AI's Amazon moment

Reinventing the $60T service economy

Not long ago, you could build a successful professional service business as a solo practitioner. A local accountant could serve dozens of small businesses. An independent insurance agent could support hundreds of families.

Where did they all go?

Rising inflation, complexity of regulations, reporting requirements, and client demands made the one-person practice nearly impossible. The independent professional has largely disappeared, replaced by regional and national firms with hundreds or thousands of employees.

This consolidation happened for two key reasons.

First, the complexity of work increased dramatically. But there was something else equally important: the burden of people management.

To handle more clients, professionals had to become managers. This meant recruiting, training, and retaining staff to handle growing workloads.

For many accountants, lawyers, and other professionals who chose their careers to practice their craft, becoming a full-time people manager wasn't just unappealing—it was a different job entirely.

The result? A curious problem in professional services.

Just as service work requires more sophisticated operations and management skills than ever, we're facing a demographic cliff. The numbers tell the story: 75% of CPAs will retire in the next 15 years. Meanwhile, new accounting graduates are declining year over year.

I believe we're at an inflection point.

AI could reverse this trend. Not just by automating work, but by fundamentally reinventing how services are delivered.

The Amazon parallel

When Amazon launched in the 90s, people thought it was just about putting stores online. But Jeff Bezos saw something bigger.

In a 2003 TED talk, Bezos compared the internet's impact to the early days of electricity.

The real transformation, he argued, would come from:

"using electricity for more than just lighting."

Amazon proved this point spectacularly—but not in the way most people think.

Many focus on how Amazon displaced traditional retail. That's not the interesting part. The real story is how they enabled an entirely new generation of entrepreneurs.

Here's what most people miss about Amazon:

Over 60% of their retail sales come from third-party sellers. That's more than 2 million entrepreneurs running their businesses on Amazon's platform.

Amazon didn't just digitize retail. They created a platform that handles all the grunt work: warehousing, fulfillment, customer service, payments, and returns.

This changed everything about retail entrepreneurship.

A solo entrepreneur can now run a million dollar retail business without managing a single warehouse worker or customer service agent. Amazon handles that operational complexity, letting sellers focus on what they do best: selecting products and building their differentiation.

I see the same pattern emerging with AI and services.

The conventional wisdom is that AI will simply automate existing service work—digital labor replacing human labor, just as robots replaced physical labor.

This view misses the bigger picture.

AI won't just automate services. It will reinvent them by enabling new service delivery models that weren't possible before.

The numbers make this opportunity massive.

Services represent roughly 60% of global GDP—about $60 trillion. While the internet revolutionized how we sell and distribute goods, it barely scratched the surface of how we deliver services.

That's about to change.

From digital to AI-Native

Today's service economy is digitized but not AI-native. Take any professional service: accounting, legal work, consulting. Sure, they leverage computing. But their fundamental business models haven't changed much since the pre-digital era.

Here's what hasn't changed:

• They still scale linearly with human headcount

• They still operate with the same organizational structures

• They still face the same constraints around growth and quality control

The rise of foundation models changes this equation entirely. For the first time, we can reimagine services from the ground up.

Everything is up for questioning:

• Who does the work?

• How is it delivered?

• Who captures the value?

The accounting example — Back to the Future

Consider accounting, a $500B+ industry ripe for reinvention.

Companies like Pilot have made strides by building software to streamline operations. But what if we took this further?

Imagine an AI-native accounting platform that brings back the solo practitioner model, but supercharged:

AI "digital workers" handle all routine tasks with consistent quality. Certified accountants run their own practices without hiring or managing staff. A trusted brand and standardized client experience provides the reliability of a national firm.

The platform does all the heavy lifting:

• Manages workflows automatically

• Ensures quality control

• Handles operational complexity

• Scales without adding headcount

This isn't just about making accounting more efficient. It's about fundamental change.

Instead of forcing accountants to become people managers, you empower thousands of independent practitioners to serve millions of clients with AI augmentation. They can focus on what they love: applying their expertise to help clients succeed.

Beyond automation

Just as electricity enabled more than better lighting, AI will enable more than automation.

The opportunity exists in any service industry with these traits:

• Rules-heavy and nuanced information work

• Need for human judgment and trust at key points

• Current scaling limitations due to staffing

Think legal services, healthcare, education, consulting. Each of these trillion-dollar markets could see their own "Amazon moment."

The value question

There's a natural concern: won't foundation model providers capture all the value?

I don't believe so. While foundation models are crucial infrastructure, the winning companies will be different.

The real value will go to companies that:

• Build trusted brands in specific verticals

• Handle industry-specific compliance and risk

• Maintain high-quality service delivery at scale

Building in this space

For founders exploring these opportunities, the question isn't whether to use AI. That's a given.

The real questions are strategic:

1. Service vs. Software?

• Consider becoming the service provider, not just selling software

• Larger TAM and higher revenue per customer favor the service model

• Controlling the entire experience enables faster innovation

2. How to reach the market?

• Look for existing distribution channels

• Consider acquiring traditional providers

3. How to defend the business?

• Consider industries that feature non-technical barriers to entry such as accreditation and licensing

• Prioritize automations that allow you to profitably serve niches of the market undervalued by incumbents

• Develop proprietary data assets

The opportunity ahead

We're at the beginning of using AI for "more than just automation."

The next decade will see the emergence of AI-native service platforms that look more like Amazon's marketplace than traditional professional service firms.

These platforms won't just make existing services more efficient—they'll create entirely new possibilities.

The pieces are all in place:

• Powerful AI models

• Cloud infrastructure

• Massive markets hungry for innovation

This is a generational opportunity to reinvent how some of the world's most important services are delivered.

For those building in this space, the opportunity isn't just to capture value. It's to reshape how millions of professionals work and how billions of people access essential services.

That's the kind of opportunity that comes along rarely.