On May 1, 1975 — Wall Street still calls it “May Day” — the SEC abolished fixed trading commissions. Overnight, the price of a stock trade began its long march toward zero. The brokers who survived didn’t survive by standing in the doorway insisting the commission was a law of physics. They climbed up the value chain — to advice, planning, relationships — and let the machine handle the transaction that no longer paid.
Every Business Is About to Star in That Movie
And right now most founders are auditioning for the role of the broker who keeps shouting “but we’ve always charged for the trade.”
Because here’s what AI does to your business: it drives the price of the transaction — the task, the deliverable, the commodity thing you do — toward zero. When anyone can generate the logo, draft the contract, build the basic app, or run the rote service for almost nothing, you can’t build your company around being the one who does that task.
The Two Things That Don’t Commoditize
You build it around the two things that don’t commoditize: judgment that sits above the AI, and the human relationship the algorithm can’t fake.
I’ve watched this in my own businesses. AboveItAll runs on agents, so the humans climb to the parts that need taste and trust. Resistance is a winery, but the moat was never the liquid in the bottle — it’s the experience and the people, the stuff a model can’t pour. Up the value chain is the only direction that doesn’t dead-end in a price war you lose to whoever has cheaper servers.
Why It’s Coming Faster
Now the part you most need to hear. It took the brokerages roughly eight or nine years to fully reprice after May Day. You will not get that runway. AI compounds in months, not years. Distribution is nearly free — your scrappiest competitor ships to the whole country overnight. Your customers’ expectations are already set by the slickest apps they use. And switching away from you is now a couple of taps. Compress a decade into a couple of years and that’s the timeline you’re actually facing.
So here’s the whole series in one sentence: put your humans above the AI, put your relationships at the center, and redraw the org chart on purpose — now, while it’s still your choice. Do it and you own the next decade. Wait, and you become the full-service broker nobody under forty has heard of — a commodity with a really nice logo.
Don’t wait for your May Day. It’s already on the calendar.
Final Thoughts
Why It Matters: AI pushes the transaction toward zero margin. The franchise that survives is built on human judgment and relationships — and the window to reposition is years, not a decade.
What to Do: Identify the commodity task at the center of your business, move your people above it, and double down on the relationship a model can’t replicate.
Coming Up Next: That’s a wrap on the series — but the conversation’s just starting. Tell me which lesson hit hardest.
Disruption with a side of humor — Kirk Drake, signing off.
This is the talk I close with — May Day, the value chain, and the founder’s choice. If your people need to hear it before the calendar makes the choice for them, book me here.
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