The New Battle for Value in the AI Era: Why Are Products Becoming Commodities Much Faster Than Before, and How Do You Resist?

There is a scene that keeps getting more common in my conversations with founders. The founder proudly shows me a feature the team spent months building. It is usually genuinely good. Then they take out their phone and show me a competitor's screen doing the same thing, shipped in a fraction of the time.

“How did they build it so fast?”

The answer is simple, and we both know it. Everyone builds fast now.

The cost of copying is approaching zero

For a long time, a big part of competitive advantage in software came from how hard things were to build. Building something was difficult, took time, and needed good engineers. Whoever built it first stayed ahead for months, sometimes years.

AI has shaken that equation. Writing code got faster, designing interfaces got faster, and turning an idea into a working prototype dropped from days to hours. There is a lovely side to this: small teams can do big things. And an uncomfortable side: anyone can also do what you do.

The shorter the time it takes a competitor to copy a feature, the shorter the advantage that feature gives you. Months of effort turn into a lead of a few weeks. This isn't new; it's just that a process that used to take years now takes months, or even weeks.

Products are turning into commodities fast. A commodity is something customers can't see a meaningful difference between, so they choose on price. And being a product that gets chosen on price is one of the most exhausting things that can happen to a startup.

The “wrapper” trap

You see this most clearly in AI products that are a thin interface over a model. Underneath, a model anyone can access; on top, a nice screen and a few clever prompts. It looks impressive at first, because the user is experiencing something like this for the first time.

The problem is that almost all of the value comes from the model underneath, and that model isn't yours. When the model provider adds the same feature to its own product, or a competitor draws a cheaper screen on top of the same model, you have nothing left to defend.

Don't read this as a warning against AI products. I work on AI-enabled business models myself, and I think this is the biggest opportunity of the era. But the opportunity isn't in using the model. It is in doing what the model can't do on its own.

What's easy to copy is the feature. What's hard to copy is how that feature fits into the user's life.

Where the line of defense runs

In a world where copying is cheap, I see a few layers in the field where value stays protected.

Proprietary data and context. A model gives everyone the same answer. But if your product knows the user's history, their team's processes, the peculiar rules of their industry, the same model works far better inside your product. A competitor can't copy that context, because it comes from the time the user has spent with you. The behavioral accumulation I described in the previous piece becomes a moat in this era.

Embedding in the workflow. A tool sitting in a separate tab is easy to replace. A product placed at the center of the user's daily process, talking to their other tools, with automations set up, isn't replaced; it has to be ripped out. And nobody likes ripping things out.

Distribution. This is the least discussed layer, and maybe the most important. Selling a product that can be copied through a channel that can't is a big advantage. A community that reaches the right audience, a network of partnerships, a strong content engine. None of these get built over a weekend.

Trust. AI products make mistakes. Users know it. So when they choose which product to trust with their work, they look at reliability, not just capability. A product that gives consistent results, admits its mistakes and protects their data is worth more than a more capable but unpredictable one. Trust is earned slowly and can't be copied.

Owning the outcome. I think this is the most important shift. We used to give users a tool and they did the work. Now we can do the work itself. Instead of a reporting tool, a product that prepares the report. Instead of an email editor, a system that runs the campaign. A product that sells a tool can be copied. A product that takes on the outcome and answers for its quality is much harder to copy, because to deliver that outcome you have to build everything together: the data, the process, the quality control and the accountability.

The way you read your roadmap has to change

This picture has a practical consequence. When you look at your roadmap, every big item needs a new question: “Is this something a competitor can easily copy, or something that deepens over time?”

Building copyable things isn't forbidden. Sometimes you have to, to meet the market's expectations. But treat them as housekeeping: they get you a seat at the table, they don't win the war. Your real investment should go into work whose value grows the longer the user stays, that accumulates the user's context and settles deeper into their workflow.

Then there is speed. In a world where copying is easy, being fast isn't an advantage; it's the price of admission. Everyone is fast. So speed doesn't set you apart; what you learn quickly does. A team that learns from users faster than its competitors, and reflects that learning in the product faster than its competitors, doesn't fear individual features being copied. Because by the time a competitor copies, you are already a step ahead.

The real question

At the end of a conversation like this I usually ask: “Your competitor copied this feature. How many of your users left because of it?”

The answer usually comes after a pause: “None, as far as I know.”

Then what was lost is a feature, not value.

In this era the question is no longer “can a competitor build this?” They can. The question is: “What happens if they do?” If your answer is “not much, because our users find something else with us,” your line of defense is solid. If your answer is “we'd lose everything,” you have nothing to defend; nobody has noticed yet.

And the most insidious enemy in this new war isn't outside. It is inside: a debt you build up without noticing while you grow fast. We'll talk about it in the final piece of the series.