Beyond the next superfood

Every few years a consumer category gets a halo and a surge of launches, and most of them disappear within eighteen months. The pattern is reliable: a real underlying trend gets wrapped in a wave of near-identical products, the shelf gets crowded, the margins collapse, and the two or three operators who understood the category durably remain.

AI-shaped consumer products are following the same arc, faster. Every category — productivity, education, wellness, companionship — is seeing a flood of near-identical offerings built on the same two or three models, differentiated mostly by brand voice and onboarding flow. Most of them will not be here in 2028.

The ones that will survive are not the ones with the slickest demo. They are the ones solving a problem that existed before the AI, where the AI makes the solution ten times better rather than ten times cheaper. The fad products ride the model. The durable products ride the problem.

For incumbents the question is not whether to launch an AI-shaped product. It is whether the problem you have been solving for twenty years is now solvable in a shape your current organisation cannot ship. If yes, that is the opportunity. If no, the AI-shaped version of your existing product is probably a distraction.

Durability beats novelty, as it always has.