According to D&AD's AI & Creativity Report 2026 — based on a survey of 197 creative leaders, including founders, creative directors, and strategists — 70% of agencies haven't changed what they charge, even though AI has made the work faster. In the report's own words: the efficiency gain has transferred to clients. Read that again: it hasn't transferred to clients as lower prices. It's been kept, quietly, as margin.
The speed gain is not in dispute
This isn't a hypothetical productivity story. Figma's State of the Designer 2026 report — 906 designers surveyed across North America, Europe, APAC, LATAM, and the Middle East — found 89% say they're working faster with AI, and 91% say it's actually improving their designs, not just speeding up mediocre ones. The gains are real and widely felt. What's not happening, for most of the industry, is any corresponding change to the invoice.
Meanwhile, actual rates haven't moved
A survey of 21 design agencies' published rates this month found hourly pricing ranging from $25–49 up to $200–300, with $150–199 the most common band — figures that look essentially identical to pre-AI agency pricing. The tools changed. The rate card didn't.
Nobody's actually settled on what comes next
It's not that the industry has deliberately decided to pocket the difference — it's that it hasn't decided anything. Productive.io's March 2026 survey of 174 agencies and consultancies found no consensus at all: agencies are split roughly four ways between raising prices, lowering them, seeing no real change, or still figuring it out — and that last group is growing, not shrinking, compared to the same survey six months earlier. The agencies moving toward value-based billing put the logic plainly: if AI helps you ship faster, charging for time makes less sense. But "less sense" hasn't yet turned into a new default.
Agencies are now shifting toward charging for decision-making and judgment rather than delivery speed — because delivery speed is no longer the scarce thing.
The real risk isn't price — it's what gets cut to protect it
Forrester's research into US marketing agencies found 90% now use generative AI — but its own conclusion is a warning, not a celebration: an industry-wide focus on productivity and cost efficiency is undermining marketing effectiveness, creativity, and long-term brand growth. D&AD's report echoes it from the inside: AI, left unchecked, tends toward average output, and, as one respondent in the study put it, "there seems to be far more conversation about AI than there is genuinely great work being made with it." Cutting cost without cutting the human judgment that catches "average" before it ships are two different things — and the data suggests a lot of agencies are currently doing the first without protecting the second.
What this actually points to
The honest reading isn't "AI should make design free" — good creative judgment is still the expensive, scarce part, and it should be priced like it. The honest reading is that billing by the hour was already a strange way to price judgment, and AI has just made that stranger: an hour means less than it used to, in output terms, so a hourly rate stops reflecting what's actually being paid for. A flat, scoped price — stated upfront, with a defined number of revisions and a human sign-off before anything ships — sidesteps the exact ambiguity most of the industry is still sitting in, rather than pricing it away quietly like the 70% in D&AD's survey.
See a price that doesn't hide behind an hourly rate
Aoibh's pricing is flat, public, and states exactly what's included — no billable-hours guesswork.
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