Personal intelligence jo log bana rahe hain, woh ek niche product ban ke reh jayega. Kuch log woh use kar lenge jinko samajh mein aata hai. Baki fragmented sa hi rahega. Woh ek aur distribution channel ban jayega basically.
Treating "Personal Superintelligence" as just another top-of-funnel distribution channel rather than a category killer is the sharpest way to look at this cycle—and we have seen this exact movie play out twice before in tech history.
The first parallel is the 2017 "Voice Commerce" panic. When Amazon Echo and Google Home were flying off the shelves, analysts predicted that visual shopping was dead and consumers would just tell Alexa to buy their groceries, flights, and insurance. Within two years, voice shopping flatlined into a tiny niche used almost exclusively for reordering paper towels or setting kitchen timers, because humans refused to buy complex, multi-variable products blind. The second parallel is when Google launched Google Flights and Google Hotel Finder. Wall Street panicked and dumped Expedia and Booking Holdings, assuming Google would disintermediate Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) entirely. Instead, Google realized it didn't want the nightmare of running global customer support, handling refunds, or managing fragmented hotel billing—so Google just became a metasearch distribution channel, and Booking.com became its biggest ad buyer, happily paying a referral toll to capture the transaction.
Your point that only people who "get it" will actually extract value exposes the Power-User Paradox of AI agents. For an asynchronous agent to actually save you time instead of dragging you into five hours of ping-pong, you have to write a prompt that reads like a software requirements spec—front-loading every constraint, budget ceiling, location boundary, and fallback rule in advance so the bot doesn't fail on edge cases. The irony is that the people smart enough to write a clean, structured specification already know how to use advanced filters on an aggregator site in 90 seconds, while the average consumer who struggles with filters certainly isn't going to write a structured prompt. That leaves the agent stuck in a narrow middle ground: useful for power users automating repetitive, low-stakes chores, but frustrating for mainstream shopping.
Because of that friction—combined with major platforms actively blocking external scrapers—the ecosystem has no choice but to stay fragmented. No single agent will ever get free, unrestricted read-write access to Amazon, Booking, Airbnb, and global airline inventory all at once. Instead, the marketplaces will simply wall off their raw data and hand the AI companies a sanitized affiliate API. When a user asks an agent for a hotel, the agent won't scrape the web for ten minutes; it will query Booking.com’s partner API, render a mini visual card inside the chat, and collect a standard 3% to 5% affiliate bounty if the user clicks through to book.
In that world, these bots don't destroy marketplace business models—they just join Google Search, Instagram ads, and travel blogs as one more Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) line item on the marketplace's income statement. Do you think the AI labs will eventually give up on the slow headless-browser scraping approach and just settle for taking affiliate referral cuts from the existing marketplaces?