I get this question a lot from people who sell ebooks, courses, templates, and other digital products, and I understand why it comes up with a bit of panic in it. If AI can generate a course outline in ten seconds or spit out a template library in an afternoon, why would anyone pay for what you’re selling. It’s a fair worry. But after watching this space closely, I don’t think the honest answer is “AI is destroying it.” I think the honest answer is “AI is destroying the laziest version of it,” and that’s a very different thing.

Let me explain what I mean. For years, a certain corner of the digital products world ran on a simple formula. Take something mildly useful, package it as a PDF or a template, slap a price tag on it, and sell it through a landing page with some urgency language and a countdown timer. That formula worked because creating the product itself took real effort and most buyers couldn’t easily make it themselves. That barrier is gone now. If your entire value proposition was “I did the work of assembling this information so you don’t have to,” AI just removed the reason anyone needs you to do that. A five dollar budget template, a generic social media caption pack, a basic notion planner, these are things anyone can now generate themselves in minutes. That part of the market is genuinely shrinking, and no amount of better marketing is going to save it long term.

But here’s where the panic gets misplaced. Not all digital products were ever really about the content itself. Some were about something AI still can’t replicate, and understanding that difference is the whole game right now.

The first thing AI struggles to replace is earned trust. When someone buys a course from a person they’ve followed for two years, they’re not really buying information, they’re buying a shortcut through someone else’s hard won experience and the confidence that this particular person’s approach actually works. That kind of trust takes real time and real credibility to build, and it doesn’t transfer just because a chatbot can explain the same concept. People still want to learn from someone who’s actually done the thing, made the mistakes, and come out the other side with scars to show for it.

The second thing is judgment that’s specific to a messy situation. General information is now free everywhere. But “here’s exactly what to do given your particular business, your particular numbers, your particular constraints” is still genuinely hard to get from a generic AI tool without a lot of skilled prompting most people don’t know how to do. A product that helps someone apply a framework to their actual weird situation, not just explains the framework, holds its value.

The third thing is community and accountability. A lot of the most resilient digital products right now aren’t really products at all in the old sense, they’re structured access to a group of people working on the same problem together, with someone experienced steering the ship. AI can give you information. It can’t sit in a group chat and notice that you’ve stalled out for three weeks and nudge you back into motion, at least not in a way that feels the same as a real person doing it.

So if you’re building or selling in this space, I think the smart move isn’t to fight AI or pretend it doesn’t threaten anything. It’s to get honest about which category your product actually falls into. If it’s mostly information that’s freely available elsewhere, repackaged, that product needs to evolve or it’s going to keep losing ground. If it’s built around your specific experience, your specific results, or a real community, you’re in a stronger position than the panic suggests, and you should probably be leaning into that harder rather than worrying about the wrong threat.

There’s also a quieter shift happening that I think gets less attention than it deserves. Buyers are getting more discerning, not less willing to spend. When information was scarce, people paid for access to it. Now that information is abundant, people are increasingly paying for curation, taste, and a trusted voice to tell them what actually matters out of the flood. That’s a real shift in what “value” means in this space, and creators who understand it are adjusting their offers accordingly, moving away from “here’s a pile of information” and toward “here’s exactly what you need and here’s why.”

I’d also gently push back on the framing that this is purely a threat and nothing else. AI has made it dramatically easier for a solo creator to actually build a polished product. Someone with real expertise but no design skills can now put together something that looks professional. Someone who’s slow at writing can move through a first draft faster and spend more time on the parts that actually require their judgment. The tool cuts both ways. It removes the floor for low effort products, but it raises the ceiling for what one thoughtful, experienced person can build on their own.

So no, I don’t think AI is destroying the digital products business. I think it’s doing what every major shift in a market eventually does, exposing which parts of the business were ever really adding value in the first place. The stuff that was thin gets thinner and eventually disappears. The stuff built on real trust, real specificity, and real human connection is actually in a decent position, as long as the person behind it is willing to be honest about which one they’re building.