AI reintermediation - the answer to consumer shadow work

2024-11-19

Being a consumer in 2024 is work. I think AI will help via reintermediation.

It’s been like this for a long time - many digital businesses work by disintermediation. A travel booking site allows you to search many, many providers of flights, hotels, etc, which has some benefits to you the consumer (price, variety), but like I said, it’s work. This kind of work is sometimes called ‘shadow work’, and there’s a lot of it in our lives.

I think there are opportunities all over the place to make this shadow go away, using AI. In general terms what this would look like is, rather than (e.g.) searching travel sites yourselves, you tell the AI what kind of a trip you want to take and then it does the searching, co-ordinating, and booking for you.

Ed Prentice, founder of AmigoAI, asks how this might affect advertisers and disintermediators. In theory, making it easier for buyers to access goods/services they want by filtering information for them should make markets more efficient. But we’ve already seen AI optimisation services show up here and there, so it’s a bit unpredictable. And no-one really expected the ‘few titans, many dwarves’ feature of disintermediated markets, so - as always - the future is unpredictable.

Disintermediators and aggregators should be well-placed to reintermediate with AI provided they can accomplish the technical lift, which not all of them will, creating opportunities for new entrants. In this vein, Perplexity has (at the time of writing) been successfully competing with Google Search.