AI Won’t Replace Brand Operators—It Will Expose the Average Ones

The Core Argument: AI as a Sorting Mechanism, Not a Replacement

In the periodic cycle of AI panic, the latest fear is that software will replace the human operators who manage ecommerce, advertising, content and strategy for consumer brands. Anthony Connelly, founder and CEO of commerce operator Neato, sees the story differently. Writing in a recent commentary, he argued that AI will not eliminate brand operators—it will make average ones economically obsolete, and that is a far bigger shift.

For years, a sprawling ecosystem of agencies and service firms has grown around brand ecommerce. One partner handles paid ads, another manages creative, another handles marketplace listings, another offers analytics, and a strategist ties it together with slide decks. Each can point to plenty of activity, but only rarely is any single player truly accountable for whether the brand is growing profitably. This structure, Connelly contends, has been sustained by complexity: when the channel stack is messy enough, everyone can blame everyone else for weak results, and the brand is left managing a committee.

AI changes that equation because it can perform more of the baseline work—writing acceptable copy, generating ad variations, summarizing performance data—faster and cheaper. The market will stop paying premium prices for people and firms that only produce middling outputs without real accountability. As Connelly puts it, the question will become not “Did you produce the deliverable?” but “Did you improve the outcome?” That distinction separates genuine operators from average ones, and AI speeds up the reckoning.

Why the Middle of the Brand Services Market Is Suddenly Exposed

The Middle Layer Under Threat

The part of the market most at risk is not the tiny handful of elite operators, nor the cheapest commodity providers. It is the broad middle—agencies and consultants whose work is competent enough to win a pitch but not differentiated enough to become essential once AI raises the performance baseline. “We can help with ecommerce” will stop being a strategy, and “we use AI” will soon be meaningless because everyone will. The firms that survive this sorting will be those that can answer harder questions: Who owns the outcome? Who makes tradeoffs across pricing, inventory and creative? Who absorbs the risk?

What Separates Real Operators from the Rest

Connelly’s own firm, Neato, illustrates the future he describes. Neato operates as a “second-party” commerce operator, buying inventory directly from brands and managing execution across Amazon, other marketplaces, social commerce and DTC channels—with a single profit and loss statement tying it all together. That model aligns economics with outcomes: Neato only benefits if the brand’s commerce actually works. It is an example of an operator that combines machine leverage with human judgment and real accountability. Connelly’s argument is that AI will reward exactly this kind of structure and punish those who merely coordinate handoffs.

Importantly, the shift is not about software sophistication but about organisational design. AI cannot own consequences, carry inventory risk, or stand in front of a brand and say “we are accountable for this strategy.” The winners will be operators who use AI to simplify the business rather than adding another abstraction layer, and who understand that profitable growth and topline growth are not the same thing. For everyone else, “good enough” was always temporary—and AI is about to make that painfully clear.

What Outcome-Oriented Operators Should Do Now

• Audit your value proposition: if it relies on producing deliverables (ads, listings, reports) rather than guaranteeing a measurable commercial outcome, reposition before AI compresses fees in the middle of the market.
• Consider outcome-linked commercial structures, such as inventory ownership or revenue-based fees, that align your economics with the brand’s profit—the Neato model is one signal of where the market is heading.
• Integrate AI to raise your baseline output, but invest equal energy in developing judgment, cross-functional decision-making, and the ability to say “we own the result”—traits that automation cannot replicate.
• Brands hiring service partners should shift their evaluation criteria from the quality of a pitch deck to hard questions about who carries risk and how the partner’s compensation ties to actual growth, not just activity volume.