Fragmentation in professional workflows doesn’t stop at the module level.

When I say “module,” I mean a distinct workstream in a larger process. Due diligence has modules: environmental assessment, lease review, financial analysis, physical inspection. Each module is already getting its own dedicated tool.

But the fragmentation goes deeper. Inside the lease review module, there’s lease abstraction. Inside lease abstraction, there’s clause extraction. Inside the financial module, there’s rent roll parsing. Inside rent roll parsing, there are tools dedicated specifically to normalizing messy rent roll formats into clean spreadsheets.

Multiple companies are competing for the rent roll parsing sub-task alone.

This is the sub-module problem: fragmentation compounds. The total number of distinct tools a professional needs to combine to run their workflow grows not just with the number of modules, but with the number of sub-tasks within each module.

The integration problem grows with fragmentation. Two modules with two sub-tasks each is four potential tools to coordinate. Four modules with three sub-tasks each is twelve. And these tools don’t talk to each other — each has its own login, its own data format, its own export flow.

The human doing the workflow becomes the integration layer. They download from one tool, clean the output, upload to the next. They translate between formats. They reconcile outputs that contradict each other.

This is the inefficiency that protocol-native tooling was designed to solve. When the tools speak a common protocol, the human stops being the connector. But most of the sub-module specialists haven’t shipped protocol integrations yet.

The deeper the fragmentation goes, the more valuable the integration layer becomes. +++