Five years ago, that same person might have paid $197 for a course teaching them to do exactly that.

They will now pay an AI basically nothing.

This is the new reality for anyone selling information online.

AI is not destroying the infoproduct business, but it is exposing which products were just repackaged Google searches, and which ones deliver something an AI genuinely cannot.

If you sell courses, ebooks, templates, or coaching programs, this distinction now determines whether your business grows or slowly faces attrition and competitive pressure on pricing.

There are products that were already on borrowed time

Let me be direct about what's vulnerable.

Generic how-to content is in trouble.

The ebook explaining "how to start a podcast" or "how to launch a SendOwl product" competes against an AI that will walk someone through the same process for free, in real time, customized to their exact situation. The AI will answer follow-up questions. It won't make them wait for Module 4 or upsell them the advanced course.

Template bundles face similar pressure. When someone can ask an AI to generate a social media content calendar, a business plan outline, or an email sequence template on demand, the static PDF version loses its edge. Even templates that are extremely high-quality face the reality that they are no longer scarce.

Basic frameworks and checklists fall into the same category. AI is extremely good at producing structured approaches to common problems.

Some of this dynamic is not new to the AI era. Informational products were already competing with free blog posts, YouTube tutorials, and Reddit threads in the previous era. Like it or not, however, AI accelerates this competitive pressure by an order of magnitude.

Creators selling these products need to evolve faster than they might have planned.

What AI actually cannot do

AI is excellent at synthesizing existing information. It's poor at several things that matter enormously for digital product businesses.

AI cannot be you. Your perspective, your failures, your specific way of explaining things, your taste. People buy from people they trust. That trust comes from personality, consistency, and demonstrated expertise over time. An AI can mimic tone but cannot build a relationship. You will need to infuse more of yourself into info products. You may need to act more like a creator. Assume even very detailed information, alone, is 100% commoditized from now on.

AI cannot hold you accountable. Information has never been the bottleneck for most people. Implementation is. Knowing you should post on Instagram three times a week is easy. Actually doing it when no one's watching is hard. Products that include accountability, feedback loops, or community support solve problems AI cannot touch.

People can ask the AI to hold them accountable, but like any app, they can turn off the accountability with a quick prompt as well.

AI cannot provide access. To real humans, to curated communities, to live experiences. A membership where people connect with peers facing similar challenges has value an AI cannot replicate, no matter how sophisticated the chatbot. Agents will even try to chip away at this advantage, but "no-AI-allowed" human communities are a real gated moat you can create that — by definition — AI can't replicate.

AI cannot do the actual work. It can explain how to write a sales page. It can even draft one. But it cannot build the business that makes the sales page worth writing. Products that help people implement, not just understand, remain valuable. There will be millions of "businesses generated in a minute" by agents in the coming months. They are all competing with each other. Any business that is instantly clone-able is not sustainable. It feels overwhelming, with the deluge of automation-related news — but you can sit and do the hard work to figure out what is not clone-able.

AI cannot provide specialized expertise at the edges. AI knows a lot about common topics. It knows far less about niche domains, proprietary methods, or expertise earned through years of specific practice. The more specialized your knowledge, the wider your moat.

I know, people might be skeptical about this last one. But AI has noticeable guardrails around providing truly "insider info" style information and often defaults to "median expertise." By being willing to give opinionated, totally counter-intuitive advice in specific areas, you can stand out from the super-helpful, detailed-oriented, middle-of-the-road insights that AI is genuinely great at.

What adaptation actually looks like

Consider how different types of creators might evolve their products:

A fitness info product designer selling meal plan PDFs could shift to a membership with weekly live cooking sessions and a private community where members share what they made. The information in the meal plans was never unique. The accountability and community are. Even with everything changing, people still tend to prefer to hang out with their favorite celebrity, over interacting with an LLM impersonating their favorite celebrity.

A consultant who packaged their methodology into a $997 self-paced course could shift to a cohort model with live case study reviews and peer accountability. The frameworks were never the hard part so much as getting clients to implement them.

A business coach selling a $47 strategy ebook might offer it free as a lead magnet instead. The paid product becomes a small group program with direct feedback and hot seat coaching. McKinsey-level strategy boilerplate is a commodity now. Human connection is the next frontier.

A designer selling Canva template bundles could pivot to live workshops on design thinking and offer template customization as an add-on service. The templates become a starting point, not the product itself.

None of these hypothetical creators abandon infoproducts. They upgrade what infoproducts mean in their business.

The new rules for selling information

If you're building or evolving a digital product business right now, these principles separate the products that will grow from the ones that will slowly deflate.

Sell transformation, not information. People often don't want to know how to do something. They want the outcome that comes from doing it. Products that promise and deliver real change in someone's business, health, skills, or life justify their price regardless of what free alternatives exist.

Add human elements that AI cannot touch. Live components, community access, direct feedback, accountability structures. Even small touches like personal video responses to questions or monthly group calls create value that scales better than you'd expect. Ironically, you may use a bit of AI help to scale up this personalization, but if you ensure the output is authentic, there is no incongruence.

Get more specific, not more comprehensive. The 47-module course covering everything about online business is now competing with AI that knows everything about online business and give a fully personalized curriculum. The focused product solving one narrow problem for one specific type of person competes with almost nothing.

Use AI as a production tool. The same technology pressuring commodity content also makes it faster to produce high-quality material. Creators using AI to research, outline, draft, and edit can produce better products more efficiently. The leverage goes both ways.

Build products around what you've actually done. Earned expertise, real results, documented case studies, proprietary methods developed through practice. AI is trained on what's been published. Your unpublished experience is a competitive advantage.

What this means for the infoproduct market

The good news is I don't think AI shrinks the overall market for digital products.

The bottom of the market, generic information sold at low prices to people who mostly won't implement it, faces real pressure. Some of that demand evaporates entirely and some of it shifts to free AI tools.

The middle and top of the market, products that deliver genuine transformation, access, or specialized expertise, may actually grow. As more people start businesses, launch creative projects, and try to build something online, demand for real guidance increases. AI makes some things easier. It makes other things more overwhelming because there's more noise to cut through.

Creators who can cut through that noise, who have built trust and demonstrated results, become more valuable as generic information becomes free.

This isn't a small shift. It's a fundamental reordering of what makes a digital product worth paying for.

The question to ask yourself

Look at whatever digital product you're selling or building and ask: could someone get 80% of this value by spending an hour with ChatGPT?

If the answer is yes, that's your signal. Your product needs more of the things AI cannot provide.

If the answer is no, you're probably already selling something in the categories that will thrive, so double down.

The digital products business is evolving faster than it has in years. The creators who adapt early will build the next generation of sustainable information businesses. The ones who keep selling commodity content will wonder why their revenue keeps declining even though they're doing everything they used to do.