How Entire Products Become Features Overnight

Imagine spending four years building a travel planning startup. You raise funding, hire a team and slowly build a product that helps people discover destinations, compare hotels and organise every part of their trip in one place. After countless iterations, customer interviews and late nights, you finally start gaining traction.

Then one day someone opens ChatGPT and types: "Plan me a 10-day trip to Japan next April. I love food, design and hiking. Keep the budget under £3,000." Within seconds they're presented with a detailed itinerary, hotel recommendations, restaurant suggestions and transport advice. There are no accounts to create, no onboarding flows to complete and no additional apps to download.

Whether the recommendations are perfect is almost beside the point. The moment the experience becomes good enough, people start asking a dangerous question: why do I need a dedicated travel planning app at all?

This isn't really a story about travel planning. It's a story about a much larger shift beginning to reshape the software industry. The biggest threat to many startups isn't that AI can do what they do. It's that users may no longer need a dedicated product to do it.

For most of the industry's history, useful functionality was valuable because it was difficult to build. If you could solve a meaningful problem, there was a reasonable chance you could build a company around it. The product itself was the value, and if enough people needed what you had built, you had the foundation of a business.

AI is beginning to challenge that assumption.

The most interesting thing about large language models isn't that they can generate text, images or code. It's that they provide a new interface for software altogether. Increasingly, people don't need to learn a new tool or adopt a new workflow. They simply describe what they want and receive an answer.

Travel planning is a useful example because it isn't a single feature. For years it existed as an entire category of software, with companies competing on itinerary builders, destination guides, hotel recommendations and booking experiences. Today, much of that value can be replicated through a conversation with an AI assistant.

The same pattern is emerging elsewhere. Research tools, writing assistants, transcription software, translation products and countless other categories are finding themselves squeezed by platforms that can offer similar functionality as part of a much broader experience. In many cases, the standalone product doesn't disappear. It simply becomes harder to justify.

This is where distribution becomes so powerful. A startup might build a better travel planner than ChatGPT. It might offer deeper recommendations, better personalisation and a more refined experience. But consumers don't always choose the best product. More often, they choose the most convenient one.

That's the structural advantage companies like OpenAI, Google, Apple and Microsoft now possess. They already have the audience and the customer relationship. When they introduce a new capability, they aren't asking people to discover a product. They're adding functionality to something millions of people already use every day.

The AI doesn't need to outperform every specialist tool. It only needs to solve enough of the problem that most users never feel the need to look elsewhere.

Historically, founders worried about competitors copying their features. Today's challenge is categorically different. Entire products are being reduced to features inside larger platforms, and that's a much harder threat to defend against.

When your product becomes someone else's feature, you're no longer competing against another startup. You're competing against a platform with distribution, infrastructure and an existing user base. The battle is often lost long before customers ever evaluate the quality of your solution.

None of this means startups are doomed. There will always be opportunities to build better products and create entirely new categories, and some companies will thrive precisely because of AI rather than despite it.

But it does mean founders need to think more carefully about where their value actually comes from. If the core promise of your business can be recreated through a single prompt, there's a chance you're not building a product at all. You may be building a feature that simply hasn't been absorbed by a larger platform yet.

Over the next few years we'll likely see more categories follow the same path as travel planning. Products that once justified their own businesses will gradually become capabilities embedded within larger platforms. Some companies will adapt and evolve. Others won't.

Either way, the shift is already underway.

For decades, software created new products by creating new interfaces. AI may be the first platform shift that removes many of those interfaces altogether.

The question isn't whether entire products will become features overnight. It's how many founders will recognise it before it happens to them.