Agents don’t disrupt industries. They delete fees.
Most “middlemen” didn’t have a moat. They had friction, wrapped in a warm voice and a branded email signature.
AI agents don’t care about your warmth. They care about outcomes, constraints, and a clean API.
Travel is the canary. Hotels have spent years trying to escape OTAs because the take rate is brutal, commonly 15–25%.  Now even Expedia is calling out “agentic AI” as a competitive threat in its filings and comms, because the new front door might not be Google or an app, it’s someone else’s assistant. 
Insurance is next. When quoting and purchasing becomes a conversational flow inside an AI interface, “renewal season” becomes a background process. We just watched broker stocks get punched on exactly this fear after ChatGPT-based insurance buying hit the headlines. 
Tax prep has been dining out on complexity for decades. And yes, some returns are genuinely complex. But the economics of the boring middle are already ugly. The average fee for a basic 1040 with state is around $220, and itemized runs about $323.  Meanwhile the political knife fight over free filing is basically an advert for how much rent is in the system. 
Routine legal sits in the same firing line. Big firms are throwing money at tech and AI because they know the low end gets automated first, and then priced like a commodity. 
And real estate is the most obvious “friendly friction” business of them all. The public line is “commissions are negotiable,” which is always true right up until you try to negotiate. Post settlement, plenty of markets still look sticky.  But the direction of travel is clear: platforms can already sell you a 1% listing fee under certain conditions.  In major metros, once the buyer-side gets unbundled properly and an agent can’t hide behind an MLS screen anymore, sub-1% becomes a scenario, not a fantasy.
If your value proposition is being the human checkout lane, don’t be shocked when the store installs self checkout.
The winners won’t be “agents” in title. They’ll be operators who own distribution, data, and the moment of decision. Everyone else is just a fee that’s about to get benchmarked to zero.
