This "messy middle" is now hitting everyday services too, quietly breaking legal claims, insurance, ombudsmen, and customer support.
For decades, organisations relied on human effort as a natural rate-limiter. Writing a formal legal claim, regulatory complaint, or detailed appeal took hours of work or hundreds of pounds in legal fees. That friction kept inbound volume matched to the humans sitting on the other side of the desk reading them.
Generative AI just dropped the cost of creating those claims to zero.
Today, anyone can generate a 20-page legal claim or dispute letter in thirty seconds. Look at the UK Legal Ombudsman's latest figures: more than half (51%) of complaint files now show clear signs of AI drafting, helping drive a 37% surge in annual caseloads.
Because most receiving organisations still rely on humans to read and triage every submission, zero-friction AI generation acts like a live DDoS attack on their teams.
You cannot solve a machine-speed flood by hiring more people to read PDFs. The only way through this messy middle is AI customer service on the receiving side too, triaging, verifying, and resolving issues at machine speed. That is a big part of why I am so excited about our investment in
@SierraPlatform (
@btaylor and
@claybavor).
Self-driving cars and AI security share the same messy transition: mixing humans and machines.
On roads, mixing unpredictable humans with AVs creates friction before all-AV fleets make safety soar.
Online, AI attack vs human defence is broken. We need AI on defence.