When AI makes content free, what's actually left to compete on?
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Everyone here can generate a hundred pieces of content before lunch now. Blog posts, ads, captions, basically free and basically instant.
So here's what I keep chewing on: when the output itself is free, what's actually left to compete on?
My honest bet, after 35 years in marketing, is strategy and taste. Knowing what to make and why, who it's for, and what actually moves someone. The stuff no model can hand you.
But I could be wrong, I've had clients want to generate 20, 30, 40 posts a day and could not be talked out of it. I want to hear how the builders here see it. Are you feeling that shift yet, where volume stops being the advantage? Or is more still winning?
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Circling back on my own question because I've been sitting with it since I posted it, and I think I was half wrong.
I said strategy and taste are what's left to compete on. True, but incomplete. Here's a sharper version: when output is free, the thing you're actually competing on is specificity, and taste is just the skill of choosing what to be specific about.
A hundred free blog posts about "roofing tips" are worthless because they could be about anyone's roofing business. One post built from a real customer's actual words, a real service call, a real objection you heard on the phone, that's not competing with the hundred free ones. It's not even in the same category. The model can generate infinite generic. It cannot generate your actual lived experience on lastTuesday.
So new question for the room: when you strip away volume as an advantage, what's the one piece of "specific" you have that a competitor genuinely can't copy, even with the same tools you're using?