Someone I know – a content creator – recently told me a really interesting story. He had written a series of blog posts that got great responses. So he decided to package them into an online course, and the course started selling well.
Here’s the interesting part: the exact same content is still freely available on his blog. He never took the posts down. Technically, anyone could just read the blog posts for free. But people are still paying for the course – probably for the convenience or the format. Packaging and user experience matter.
I think the same applies to AI apps. In theory, you can do almost anything with ChatGPT or other general models, but that doesn’t mean people are always thinking of specific use cases in advance. That’s why specialized AI apps, with thoughtful UI/UX and fine-tuned prompting – in other words, good packaging – still matter.