MAR 2023

How AI Is Affecting the Design Business

In the past two years, artificial intelligence has moved from the edges of the creative industry to its centre. Tools like Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion, and a growing range of AI copywriting and brand generation platforms are now used daily by designers, marketers, and business owners across the UAE and globally. The question for any design business — and for any client of a design business — is not whether AI will affect the industry. It already has. The question is how to navigate the change intelligently.

This post is an honest assessment from a Dubai-based design agency that uses AI tools in its workflow, thinks carefully about where they add value and where they do not, and is navigating the same questions that every creative business is currently working through.

What AI is genuinely good at

Speed in the exploration phase

AI image generation tools have dramatically accelerated the early concept exploration phase of visual projects. What previously required hours of moodboard curation and rough sketch development can now be partially achieved through AI-generated reference imagery — allowing designers to explore a wider range of visual directions, faster, before committing to a manual development process. This is a genuine workflow improvement.

Copy drafting and iteration

AI copywriting tools are genuinely useful for first-draft generation, headline alternatives, and structured content (FAQs, product descriptions, social media variants). They are significantly less useful for nuanced brand voice work, culturally specific communication for Arab market audiences, or any creative brief where tone and personality are central to the deliverable.

Image editing and production tasks

Adobe’s AI-powered editing tools — Generative Fill, content-aware tools, and background removal — have meaningfully reduced production time on image editing tasks. These are production efficiency tools, not creative replacement tools.

What AI is not (yet) good at

Strategic brand thinking

A logo is not just a shape. A brand identity is not just colours and fonts. The value of a skilled brand designer is not in their ability to draw a mark — it is in their understanding of what a mark needs to communicate, to whom, in what context, and against what competitive backdrop. AI tools cannot currently replicate the strategic thinking that produces a brand identity that genuinely works in the market.

Cultural nuance in GCC markets

Brand communication in the UAE and GCC requires cultural understanding that goes significantly beyond visual style. Arabic typography is not a translation exercise. The visual codes of premium positioning in the UAE are different from those in Europe or North America. Communicating appropriately across the UAE’s diverse expatriate and national audiences requires genuine cultural fluency. AI tools, trained predominantly on Western internet data, perform poorly in this domain.

Production-grade output

AI-generated imagery, while impressive at first glance, rarely meets production standards without significant manual refinement. Issues with hands, text rendering, consistent proportions, and technical specifications (colour mode, resolution, file format) mean that AI output cannot be used directly in professional print or large-format production without skilled designer intervention.

What this means for clients of design agencies

AI tools have not eliminated the need for skilled designers — but they have changed what skilled designers should be delivering. Agencies that are using AI to work faster, explore more thoroughly, and reduce production time on repetitive tasks are passing efficiency benefits to clients in the form of faster turnaround and more concept exploration for the same investment. Agencies that are using AI to replace strategic thinking or to mass-produce undifferentiated work are producing output that looks like AI — and which will not stand out in a market full of AI-generated content.

The most important question to ask any design agency in 2026 is not ‘do you use AI’ — everyone does, to some extent. The question is: where do you use it, where do you not, and why?

At Kmistree, we use AI tools in our workflow where they genuinely accelerate quality: early concept exploration, copy iteration, image editing, and production tasks. We do not use AI-generated imagery as final deliverables, and we do not use AI to replace the strategic brand thinking, cultural expertise, and design craft that produces work which genuinely performs in the UAE market.

Kmistree is a Dubai-based branding and digital agency with over ten years of experience in the UAE market. Our approach combines human design expertise with intelligent use of the tools — including AI — that allow us to deliver better work, faster. Contact us to discuss your next brand or digital project.