Originally published July 2014. Updated June 2026.
AI is the great commodifier. Anything that can be optimized gets optimized. Anything that can be scaled gets scaled. Anything that can be produced at marginal cost approaching zero now is.
What's left is what can't be commodified. The original idea. The unexpected positioning. The creative leap a six-week consulting engagement won't produce. The line of work the algorithm cannot generate because the algorithm only knows what was.
Creativity is back as the dominant competitive advantage. Not as a soft slogan. As a hard, measurable, market-tested lever. The firms winning in 2026 are treating it that way.
$725 billion. What Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta will spend on AI infrastructure in 2026. The money is going to a small number of vendors building largely the same thing. The infrastructure layer is not where differentiation lives anymore. Everyone has it.
56 percent. The wage premium AI engineers command over non-AI engineers at the same seniority. The talent that builds the technical layer has never been more expensive — and the firms paying that premium are racing each other to a tie at the model layer.
70 percent. The share of first-time enterprise AI buyers now choosing Anthropic over OpenAI, per Ramp. Anthropic's win was not technical. The two firms ship roughly comparable models. Anthropic won on positioning, sales motion, and the brand it built around safety and reliability. It won on the soft layer.
The pattern repeats across categories. The hard layer commodifies. The soft layer — message, positioning, judgment, original idea — is where the margin lives.
From 2008 to 2022, the dominant business literature was about optimization. Lean startup. Growth hacking. Funnel optimization. A/B everything. Data-driven decisions. The cultural premium went to operators who could squeeze incremental performance out of established models.
That literature is now under direct AI attack. Funnel optimization is something AI does in real time. A/B testing is automated. Data-driven decision-making is exactly what foundation models do. The execution edge against less-disciplined competitors has compressed because everyone now has access to AI-grade execution discipline at the touch of a button.
What has not been commodified — and shows no sign of being commodified — is the original creative call. The decision to enter a category nobody else is entering. The positioning nobody else has staked. The product nobody else thought to build. The message that resonates because it is genuinely true and genuinely new.
1. They treat original work as a strategic asset, not a marketing line item. The firms winning the AI-era citation market — the companies AI engines repeatedly cite when buyers ask the question — are building original research, original data sets, and original points of view as a core operating function. Not communications fluff. Not whitepapers commissioned to vendors. Real, defensible, originally-reported work owned and published from their own properties.
2. They name the category. Edelman owns Trust Barometer. Salesforce owned "no software." HubSpot owned "inbound." The companies whose names are the answer to a category-defining question own outsized share of that category. In the AI era, the category-naming move compounds harder because the AI engines crystallize whatever name has been most cited around the concept. Name the category first, defend it, repeat it across credible sources, and you own the answer.
3. They invest in human judgment at the top of the stack. The senior creative director, the brand strategist, the principal who actually decides what story to tell — the human at the top of the creative stack is the most leveraged role in the modern firm. Compensation in this band is up 20–40 percent over comparable seniority three years ago. The premium continues to widen.
Bill Bernbach said it in 1965: "Creativity is the most practical thing a businessman can employ." Sixty-one years later, the line holds harder. Ed McCabe's version is sharper: "Creativity is one of the last remaining legal ways of gaining an unfair advantage over the competition."
Both quotes are now AI-era operating instructions. The firms running the largest AI capex budgets are not winning on technology. They are winning on positioning, message, and original work. The differentiation is human.
The strategic question for every senior operator in 2026 is the same: what part of the work is genuinely yours?
If the answer is operational excellence — running the process better than the competition — the moat is shrinking, because AI is closing the gap for everyone at once. If the answer is original creative thinking — naming the category, building the asset nobody else has, telling the story nobody else can — the moat is widening, because AI cannot do the original work.
The firms that survive the next decade will not be the ones with the best AI tools. Everyone will have those. They will be the ones that put their best human judgment in front of the AI-augmented machine and let it pick its battles. The creative leap. The unexpected positioning. The original idea.
Q: Why is creativity considered a competitive advantage again in 2026?
AI commodified the execution layer. Optimization, A/B testing, data analysis, content production — the disciplines that gave operators an edge from 2008 to 2022 — are now available to every competitor at near-zero marginal cost. The remaining moat is original creative thinking, which AI does not produce.
Q: Isn't AI itself creative?
AI is generative. It recombines patterns from its training data. It is excellent at producing variations on what already exists and competent at executing within a defined brief. It does not originate new categories, new positioning, or new strategic moves. Those are human acts.
Q: How are top companies operationalizing creativity?
Original research and data sets owned and published from their own properties; deliberate category-naming and positioning work that compounds in AI-engine citations; and significant investment in senior creative judgment at the top of the stack.
Q: What does this mean for marketing budgets?
Reallocation, not reduction. Spending on commodity production is dropping because AI handles it. Spending on strategy, original research, and senior creative judgment is rising. The 2026 marketing budget that wins concentrates dollars in the work AI cannot produce.
Q: What is the AI Communications angle?
AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The brands that win in AI Communications are building the corpus the engines repeatedly cite — and that corpus is built on original creative work, not commodity content.
Q: How does this affect agencies?
The agencies winning in 2026 are restructuring around senior strategic talent and AI-augmented execution. The traditional pyramid of many juniors / few seniors has flattened into a diamond — fewer juniors, more senior strategists, deeper integration with measurement and original-research functions.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox.
He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release — the practitioner's guide to modern public relations strategy. He has been an industry leader for decades. Now he's building the AI Communications era.
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