• by Allen Adamson , Yesterday

For years, AI companies positioned themselves as tools that help professionals work faster, not competitors waiting in the wings. It's a comforting story. But industries often cling to comforting stories right up until the business model beneath them shifts.

If you want a glimpse of where this might be heading, you don't need a crystal ball. You just need to look at what happened in Hollywood.

From Distributor to Creator: The Netflix Roadmap

Netflix began by distributing other people's content. Then it improved discovery with data. Then it hired writers and directors. Then it became a full-scale studio. Today, it's no longer disrupting the entertainment industry. It is the entertainment industry.

AI is now where Netflix was in its early years, still in the distributor phase, ingesting massive amounts of content: books, articles, reports, expert work to train large models.

The next question is unavoidable: What happens when the platform that aggregates the world's expertise decides it can also produce its own?

Signals AI May Follow the Same Path

Look at what AI companies are doing, not what they're saying, and a familiar pattern appears.

They're hiring specialized talent -- not only engineers but economists, psychologists, legal scholars, clinicians, and policy strategists.

Netflix changed course when it hired creators. AI may change course when it hires experts.

AI companies are building vertical pro models for finance, law, software development, and marketing. The step from supporting professionals to substituting for them isn't a big one.

Enterprise clients want more than raw answers. They want interpretation, judgment, and strategic guidance: the same things consulting firms, agencies, and analysts are hired to deliver. If platforms can deliver even part of this at scale, the competitive landscape will look very different.

What This Means for Professional Services

Professional services differentiate themselves through expertise: original thinking, proven frameworks, the ability to read situations with nuance. Yet these are the very ingredients AI systems learn from.

The assets that make firms valuable may soon become the training data that powers their most significant competition.

This doesn't mean the sky is falling. It does mean the center of gravity in professional services is shifting. Winning firms will deliver fresh thinking rather than recycled best practices, develop a clear and original point of view, combine human judgment with AI scale, and protect the parts of their expertise that can't be flattened into data.

The Takeaway

Netflix never announced it was entering the studio business. It simply hired the talent it needed and let the model evolve.

AI companies are now hiring their talent.

The question is no longer whether AI will become more than a tool.

The question is whether professional service firms are preparing for the moment when the platform that learned from them begins to compete with them.