There's only one type of studio that will thrive in the next 5 years

Being reliably good used to be enough. That's the part AI is breaking.

A few days ago I posted a carousel. The argument was simple: the studios that thrive in an AI world are the ones that build AI into the core of how they work, whatever they charge.

My DMs lit up. A lot of you wanted to talk about where our industry is actually headed.

So here's where I think it's going.

Two axes, four studios

Start with two axes.

One is how much AI runs through your process.
The other is how you price and position the studio.

They both move independently. You can charge premium fees and run heavily on AI. You can charge little and refuse to touch it. One axis doesn't set the other.

AI is an accelerator. It helps you make better work, faster, and the hours it hands back are real.

Put the two axes together and you get 4 different types of studios.

High AI, low price is the AI Volume Studio. It's real, and it survives, but it's stuck in a price war. Cheaper design doesn't create more home renovations, and demand doesn't stretch just because your fees dropped.

Low AI, high price is the Traditional Studio. Looks safe from the outside. Gets quietly out-iterated by the studio next door. This is the one I worry about.

Low AI, low price is the Commodity Studio, undifferentiated and slow. This is the one that gets squeezed out first.

High AI, high price is the AI-First Luxury Studio. AI compresses the production work, and you pour the hours you get back into more directions and deeper client work, while still charging premium fees. This is where you want to be.

 
Competence just got cheap

For 20 years, being reliably good was enough to make a living. Clean drawings, sensible plans, a decent mood board, delivered Friday.

AI is collapsing the cost of all of that to near zero.

A render that ate two days now takes 30 minutes. The competent, generic deliverable, the thing that used to justify your fee, costs almost nothing to produce now.

So the value of being merely competent falls. The value of judgment and taste holds and climbs.

The studios in trouble built their whole worth on being competent. They're getting commoditized from below by tools anyone can buy for 20 dollars a month.

Two myths to kill

Myth one: premium means no AI.

High-end clients pay for the outcome, the taste, the status, the feeling that everything just works. They're not auditing your toolchain.

The studio that generates 15 directions overnight and walks in with its 3 best looks like the serious one in the room.

Refuse AI on principle and you get out-iterated by quieter competitors who didn't.

Slowness by hand is just a cost you're absorbing, and the client never cared how long it took. They pay for the result.

Myth two: AI is for the cheap end.

AI is a lever, and you decide which way to pull it. The same saved hours can fund lower prices, more creative depth, or fatter margins.

Picking up AI doesn't drag you down-market. What you do with the freed time does.

What you do with the hours

AI is table stakes now, at every price point. Even the most bespoke atelier runs on it or falls behind on iteration speed. Everyone is using it.

So your position comes down to one question: where do the saved hours go?

• Spend them cutting prices -> you become the Volume Studio.
• Spend them deepening each project -> you become the premium studio.
• Spend them on more work at the same fee → fatter margins.

Same tool. Three types of studios. You pick.

Where the hours should go.

Point them at what stays scarce.

Taste and a point of view. Client trust built over years, and the nerve to say no to the wrong project.

Build your brand on social media, and manage execution in the physical world: the site visits, the trades, the suppliers, the asbestos someone finds in the wall on day three.

That's the column AI can't touch. Software doesn't negotiate with a contractor or read a client's face. So the time AI frees up should flow straight into it.

AI is about to hand you a stack of hours you didn't have before. Where are yours going?

P.S. The "where do the hours go" question is the one I built my masterclass around.
It's the exact workflow I use to make magazine-quality visuals in minutes without losing my style, then turn them into content that actually books clients. The practical version of everything above. → Learn More

TLDR

• AI just made being good cheap, and being good was most studios' entire edge.
• The doomed quadrant is low AI plus low price. The winner is high AI plus high price, and that's where most of us should aim.
• You can't opt out of AI at any price point. What you do with the time it gives back is the whole game.