While the service providers are experiencing massive growth they are happy to share. When growth plateaus they will go after every cost reduction, including squeezing out non-value added resellers. Especially those with warning letters from the FDA for making false claims, as noted below.
As a distributor your value add was always making me markets. Once made, those markets are now trivial to take direct unless there is some advantage to having a local take a risk on stock- holding. I have worked in distribution and seen Amazon refuse to deal with the distributor and go direct as soon as they see decent sales, for instance.
I think the point of this article is that AI enables people to do so much more? Much of marketing is creating engaging content and AI allows people to create more than ever.