“AI won’t replace designers, it will help them. AI won’t eliminate creative jobs, it will make creative people more productive. AI is just another tool. AI should be embraced, not feared. AI is inevitable.”
Whether those claims turn out to be true remains to be seen. Some may prove accurate, others may not. That’s not really what interests me… What interests me is something else entirely.
Why is so little attention seemingly being paid to the economics of the AI systems we’re rapidly becoming dependent on?
Every week seems to bring another AI-powered tool aimed squarely at creative professionals. Midjourney, Runway, Gamma, Cursor, Lovable, Firefly and countless others promise to help us work faster, generate more ideas, create more content and deliver more output. Presentation builders promise polished decks in minutes. Image generators can help designers churn out endless concepts and moodboards. Video tools allow production at a fraction of the usual cost and time. AI assistants have already appeared inside the software many of us already use, quietly (or irritatingly) becoming part of our day-to-day workflow.
The pitch is almost always some variation of the same idea: faster, easier, cheaper - and crucially, allowing us to use our creative time more efficiently!
To be fair, many of these tools are genuinely impressive. The conversation that follows is usually focused on capability. What can the tool do? How much time can it save? How much faster can it make us? Alongside this runs another familiar discussion: that AI won’t replace creatives, but augment them. That designers who embrace AI will outperform those who don’t. That the future belongs to people who learn to work alongside these systems rather than compete against them.
I don’t argue that any of this may be false. What I see far less often is a discussion about sustainability. Not environmental sustainability (which is a separate conversation), but economic sustainability. What does this tool depend on to exist? And perhaps more importantly, what happens if the economics underpinning it begin to change?
Many of the AI products currently being integrated into creative workflows feel remarkably affordable. Some are free. Others cost little more than a streaming subscription. Increasingly, AI features are simply being bundled into software that agencies and designers are already paying for.
Viewed individually, none of these costs seem particularly significant, yet behind many of these products sit some of the largest infrastructure investments in corporate history.
A thing I find notable is how often discussions around AI focus on what the technology can do for us, and how rarely they focus on what the companies behind it expect in return.
Why are some of the world’s largest companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars building these systems? The answer is obvious: they believe there will eventually be a return. The question is, where does that return come from? Nobody invests billions of dollars in infrastructure because they’re hoping to break even. The expectation, sooner or later, is that those investments generate returns - that isn’t a criticism, it’s simply how investment works.
The bit I find most concerning is that many creative businesses appear to be building increasingly important parts of their workflow around technologies whose long-term economics remain uncertain.
