How to succeed in the modern creative era? Make agility your superpower –here's how I'm doing it

The asteroid has hit. The earth beneath our feet is vibrating, shaken by technology, new platforms, and changing consumer habits. And it's altering how we create, collaborate, and connect. This isn’t about keeping pace with software updates or upgrading hardware stacks. It’s a deeper, more profound shift that’s challenging long-held norms and forcing a Ctrl, Alt, Delete reboot of what it means to produce creative work. The creative industry isn't evolving. It's transforming.

The era of the Studiosaur is coming to an end. Legacy giants of creative production – large traditional shops with rigid hierarchies, sprawling teams, and slow-moving processes. For a long time, their size and structure were their biggest advantages (and they produced iconic work, including some of the best rebrands ever) but in today’s tech-driven world, those strengths might be starting to look like liabilities. Once-dominant names like Technicolor and Jellyfish have fallen by the wayside, and while it’s sad watching these big players collapse, it’s hard to turn an oil tanker.

Why the old playbook doesn't work

It’s happening because the old playbook doesn’t work anymore. Traditional pipelines, endless sign-offs, and siloed teams were built for stability and predictability. But today’s creative world is fluid. New tools, platforms, and formats emerge overnight, and audiences shift just as fast. Agility isn’t optional, it’s essential. Being nimble, smart, and relentless is key to the new way of doing things.

Change is nothing new. It’s the only certainty. In 1993, I was a graduate designer learning retouching on a $1M Quantel Paintbox. What I didn’t realise was that I was a disruptor, replacing darkroom artists in just two years. Meanwhile, our prepress team had 20 bench planners. Then a single Sytex operator walked in, digitised the whole process, and 20 jobs vanished in 12 weeks.

Rise of the agile studio

Fast forward to today, and it’s AI’s turn to shake our industry. Studios are shutting down. Budgets are shrinking. Clients want more for less. Competition is escalating. Audiences are changing. Enter the new players: agile studios. Nimble, fast-moving teams are rewriting the rules. They’re not bogged down by legacy systems or slow approval chains. The future of production isn't about isolated disciplines like photography, filmmaking, VFX, or editing anymore. It’s about integrating them. As AI and automation converge across creative fields, traditional production workflows are breaking and rebuilding smarter. New tech is adopted as it appears, works across disciplines, and turns around high-impact creative work almost in real-time when managed correctly.

You need tools that transform and teams that adapt

VR & AR content, brand films, and print stills can now be created and published at lightning speed from one master digital asset using Unreal Engine. Unreal has become the creative lynchpin for many projects, including car visualisations. What once took months and huge budgets to produce is now being made by small, focused teams. Or even by individual creators. Real-time rendering, including ray tracing and global illumination, spins up lifelike depictions of vehicles. This means intricate details like reflections, shadows, and material finishes are rendered with great accuracy, creating visuals that were previously only achievable through offline rendering processes that took an age.

Turbocharging the creative process means more assets for more content channels. Clients, in turn, benefit from having more creative options to extend a campaign. Smarter production strategies deliver efficiencies for the client across the twin pillars of time and budget. Build once. Rinse and repeat. There is potential to unlock strategic campaigns that can run over 2-3 years, benefitting from building digital virtual worlds and re-using assets to extend storytelling into different channels and audiences, all at a fraction of the cost.

Unlike traditional methods, where changes required lengthy re-renders, tools like Unreal provide immediate visual feedback as users customise in an instant. This isn’t a fringe movement – it’s become mainstream. More and more, brands are rethinking what creative means, and agile studios and creators who understand the movement and can deliver quickly are in the box seat. But there still needs to be a connection between brands and these smaller, agile, and progressive studios. Clients also need to adapt and change how they work. In many ways it is they and the brand owners who will dictate the speed of adoption of new technologies (here are 5 tips for using AI properly). For mass adoption to happen quickly, they too need to work in different ways. This will be best delivered by close collaboration with those studios championing new ways of working and the benefits it brings.

Brands are underserved by big network production in times of disruption and a decline in spend. Bigger studios have more to lose from changing fast and cannibalising their share price. Innovation and change come from independents seeking to use the latest tech to push their creative capabilities, speed, and cost savings. Brand managers sitting on countless meetings with 10 people saying nothing, adding no tangible value. Once long-term contracts expire, I believe brands will not renew, but rather seek new ways to unlock the value added by innovation. Maybe that will be working with agile studios, paired with an enhanced internal capability. We've seen this cycle time and time again in the creative space. Following disruption comes change.

Survival of the fastest

The Studiosaur Extinction isn’t coming. It’s already happening. The question now is: how do you not only survive, but thrive in this new era? The real game is how fast you adapt. In 30 years, I’ve never bet against progress, automation, or innovation. At Alongside, all our core studios have their focus – whether that's a particular skill or type of client – and everyone’s embracing AI and innovation tools as part of how they work. What helps us move faster and go further is the support from our in-house innovation hub, Sombra Labs, which is helping us explore and engineer the next generation of production workflows.

During times of great change, collaboration, patience, and humility always serve the creative process. Not everything will immediately fall into place, as it’s a constantly evolving picture, and we are all navigating in a landscape for which the maps are still being drawn. But if there’s one trait that will quietly define the studios that thrive in the years ahead, it’s agility. Not just speed for speed’s sake, but the ability to adapt, respond, evolve, and offer clients increased value in real time.

Every studio, big or small, is grappling with disruption – shifting client expectations (here's how some designers are finding this problematic), new tools arriving weekly, and a production model that’s being rewritten in front of us. There’s no perfect roadmap. But the studios that move forward will be the ones willing to stay curious about new technologies, rethink rigid workflows, and empower small, skilled teams to own their output and respond to what the market needs. Agility won’t come from tearing everything up – but from learning, adjusting, and letting go of the things that no longer serve.

AI is a perfect example of this shift. What used to feel like sci-fi is now a practical, everyday tool. It’s helping agency creatives generate ideas faster, automate repetitive work, and explore new visual and storytelling directions.

The most agile studios are already using it to enhance, not replace, their creative instincts. AI isn't here to eradicate us, it's here to accelerate us. True creative excellence comes from empowering people, nurturing talent, and pushing the boundaries of craft to solve real client challenges. Services like XR stages and virtual production are not fads. These are the new tools that unlock the benefits of innovation with Unreal Engine. AI, in turn, will also drive equally important production innovation. Clients don’t just want creative, they need scalable, reusable, tech-powered solutions that offer content consistency across all content output. Bigger studios, meanwhile, often get stuck in the friction of approvals, policy debates, and internal resistance. However, AI isn’t an immediate silver bullet. Brands still need to invest to deliver creative projects to match established expectations. Slashing the budgets of production partners in the vain hope that AI can do all the heavy lifting is not quite where we are. Yet.

So, what is the future of creative production? Well, the studios of the future won’t be defined by headcount or square footage. They’ll be defined by the quality of creative output and ability to deliver this in volume and consistency at a cheaper price point. The most successful teams will be lean and efficient, not bloated or bureaucratic. They’ll be fluent in emerging tech, including AI and cloud-based tools. But more than that, they’ll be cross-functional and collaborative, not siloed, focused on the results and adaptable enough for what comes next.

Yes, the creative world feels chaotic right now. But within that chaos is a huge opportunity, and we only need to look back to know, old ways will embrace the new. The Studiosaur Extinction isn’t something to fear. It’s something to embrace. It’s a chance to evolve.

Find out more about the future of AI in graphic design here, and why AI tools shouldn't be feared – even in digital art.