I can do it with AI: the new I'll ask my grandson

The line is blunt, but it describes a reality. Twenty years ago, the nephew knocked up a logo in Word. Today it is a prompt. The outcome is the same: it all has to be redone.

Every designer has met the client who was going to have their grandson do the logo, because he is good with computers. The line has changed, the reasoning has not.

The line and what it hides

Behind I can do it with AI lies the same belief as before: that design is a matter of tools. That the difficulty is execution, and once execution is automated, there is nothing left to pay for.

That belief is not ridiculous. It is simply incomplete, and the field demonstrates it fast enough.

The clients who come back

I take on more and more disappointed clients:

• Disappointed by providers who do everything with AI, without method.
• By generic results, with no personality or consistency.
• By the time sink: testing fifteen tools, rerunning forty prompts, hacking together twelve versions.
• And above all, by the absence of direction.

The paradox is delicious: the tool meant to save time wasted an enormous amount of it, because nobody knew what to ask for or how to judge the result.

AI does not replace a vision. It quickly produces what you cannot slowly decide.

AI does not kill the market, it sorts it

In the end, these clients come back to the essentials: framing, choices, hierarchy, an identity, an experience. Real design.

So my conviction is more nuanced than the prevailing discourse. AI will not kill the business, it will sort the market:

• Those who want it fast and cheap will go to AI, and that is fine: they were never studio clients.
• Those who want durable, coherent, strategic work will need support even more.

The middle of the market is what gets crushed. The right answer is not to cut prices to fight a 20-euro-a-month tool, it is to move up to where the tool does not go: decision and framing.

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Frequently asked questions

Will AI kill the design profession?

No, it will sort the market. The fast-and-cheap segment moves to tools, the durable and strategic segment will need support even more.

Why do these clients come back?

Because they get generic results with no direction, after losing a lot of time. The problem is not the tool, it is the absence of framing.

Should you cut prices against AI?

No. That is the surest way to be compared to a 20-euro-a-month tool. The answer is to move up to what the tool does not do: decide and own it.