Here’s a market pattern worth watching: when each sub-module of a complex workflow gets productized separately, the integration layer becomes the next opportunity.

You can watch this play out in real time in commercial real estate due diligence. Environmental assessment has a dedicated AI platform. Physical condition reporting has another. Financial and accounting workflows have an agentic system that just raised over a hundred million dollars. Full acquisition due diligence has a nine-module SaaS tool. Each vertical is getting its own specialist.

None of them talk to each other through a standard protocol.

The workflow fragmentation is actually evidence that the overall market is real and large. When you see a company raise at a billion-dollar valuation for just the accounting slice of a workflow, the implied size of the integrated workflow is very large. The accounting module alone isn’t the market — it’s one of eight or ten modules in the acquisition process.

The fragmentation tell is when specialists are succeeding in each vertical but no one has built the integration layer. At that point, the specialists have done your market validation for you. They’ve proven each slice has willingness to pay. The integration problem — stitching those slices together into a coherent workflow — remains open.

The integration layer can be built at different levels of abstraction. A human can do it by subscribing to all the specialists and manually moving information between them. A consultant can do it by building custom workflows for each client. A protocol-native tool can do it by connecting the specialists programmatically.

The third option scales. The other two don’t.

When you see the vertical fragmentation tell, ask: where’s the integration layer? If it doesn’t exist yet, that’s the gap. +++