AI audio giant ElevenLabs just delivered a surprising prediction about its own future. CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that AI audio models - the core of his company's business - will become commoditized within the next couple of years, even as they remain the biggest competitive advantage today.
ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski just made one of the most candid admissions you'll hear from a tech founder: his company's core product will eventually become a commodity. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 yesterday, the AI audio pioneer revealed his surprisingly pragmatic view of where the industry is heading.
"Over the long term, it will commoditize - over the next couple of years," Staniszewski told the packed audience. "Even if there's differences - which I think will be the truth for some voices, some languages - on its own, the differences will be smaller." It's a striking statement from someone whose company has built its reputation on having the most realistic AI-generated voices in the market.
But Staniszewski isn't panicking about this future. Instead, he's planning for it. When pressed on why ElevenLabs would continue focusing on model development if commoditization is inevitable, his response was refreshingly direct: "In the short term, they were still the biggest advantage and the biggest step change you can have today."
The reasoning is simple but smart. Right now, if your AI voices sound robotic or interactions feel clunky, you've got a fundamental problem that kills user experience. "The only way to solve it is building the models yourself, and then, over the long term, there will be other players that will solve that, too," Staniszewski explained according to TechCrunch reporting.
The ElevenLabs founder sees the writing on the wall for standalone audio models, but he's betting big on what comes next: multi-modal AI that fuses different capabilities together. "You will create audio and video at the same time, or audio and LLMs at the same time in a conversational setting," he said, pointing to Google's Veo 3 as an example of what's possible when you combine models.
This shift toward integrated AI systems is already reshaping how companies think about competitive advantage. While individual models may become commoditized, the ability to seamlessly blend them creates new opportunities for differentiation. ElevenLabs is positioning itself to ride this wave through strategic partnerships and open source collaborations.
