Friday, June 20, 2025
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Hi, it’s Chad. Every Friday, I serve as your AI guide to help you navigate a rapidly evolving landscape, discern signals from noise and transform cutting-edge insights into practical leadership wisdom. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Algorithmic Musings. The Great Compression: How AI is Squeezing Out Professional Intermediaries (And What You Can Do About It)
If you’re an attorney, CPA, financial advisor, or consultant, this one’s going to hit close to home. And if you manage teams of these professionals, you need to understand what’s coming.
Viewed through one lens, the history of humanity is one of compression. Compression of distance, time, information access. Technology continually compresses the “things” that separate us. The telephone compressed distance. The internet compressed information access. And AI? Well, AI is compressing the space between problems and solutions – which means it’s compressing you right out of the equation.
The removal of intermediaries is known as disintermediation, and it’s happening faster than you can bill your next hour.
I was reminded of this during a recent discussion about the legal profession. In many ways, attorneys are the quintessential example of an intermediary. They interpret arcane, obscure, and voluminous amounts of information. They’re a layer that rides atop and buffers information sandwiched between their client and the result that client wishes to achieve.
And they’re in serious danger of disintermediation.
It’s Happening Right Now
What I’m describing isn’t theoretical. It’s Friday.
Consider what’s happening right now in law firms across the country. Contract review – once the bread and butter of junior associates billing $300+ per hour – is increasingly handled by AI that spots standard clauses, flags deviations, and suggests edits faster than a caffeinated first-year ever could.
Legal research that used to require days of digging through case law? AI synthesizes it in minutes.
Document preparation that kept paralegals busy for weeks? Automated in hours.
The compression I mentioned earlier? It’s not just squeezing out inefficiencies – it’s squeezing out entire layers of the professional services pyramid. And here’s the kicker: clients love it. They get faster results at lower costs. Why wouldn’t they?
Three Ways AI is Eating Your Lunch (and Your Dinner)
Let me get specific about where compression is hitting hardest:
- Contract Review and Markup. Remember when reviewing a commercial lease meant three associates, two all-nighters, and enough coffee to float a small yacht? AI now handles the heavy lifting, flagging non-standard terms and suggesting edits based on thousands of similar agreements. The intermediary layer between “client needs contract reviewed” and “contract is reviewed” just got paper-thin.
- Legal Research and Analysis. That brilliant legal memo you spent 40 hours crafting? AI can now synthesize case law, statutes, and regulations into coherent analysis in a fraction of the time. It won’t win a Pulitzer, but it’ll answer the client’s question. And that’s often all they need.
- Document Preparation and Filing. Court documents, compliance filings, regulatory submissions – these used to require human hands at every step. Now? Input the parameters and watch the system generate everything from the caption to the certificate of service.
Attorneys aren’t the exception – they’re just one of the first dominos to begin teetering.
The Broader Professional Reckoning
CPAs watching AI crunch numbers. Consultants seeing AI generate strategy decks. Financial advisors watching robo-advisors manage portfolios. You’re all in the same boat, and that boat is taking on water fast.
Any profession that creates value primarily by serving as an information intermediary is facing the same existential question: What happens when the intermediary becomes unnecessary?
How to Survive the Squeeze
So, what’s a professional to do? Channel their inner Michael Douglas in Falling Down and rage against the machine? I think not.
Here’s your three-step survival plan:
- Become a Strategic Counselor, Not a Document Processor
Your value isn’t in reviewing contracts; it’s in understanding why certain terms matter for this client in this situation. It’s about reading the room during negotiations, sensing when to push and when to yield. AI can’t feel the tension when a deal’s about to fall apart. Yet.
You can.
- Embrace Hybrid Human-AI Service Models
This isn’t about competing with AI – that’s like trying to outrun a Ferrari on foot. Instead, use AI as a force multiplier. Let it handle the grunt work while you focus on strategy, relationships, and judgment calls. Think of yourself less as a knowledge gatekeeper and more as a wisdom translator.
- Specialize in AI-Resistant Problem-Solving
Courtroom advocacy. Creative deal structuring. Navigating novel legal issues. These require the kind of contextual thinking and adaptability that remains stubbornly human. When the law hasn’t caught up to technology (hello, crypto regulations), when negotiations get emotional, when someone needs to stand before a jury and make them feel something – that’s where you live now.
Three Questions That Might Save Your Career
If you’re a professional watching AI encroach on your territory, ask yourself:
- What part of my work is truly just information processing, and what part requires human judgment?
- How can I use AI to deliver more value rather than competing with it?
- What unique human capabilities do my clients actually need that no algorithm can provide?
The answers might surprise you. They might also save your career.
The Compression Opportunity
But here’s what compression can’t touch: trust, judgment, creativity, and the ability to navigate ambiguity. The question isn’t whether AI will change your profession – that ship has sailed. The question is whether you’ll evolve with it or be compressed by it.
The compression of time, distance, and information access has always been humanity’s story. We’ve just reached the chapter where it’s compressing the distance between clients and outcomes, potentially writing intermediaries out of the plot.
But every compression creates new spaces, new opportunities, new ways to add value.
The question is: Will you find them?
2. Sound Waves: Podcast Highlights
This week’s podcast features Steven Bryant, COO of Avitel, a guy who’s been orchestrating complex business processes since before AI was cool. Steven shared the counterintuitive insight that companies with existing automation infrastructure are actually at a massive advantage in AI adoption – and he breaks down the specific orchestration approach that cuts AI implementation from months to weeks.
Key takeaway for executives: If you’ve already invested in process automation, you’re not behind in AI – you’re ahead. Steven explains exactly how to leverage that foundation.
Subscribe for free today on your listening platform of choice to ensure you never miss a beat.
New episodes release every two weeks.
3. Research Roundup: What the Data Tells Us
The multi-Million Dollar Blind Spot in Your Email Security
Your email filters are missing the threats your employees can actually see as new research just proved AI can read phishing emails like a human expert. (And catch what your current systems don’t).
The numbers that matter: AI models achieved 95-97% accuracy in detecting phishing attempts by analyzing actual email content and sender intent, not just technical metadata. Compare that to your current system that lets sophisticated phishing emails reach employee inboxes every week because they pass technical filters but scream “scam” to anyone who reads them.
What this means for your Monday morning: This isn’t theoretical. While you’re reading this, sophisticated phishing emails are likely sitting in your executives’ inboxes because they passed your technical filters but would be obvious scams to any human who actually read them.
The catch: This isn’t about replacing your current email security. It’s an additional layer that examines content after your existing filters do their technical screening. Your IT team will need to integrate this properly, not bolt it on as an afterthought.
Action item: Ask your IT director what percentage of phishing emails currently reach employee inboxes despite your filters. If they don’t track this metric, that’s your first problem to solve. Then consider piloting AI content analysis on executive emails within 90 days.
Read our full analysis of each of these research papers at AI for the C Suite.
4. Radar Hits: What’s Worth Your Attention
AI Adoption Reality Check: 40% of your employees are already using AI at work – nearly double from two years ago. But here’s the leadership gap: only 22% of organizations have communicated a clear AI strategy. Translation: Your people are experimenting with AI tools without guardrails. You’re not avoiding risk by staying quiet – you’re just managing it blindly.
The AI Writing Problem: New research explains why AI-generated content feels “off” to readers, even when it’s technically correct. If your customer-facing content, proposals, or internal communications sound robotic, you’re undermining trust before anyone reads past the first paragraph. Your content teams need specific guidelines for when AI helps versus when it hurts.
The Emotional AI Warning: OpenAI’s head of model behavior reports people are forming emotional bonds with ChatGPT – thanking it, confiding in it, calling it “alive.” For customer service leaders: AI that feels too human creates unrealistic expectations, while AI that’s too robotic frustrates users. The sweet spot is warm but clearly artificial.
5. Elevate Your Leadership with AI for the C Suite
Ready to turn these insights into action? I’m working with two new clients next quarter on comprehensive AI strategy – the kind that identifies your specific compression opportunities and builds competitive moats around your human advantages. If you want to get ahead of the disintermediation wave instead of getting caught in it, reply with ‘STRATEGY’ and let’s talk about what that looks like for your organization.
Here’s the bottom line: AI isn’t going away, and neither is the need for strategic leadership. Until next week, keep pushing boundaries.
Chad