The Vulnerability of Middlemen
For decades, some of the most lucrative sectors in the global economy produced no physical goods, wrote no original software, and assumed very little financial risk. Instead, these industries generated trillions of dollars in enterprise value by mastering a single, highly profitable art: monetizing friction. This “intermediation layer” thrives on consumer inertia, information asymmetry, and the sheer complexity of modern paperwork. Brokers and agents insert themselves between buyers and sellers, charging a toll simply for translating industry jargon and navigating artificial barriers.
However, the rapid deployment of agentic artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to this exact business model. It is a deeply unexpected paradigm shift; jobs built entirely on localized human relationships and networking were supposed to be safe from the algorithms. Yet, when a consumer is armed with a personal AI agent that can instantly cross-reference every insurance policy on earth, optimize for exact pricing, and execute the binding paperwork autonomously, the middleman’s margin vanishes. For a veteran broker who built a thirty-year career on community trust and navigating red tape, being bypassed by a digital interface that operates for fractions of a cent feels profoundly unfair and dehumanizing. But the economic reality is absolute: any business model reliant on matching buyers to sellers through opaque pricing is structurally incompatible with a world of abundant, autonomous machine intelligence.
Real Estate Commission Compression
The U.S. residential real estate market serves as the most prominent, high-stakes battleground for this disintermediation. The scale of this industry is staggering; in 2024 alone, commissions and related ownership transfer costs totaled approximately $170 billion, representing 0.6% of the entire U.S. GDP. Historically, real estate agents maintained a strict grip on property data and transaction mechanics, justifying a standard commission of 5% to 6% of a home’s sale price, typically split down the middle between the buyer’s and seller’s agents.
That protective dam has broken. In August 2024, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) implemented sweeping practice changes following a landmark antitrust settlement, severely restricting how buyer agent compensation is advertised and mandating written agreements upfront. With the structural protections stripped away, commissions immediately began to compress. By early 2025, the average buyer’s agent commission had dipped to roughly 2.4%, while seller commissions hovered near 2.7%.
This legal vulnerability is now being relentlessly exploited by technological acceleration. AI is projected to drive $34 billion in efficiency gains across the real estate sector by 2030. Advanced generative AI tools can automatically assess asset values, analyze real-time neighborhood trends, simulate market shifts, and draft customized legal paperwork in hours. Imagine a young couple buying a home in late 2026: rather than hiring a traditional broker, they deploy an autonomous AI agent that continuously monitors the Multiple Listing Service, dynamically negotiates the bid based on hyper-local data, and finalizes the transaction. As the technology perfects these workflows, the hypothetical scenario of standard commissions plummeting from 3% per side to under 1% becomes highly probable.
Disruption in Insurance and Travel
A parallel and equally aggressive disruption is currently unfolding within the insurance and travel brokerage sectors. The fragility of these legacy models was violently exposed in February 2026, when the global insurance industry experienced a massive valuation correction. What began as a selloff in U.S. insurance brokerage stocks quickly infected European markets, causing steep single-day declines in the S&P 500 Insurance Index.
This market tremor was directly triggered by the realization that “agentic AI” is actively destroying the information advantage held by human insurance brokers. The disruption moved from a futuristic concept to a present force when Insurify launched a ChatGPT-based application allowing consumers to compare auto insurance through a sophisticated conversational interface, completely bypassing human advisors. Simultaneously, OpenAI approved its first carrier-built insurance app, developed by the Spanish digital insurer Tuio, signaling that technology giants are ready to help carriers cut out the costly broker network entirely.
The travel industry, heavily reliant on online travel agencies and human planners, faces a similar reckoning. While the U.S. travel agency market experienced a robust post-pandemic rebound, achieving $109.7 billion in gross bookings in 2023, the underlying mechanics of how consumers plan trips are shifting. Travelers are increasingly turning to advanced AI platforms for end-to-end trip inspiration, dynamic pricing optimization, and automated booking. As these autonomous digital agents gain the ability to continuously hunt for the best price and execute complex itineraries without human intervention, the trillion-dollar global intermediation layer will systematically disintegrate.