ElevenLabs’ CEO says AI voice models will be “commercialized” over time

Audio AI company ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Matej Staniszewski believes AI models will be commoditized over time, a revealing comment for a company today focused on building them.

While speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Tuesday, the ElevenLabs founder was discussing his short- and long-term views on the voice AI space.

Staniszewski said his company’s researchers were able to overcome some of the model engineering challenges, and this focus will continue in the acoustic space for the next year or two.

“In the long term, it will turn into a commodity – over the next couple of years,” Staniszewski said. “Even if there were differences — which I think would be the truth for some sounds, some languages ​​— in and of themselves, the differences would be smaller.”

When asked why ElevenLabs focused on building models if he thought they would be commoditized in time, Staniszewski explained that it was still, in the short term, “the biggest advantage and biggest step change you can have today.”

For example, if the AI’s voices or interactions don’t sound good, that’s still a problem that needs to be solved.

“The only way to solve this problem is to build the models yourself, and then, in the long run, there will be other players who will also solve the problem,” Staniszewski said.

He also noted that those looking for reliable and scalable use cases will likely use different models for different use cases.

However, in the next year or two, Staniszewski said an increasing number of models will move to multimodal or combined approaches.

“So, you’ll be creating audio and video at the same time, or audio and LLMs at the same time in a conversational environment,” he said, pointing to Google Veo 3 as an example of what can be achieved when you bring the models together.

The founder said that ElevenLabs plans to launch partnerships with other companies and work with open source technologies to see if the company can combine its audio expertise with some of the expertise of other models.

The goal for ElevenLabs is to focus on building models and applications to create long-term value, he said.

“In the same way that software and hardware have been the magic for Apple, we believe product and AI will be the magic for generating the best use cases,” he added.