The Return of the Middleman: AI Now Sits Between You and Your Customer
For the better part of two decades, technology told a simple story: intermediaries were dying. The internet would connect businesses and consumers directly, remove friction, and flatten entire value chains.
And for a while, it did.
E-commerce enabled brands to go direct. Search engines gave consumers immediate access to information. Marketplaces streamlined distribution. Layers of brokers, agents, and gatekeepers began to disappear. Control shifted toward those who could capture attention and convert demand.
Disintermediation became the default assumption.
But that era is ending.
Large language models are a structural shift in how decisions get made. Search presented options, while LLMs synthesizes them. Platforms enabled discovery, while LLMs increasingly determine outcomes.
They aggregate information, interpret intent, and recommend answers.
And in doing so, they reinsert themselves directly into the transaction. This is a concept that I have dubbed “reintermediation”.
Disintermediation saw the removal of intermediaries (middlemen like wholesalers or agents) from a supply chain, allowing producers to sell directly to consumers, often via the internet/google.
Reintermediation is the reintroduction of new, digital intermediaries like LLMs to aggregate, curate, or simplify the buying process in a crowded market.
AI systems are becoming the new layer between supply and demand. Consumers no longer browse ten websites. They ask ChatGPT. Procurement teams do not evaluate dozens of vendors. They receive a shortlist. Increasingly, the journey collapses into a single interaction, mediated by an artificial intelligence that curates, filters, and decides.
The interface actively curates, ranks, and shapes outcomes.
It shows options and influences which ones matter.
That shift carries real consequences. Power moves away from those who own the product or the customer relationship and toward those who influence the model. Visibility is no longer just about ranking highly in search results or building brand awareness. Visibility depends on being selected, summarized, and recommended by systems that operate one layer above the open web.
In a disintermediated world, success depended on access. In a reintermediated one, it depends on inclusion.
This has immediate implications for both B2C and B2B models. Direct-to-consumer becomes mediated when discovery sits inside an AI layer. Brand equity functions as a signal within a model’s decision process. Even pricing power can shift as AI systems standardize comparisons and compress differentiation.
The battleground is moving.
It centers on reaching the systems that shape customer decisions.
That raises a harder question. If LLMs are the new intermediaries, who controls them? And who gets surfaced within them?
We are already seeing the early contours of this shift. Companies are beginning to think about AI optimization in the same way they once thought about SEO. The focus shifts to appearing in answers and being chosen within them.
The irony is hard to miss.
We spent twenty years trying to remove the middlemen. Now we are replacing them with something far more powerful and influential. I suppose we didn’t want to do our own research after all…