships are algorithmic. Complexity is handled autonomously.
The village is shrinking. The middlemen are disappearing. And the new scaffolding of society? Smarter models that understand us better than we understand ourselves.
What Happens in an Agent-Driven Economy?
The erosion of traditional intermediaries isn’t just an economic transformation—it’s a cultural one. For centuries, middlemen held power not just by offering expertise, but by owning the gates to knowledge, relationships, and opportunity.
Now, AI is democratizing those advantages. It’s shifting control from centralized gatekeepers to individual users and operators, by enabling:
- AI-native user experiences. The winners won’t just bolt AI onto existing systems—they’ll reimagine how we interact with software. From multimodal interfaces to intent-based computing, we’re entering a world where technology acts as an extension of thought.
- Radical cost reduction and expanded access. Removing intermediaries means lower prices, higher efficiency, and greater consumer autonomy—especially in industries previously locked behind high fees or outdated gatekeeping.
- Real-time decision-making. With AI eliminating human bottlenecks, users will make better, faster decisions with less back-and-forth.
- Extreme personalization. As products learn from individual behavior, the user experience will continuously evolve—more helpful, more tailored, more intuitive.
- New business models. AI-driven self-service platforms will replace human frictions with seamless, direct interaction between users and systems.
All Agents, All the Time?
Not exactly. Middlemen won’t vanish overnight—but their roles will evolve. The most successful won’t just connect—they’ll curate. They’ll coach. They’ll provide human value that AI still struggles to replicate: emotional nuance, strategic thinking, regulatory finesse, creative insight, and deep trust.
The future might reward more artisanal middlemen—those who emphasize quality over scale. But the overall trajectory is clear: knowledge asymmetries are crumbling, and traditional hierarchies are being replaced by flatter, faster, AI-powered networks.
What This Means for the Future
As AI agents become foundational across industries, the scale of opportunity becomes too big to ignore. We see three major waves of disruption:
1. AI Assistants That Replace Consultants
Autonomous agents will replace the need for expensive consultants by giving individuals greater control and customization in areas like:
- Content Creation – $400B+ in annual media spend is ripe for intelligent automation.
- Event Planning – 20% of budgets go to planning; AI can streamline the entire process.
- Financial Advice – $89B in fees, with a rapidly aging advisor base.
- Preventive Healthcare – $1.1T in chronic condition spending could be curbed.
- Style & Interior Design – Pinterest alone hosts 1.5B+ sources of inspiration.
- Legal Services – A $1T+ industry primed for automation.
- Mental Health – 2 in 3 diagnosed Americans lack access to treatment.
- Fitness Coaching – $48B industry globally.
- Recruiting – $2T+ projected spend by 2031.
- Tax & Accounting – With 75% of CPAs near retirement, AI can bridge the gap.
2. AI Marketplaces That Replace Brokers
Smart marketplaces will proactively match buyers and sellers with less friction and greater precision—disrupting:
- Autos – $4.4T in annual transactions.
- Commodities – $547B in brokerage and derivatives volume.
- Heavy Equipment Rental – High-margin, low-tech incumbents.
- Freight & Logistics – $6T+ in global spend.
- Procurement – Where outsourced services eclipse internal software tools.
- Real Estate – $100B+ in commissions up for grabs.
- Tutoring – Still under-digitized despite rising demand.
- Travel – $600B+ in online agency revenue.
- Wholesale – A $52T+ global market that’s still highly manual.
3. AI Operating Systems That Supercharge Experts
Instead of replacing service providers, these platforms make them exponentially better—automating workflows, augmenting decisions, and unlocking scale:
- Advertising – $456B in spend, $78B paid to agencies.
- Architecture – Hundreds of hours go into a single plan.
- Claims & Insurance – $44B just in claims adjustment.
- Customer Support – 54% of companies outsource; AI brings it back in-house.
- Construction – GC profit margins average just 6%; automation can widen the spread.
- Healthcare Admin – 15% of clinician time goes to paperwork.
- Insurance & Mortgage Sales – Legacy workflows dragging down productivity.
- Property Management – $25B in fees, often tied up in inefficiencies.
And that’s just the surface.
The Bottom Line
The Age of Agents isn’t about incremental upgrades—it’s a full-system rewrite. No more bloated back-and-forth. No more bottlenecks. No more browsing endless vendor directories.
Just input → outcome.
AI agents won’t just make life more efficient—they’ll make it more accessible, more personal, and more human by removing the unnecessary layers in between.
The future doesn’t need middlemen.
It needs agents.
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