2030 Prediction: Death of the Small Intermediary Middleman Jobs

Middleman Imminent Doomsday

If you are a housing agent, financial advisory, car agent or involved in any sort of business providing an intermediary function and yet do not manufacture the product or provide the actual services that is desired by the end consumer, you will need to get ready for some radical changes if your retirement age is due after 2030.

With the fast digitalisation pace which is significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 situation, a far reaching consequence is on the type of jobs and business that are still available by 2030. The optimisation of the digital economy will result in the removal of firms and agents in the intermediary middleman role. This will be the result of the following trends that are already evident today.

1. The proliferation of digital channels that have unanimous outreach to most consumers, survival of the fittest effect will create a few highly consolidated, dominant digital platforms providers for every geographical location. The consumers and the product manufacturers and the service providers will be drawn to transact through these dominant platforms due to the very efficient processing capability and low transaction fees. The small middleman intermediaries will not be able to match these economies of scale and value stream efficiency.
2. These dominant platforms will be using artificial intelligence, deep learning technologies that significantly cut down the number of required human workers to provide the direct selling services via chatbot services, often with higher accuracy and quality of advice which few human intermediaries will be able to provide. Human intermediaries that require much manual invention and effort to provide these services will not be able to compete with machines willing to work at a small fraction of a human’s salary.
3. More superapps similar to that of WeChat and Tabao will continue to emerge and eventual consolidate. The companies behind these eventual superapps platforms will be the future conglomerates with influence across national boundaries and different demographic stratas. This will further consolidate multiple services and product purchase across different industries onto the same digital platform. These superapps will utilize a common set of user accounts information and digital payment mechanisms. The superapps will be able to figure out the best recommendation based on your stage in life, time of the day, current location and other highly personal information such as blood sugar level, heart beat that are sent to these digital platform by wearables devices. These superapps will probably know us better than we know ourselves.
4. Consumers will have gained the digital sophistication to consume these digital services efficiently, and have the confidence to do away with the human middleman entirely. There will be more and more digital natives, who grew up in the era of technologies. People in the generation X and baby boomers era are forced to pick up digital skills as well, many during 2020 when isolation and worldwide lockdown due to the virus make food and grocery ordering available only via online channels. Consumers will find the middleman firms services unnecessary, costly and not as available as the 24x7 digital platforms. Who will want to meet up with an car insurance middleman if you can already figure out the cheapest insurance plan available in your area using a user friendly voice interface such as Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa, and help you purchase the plan directly within seconds using the personal information that are already existing inside the superapps platforms.

Some of these middleman firms are already being disrupted and many are not surviving.

1. Bookstores are intermediary middleman business that traditionally links book publisher products to the books buyers. Gone are these bookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, when more efficient direct business to consumer channels like Amazon and Taobao are already available. I am further speculating that the role of book publishers may very soon be made redundant and goes into history books, as it is getting easier and easier for the individual book author to publish his own books via electronic platform such as Kindle and Kobo.
2. Brick and mortar retailers like JCPenny, Toys”R”Us, Isetan, Target and Robinson are fighting losing battle against the bigger digitalisation trend. Using techniques like fire sales will further erode their margins and hard to avoid the inevitable outcome. Retailers with an inherent cost structure that include pricy mall rentals and precious human staffing compensations, it is increasingly an losing battle against digital retailers that are located in low cost warehouses and uses robots and programs willing to carry out much of the previously manpower intensive jobs for free.

Plan your children career path carefully

“My generation will come up with the inventions that will make your generation jobless”

This is one joke that I often tell my children. The cruel reality of this joke is that it is probably true.

Many jobs that are currently available now will no longer be here in 10 to 20 years time. So if your children are now deciding what subject major to choose on, try to avoid those that has high chance of ending up with intermediary middleman jobs.

Current jobs like banking relationship manager, Grab Driver, Postal Mail workers, Cashiers, Travel Agents, Telemarketers are all intermediary jobs that can be replaced by autonomous robots, autopilot drones, artificial intelligence programs running on a well-managed digital platform probably in the next 10 years.

In fact, even the now highly regarded and handsomely paid professionals like doctors may not be spared. Patients do not want to see doctor alone as the end goal. What patients need are the medical advice that can guide them towards a health recovery path. With the advancement of remoting technology, local doctors will first be replaced by human medical professionals willing to provide these services remotely at a fraction of the cost. Not too longer after, even these human professionals may be replaced by artificial intelligence powered by highly efficient GPUs that are able to make more accurate medical advice. These artificial intelligence have learnt its domain knowledge through the access to millions of past medical and diagnosis stored on the cloud infrastructure, and can continuously adapt and learn. Human doctors know-how are limited by their limited biological lifespan and personal experience. Doctor jobs are potentially in danger, in a somewhat slightly more distant future than the telemarketers.

It is probably harder to think of what jobs are considered safe from being made redundant, especially if the time horizon is about 50 years time when your school going children are likely going to retire. For now, I am advising my children to pick up computer science. Professionals in this domain will probably last a bit longer compared to the other industries. Well, at least these jobs are safe until computer programs figure out how to rewrite themselves without human intervention.

Afternote: When programs can rewrite themselves independently, we will not be very far from the age of Skynet in the Sci-Fi Terminator series.