According to Anthony Connelly, founder and CEO of Neato, a second-party commerce operator, artificial intelligence will not replace brand operators but will instead render average ones impossible to justify. Rather than shrinking teams or collapsing functions, AI will expose which operators were never truly operating in the first place by making the gap between activity and value much more visible.
The real pressure will fall on the broad middle layer of the services market—agencies, consultants, and service partners whose work is competent enough to get hired but not differentiated enough to be essential once AI raises the baseline. Connelly argues that the operators who will win are those who can answer harder questions: Who owns the outcome? Who sees across the full system? Who absorbs the risk? These are operational questions, not software questions. AI can support decisions, accelerate them, and improve visibility, but it cannot own consequences, carry inventory risk, or make judgment calls tied to a real P&L. The future belongs to operators who combine machine leverage with human judgment, real accountability, and deep understanding of how brand, channel, and profit interact.
This shift arrives as brands increasingly expand across multiple marketplaces, social commerce, and direct-to-consumer channels with shared inventory and unified P&L structures. In this complex environment, average coordination will not hold, and AI will expose operational weaknesses faster than ever before.