For as long as anyone can remember, the marketplace ran on go-betweens. The broker, the dealer, the agent, the guy who knew a guy — these were the people who stood between buyers and sellers and charged a premium for closing the distance. But in a recent essay for American Thinker, Raushan Gross argues that this arrangement is now under genuine threat, and the threat is not human. It’s artificial intelligence.
Gross’s piece, published September 21, 2026, frames the dynamic bluntly: a “scary war is underway between AI and middlemen.” The battlefield, in his telling, is information — who has it, who controls its flow, and who can deliver it more cheaply.
The Information Monopoly Middlemen Used to Hold
The traditional case for intermediaries has always rested on a simple reality: no single person knows everything. Middlemen filled niche knowledge gaps and lowered what economists call information costs — the expense, in time and money, of finding out what you need to know before you transact. When information is scarce or expensive to obtain, the person who already has it can charge for access. That was the middleman’s business model.
Gross describes them as “bridge builders” who controlled the flow of information and put a premium on it, functioning as “the only resource, the only go-to once upon a time.” The arrangement worked because the alternative — doing the legwork yourself — was often impractical.
What has changed, according to Gross, is that consumers can now close their own knowledge gaps using technologies that simply did not exist during the middleman’s heyday. AI-enabled platforms across retail, finance, distribution, and other areas of market facilitation are absorbing the role. Consumers, he writes, are shifting their trust “from the human middleman to AI.”
Customers Were Never Actually Loyal
One of Gross’s sharper observations is that the supposed relationship between consumers and their intermediaries was never as durable as it looked. “Customers aren’t brand loyal to humans or AI systems,” he writes. What they are loyal to is getting what they need at a lower cost.
That matters because the premium middlemen charge is justified by perceived value. If an AI system can perform the same discovery and matching function — or something close to it — the perceived value of the human intermediary declines, and with it the willingness to pay. Gross puts it plainly: “we are starting to pay and play with AI, not the human middleman.”
He is careful not to claim middlemen are simply replaceable. His argument is narrower and more interesting: AI is “a serious contender” that is improving the very areas that once drove up consumers’ costs of doing business. In other words, the middleman’s moat is being drained, not demolished in a single stroke.
What Happens When the Go-Between Goes Away?
Gross raises questions he does not pretend to answer definitively. If human middlemen are effectively ousted from the marketplace, does the market self-correct and eliminate whichever option is less preferred — human or machine? And what does an economy with no middlemen actually look like?
These are not idle thought experiments. The essay notes that intermediaries themselves now view AI as the new middleman, and they find the sight frightening. That anxiety connects to a broader public fear that AI will take jobs and eliminate human work and prosperity — a fear Gross acknowledges without dismissing.
His essay, though, is less a prediction of total displacement than a description of a shift already underway. Bots and platforms increasingly interact directly with human customers. Market discoverers who once owned the channel now compete with software for the same function. Revenue streams that flowed reliably to those who discovered new markets are, in his phrase, drying up.
The Uneasy Part Is the Uncertainty
What makes the argument worth sitting with is not a confident forecast. It’s the admission that the endpoint is unclear. AI is, in Gross’s own framing, “advancing and not advancing in some respects” — a technology with obvious momentum and obvious limits. Whether that combination hollows out the intermediary economy or reshapes it into something new is genuinely unresolved.
For now, the practical takeaway is that the middleman’s oldest asset — privileged access to information — is depreciating fast. Consumers have moved on, in Gross’s reading, “for better or for worse.” And the intermediaries who spent careers positioning themselves between buyer and seller are discovering that the space they occupied is getting narrower.
The market, as ever, will decide what it still wants to pay for. The uncomfortable question for anyone whose living depends on being the go-between is whether that list still includes them.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/will-ai-dry-up-middlemen-revenues-and-profits/