Lawrence Lartey already described what happens when the layer you sold becomes free
On Ep12, The Agency Model Is Broken - And The People Who Built It Are Saying So, Lawrence Lartey traced the agency business back to why it existed at all: brands 'could not acquire all of these skills. Right. So they outsourced it… to that partner, that foundation partner that could be there and be accountable.' Then the turn: 'The internet comes and now we're in the age of AI, where technology has said, well, a lot of that knowledge is now available at the touch of your hand. So the retainer that I used to pay the agency to be able to be that repository of that knowledge and the repository of those skills, is that retainer really that valuable? … The thing I used to pay you for, I now have access to.' His conclusion wasn't that agencies stop mattering: 'it's not so much that agencies are no longer valuable. It's the model.'
What it actually means
Both of today's stories are that sentence happening to somebody else. The agent harness a framework company was going to charge for; the data plumbing a startup built for one industry; both were repositories of skill that somebody paid you to hold on their behalf, and both just became available at the touch of a hand. Lawrence's answer still holds, and it's the useful one: the value doesn't vanish, the thing you invoice for changes. Elsewhere in the same episode he put the work in naming which pieces of a business are 'truly valuable' and which are 'fluid' because the fluid ones get absorbed, and the expensive way to find out which is which is to read it on somebody's launch page. Run that audit on your own product this week instead.
The thing I used to pay you for, I now have access to.
Source: Brew Bytes Ep12 — Sameer Rehman & Lawrence Lartey · Friday 11 September 2026