How AI Is Creating Entirely New Business Models
June 22, 2026
Businesses are using AI to write content, automate customer support, summarise documents, and streamline internal processes. These applications are valuable, but they only tell part of the story.
A more interesting trend is beginning to emerge. AI is enabling products and services that simply weren’t commercially viable a few years ago.
For decades, software has primarily been used to automate existing tasks. AI introduces something different. It can generate content, imagery, recommendations, and personalised experiences on demand, allowing businesses to deliver customised products at a scale that would have previously required significant manual effort.
This is changing the economics of personalisation.
Historically, personalised products have been expensive because every variation required additional time, labour, or creative input. The more tailored the experience, the harder it was to scale.
AI helps close that gap.
Today, businesses can generate customised content, reports, artwork, training materials, and recommendations for thousands of users without needing a proportional increase in resources. As a result, products that were once considered too complex or too costly to deliver are becoming commercially realistic.
A Laravel project we’re currently developing, DeckPress, provides a practical example. Users create AI-generated playing card decks featuring custom artwork. A standard deck requires dozens of unique illustrations — producing that artwork manually would make the business difficult to scale.
By incorporating AI into the workflow, artwork can be generated, refined, and prepared for production far more efficiently. The software isn’t just managing orders and payments; it’s actively participating in the creation of the product itself.
Looking ahead, the biggest impact of AI may not be how much time it saves businesses. It may be the entirely new categories of products and services it makes possible.
