Will AI make ecommerce more competitive or less?

More competitive on everything it can produce and less competitive on everything it cannot. When every store can generate a good description, descriptions stop being a differentiator.

In more detail

What appreciates in value is what cannot be generated: delivery speed, a real relationship with a supplier, service with a name attached, knowledge of a specific market. Those were always the durable advantages and now they are the only ones.

What to do about it

The biggest change is where people ask. A merchant now asks an assistant ‘who can build me an app’ instead of searching, and what gets quoted back is whatever answered plainly.

AI is good at the volume work — descriptions, alt text, replies to the same question. It is poor at deciding what to sell.

Generated product photography still reads as generated to a customer more often than the people making it believe.

The mobile app angle

The practical consequence for a store: what an assistant can read about you decides whether it recommends you. Plain, checkable facts beat marketing copy.