The future of creator businesses isn’t more AI features

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that companies like Podia need to rethink what people actually value online now. Earlier this year, I wrote about why I think this shift is happening.

When ChatGPT and other large language models first started taking off, it became obvious that a huge amount of information and educational content was going to become abundant and nearly free. People can now ask AI questions directly, get personalized explanations instantly, and learn things that previously required courses, ebooks, or tutorials. That changes everything.

As Podia’s CEO, I felt like there were two paths we could take with Podia. The first path was to jump headfirst into building AI features for creators. AI writing tools, assistants, workflows, and all the other things software companies started rushing toward. 

The second path was to focus on the one thing AI still cannot replace: human connection.

We chose the second path.

Not because we’re ignoring AI. Quite the opposite. AI is one of the biggest technological shifts in my lifetime. But over the last 18 months, it became very clear to me that the AI landscape was moving too quickly to confidently predict where it was all heading. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other models were improving at an unbelievable pace. Features that felt brand new one month were quickly becoming expected everywhere else.

A lot of companies rushed to build AI-powered features into their products, only for those same features to become built directly into the major AI platforms themselves shortly afterward. Without a crystal ball, it felt risky to spend years trying to outcompete the companies building the models themselves.

So instead, I started asking a different question: what becomes more valuable in a world where information becomes infinite and free?

The answer I kept coming back to was relationships.

People don’t just buy products from creators because they want information. They buy because they trust that creator. They like their perspective. They want to hear from them. They want to feel connected to them and to other people with similar interests. In a world increasingly filled with AI-generated content, I believe human connection becomes more important, not less.

That realization ended up reshaping how we thought about the future of Podia.

Historically, most creator platforms have treated creators and their audience like they existed in two completely different places online. The creator sits behind the scenes managing settings, products, permissions, and configurations while the audience logs into a separate members area and watches lessons, reads posts, or buys products. It’s functional, but it doesn’t really bring people together.

So one of the biggest changes we made with the newest version of Podia was rethinking that relationship entirely. Instead of creators operating behind the curtain, we wanted creators sitting at the same table as their audience.

In the new Podia, creators and members now exist in the same shared environment. They see the same conversations, the same spaces, and the same activity happening around the business. The goal was to make Podia feel less like a storefront and more like a place people actually spend time together.

The inspiration is much closer to Slack or Discord than traditional course platforms.

We also realized community could not just be another optional feature bolted onto the side of the product. It needed to become part of the core experience itself. That led us to building Spaces: shared places for conversations, learning, updates, events, and interaction. We wanted creators to be able to organize communities however they wanted without making things feel fragmented or disconnected.

We also expanded messaging and communication throughout the platform. More ways for creators and members to talk to each other naturally. More ways for people to participate instead of just consume.

More than anything, we want Podia to feel alive.

We want creators and their audiences to feel like they’re actually participating in something together rather than simply logging into a static content library alone. Of course, privacy and control still matter. Creators can make spaces private, hide member lists, manage permissions, and control visibility throughout the platform.

But philosophically, we believe the future of the creator economy is going to be much more community-driven and relationship-driven than purely content-driven. AI can generate information. It cannot replace belonging, trust, or shared experiences between creators and the people who genuinely care about what they do.

That’s the direction we’re building toward with the newest version of Podia.

We still have a lot of ideas we’re exploring. Some of them will work. Some probably won’t. But this is the most excited I’ve felt about building software in a very long time because it feels less like adding features and more like rethinking the human relationships that software enables.

I think we’re still very early in this transition. But it’s clear to me that the products that last will be the ones that help people feel more connected to each other, not less.