Google AI Product Photography: Why Startups Should Worry About Big Tech | Taha Abbasi

Google’s AI Product Photography: Why Startups Should Worry About Big Tech Eating Their Lunch

Taha Abbasi has built startups and advised companies navigating the tech landscape, and Google’s launch of “Photoshoot” in Pomelli — free AI product photography from a single image — is a case study in Big Tech’s ability to instantly vaporize startup business models. The feature went viral with 1.8 million views in hours, and the implications ripple far beyond photography.

If you’re building a startup in any space where a major tech company could release a free tool, this story is a warning — and a roadmap.

What Google Photoshoot Does

Upload a single product photo. Google’s AI generates professional-quality product images with different backgrounds, lighting, angles, and styling — instantly and for free in the US, Canada, and Australia. What previously required a photographer ($200-$2,000 per session), studio rental ($100-$500), and editing software ($20-$50/month) is now available with one upload.

The quality is good enough for most e-commerce listings. As Taha Abbasi observed when the feature went viral on X, the reactions were split: consumers and small businesses celebrated while product photography startups and photographers saw their competitive moats evaporate overnight.

The Startup Graveyard

Multiple startups have raised venture capital specifically to solve AI product photography — generating backgrounds, removing noise, creating lifestyle shots from studio photos. Companies like Photoroom, Pebblely, and others had built real businesses around this need.

When Google offers essentially the same capability for free, integrated into their existing merchant tools, the unit economics of every competitor collapse. It’s not that these startups built bad products. It’s that they built products in a category that a platform company decided to commoditize.

The Broader Pattern: Platform Risk

Taha Abbasi has seen this pattern repeatedly in his career:

1. Startups identify a genuine pain point
2. They build solutions and capture early market share
3. A platform company (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) notices the opportunity
4. The platform company ships a “good enough” solution for free, bundled with their existing products
5. Startups that relied on the feature alone collapse; those with deeper moats survive

Examples are everywhere: Dropbox vs iCloud Drive, Zoom vs Google Meet, countless analytics startups vs Google Analytics. The pattern is so common it has a name: “sherlocking” (after Apple’s habit of absorbing features from third-party developers).

How Startups Can Protect Themselves

As Taha Abbasi advises from his experience building and advising technology companies:

• Build workflows, not features: A single feature can be replicated. A comprehensive workflow with integrations, customization, and network effects is harder to copy.
• Own the customer relationship: If your customers would switch to a free tool instantly, you don’t have a relationship — you have a transaction.
• Move up the value chain: Don’t compete on the commodity layer. Compete on the intelligence, customization, or expertise layer above it.
• Build for the enterprise: Platform companies typically ship consumer-grade tools. Enterprise needs — compliance, SLAs, customization, security — create defensible positions.

The AI Arms Race Between Giants

Google’s Photoshoot isn’t just about photography — it’s a move in the broader AI platform war. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are all racing to make their AI capabilities the default for every digital task. Each free AI feature is a land grab for user data, platform lock-in, and ecosystem dominance.

The Lesson

If you’re building in AI, assume the giants are watching. Build something they can’t easily replicate — not because the technology is secret, but because the value chain, expertise, or customer relationship is too deep to copy with a free tool. That’s the only startup strategy that survives the platform era.

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About the Author: Taha Abbasi is a technology executive, CTO, and applied frontier tech builder. Read more on Grokpedia | YouTube: The Brown Cowboy | tahaabbasi.com