Like many agencies in the creative and marketing sector, we attended the annual Business Show expo at London's Excel recently. One thing was very clear – AI is everywhere. It's a bubble, for sure, with increasingly more companies jumping on the bandwagon.
At this event, we found a plethora of digital marketing agencies, consultants, legal services, accountancy services, virtual assistants, translation companies and more swearing they can do things better (in their materials, banners and posters) by promising things like 'automating lead generation' with AI. Strangely though, it was completely at odds with the conversations happening in the room. “It's a bubble that's going to burst”, “it can never replace human creatives,” and “it should only be used as a tool”, were just some of the phrases cropping up in our many conversations with fellow business owners.
We even found some companies selling AI services who frankly didn't understand what AI even was or how to explain their USP to someone asking how their company could deliver results. That's on brand for the vague nature of the industry, given that OpenAI's Sam Altman once explained to a crowd of potential investors that his business plan was to build a general intelligence system and then ask it how to make money.
What we're seeing from our conversations with people across many sectors is that there are two tribes of people. Those who see AI as the answer to everything, (with a view that it can truly replicate and replace us as human beings), and those who clearly see its limitations as a tool, (i.e. its ability to stagnate human thinking, creativity and nuance if rolled out as a long-term human replacement). But what if the AI bubble does burst? What are the wider implications for us all? Has its value been over-inflated? And what happens to the creative industries who are most under threat – the designers, artists, illustrators and writers among us who rely on our craft to make a living? Let's get into what we know so far.
AI and the global markets
Global stock markets have been jittery throughout October and November 2025 as talk of an AI bubble burst looms over business decisions. Many countries are experiencing stagnant wage growth, high unemployment rates and low-paying jobs. Bankruptcies are on the rise, consumers are tightening their purse-strings, debts are rising, and geo-political events and tensions are taking their toll on economic growth.
Against this backdrop, investors are ploughing money into what can only be described as an AI boom – with many dropping vast sums into the dream of superhuman AI agents. The investments have come in so thick and fast, that they're essentially keeping the global economy propped up in these difficult economic times. Naturally of course, it's not long before people start to wonder how long it'll be until the boom goes bust and a correction happens after so many months of the global economy being balanced on borrowed stability.
The financial markets have a 'fear index' known as the VIX Index – a proper measure of the stock markets' volatility. In the week commencing 10 November 2025, the VIX Index experienced its largest swing since President Donald Trump announced a range of tariffs on what he called 'Liberation Day' in April 2025.
There are even experts believing that the AI bubble could burst in the same way as the dot-com boom of the late nineties, which eventually went bust in March 2000. If something of the same scale happened, it would wipe out $15tn of global investors' wealth.
How is AI a bubble?
No one really knows what the AI economy is going to look like, because the goalposts keep shifting as more is discovered about what AI agents are both capable (and incapable) of. One month AI is poised to eliminate search as we know it; the next, it’s supposed to reinvent productivity. Then we're told its the precursor to machine consciousness. It's hard to keep up most days.
Of course, it’s not all hype. AI is already quietly doing a lot of good work across many sectors. Banks use it to spot fraud the moment it happens. Delivery companies rely on it to plan routes, retailers use it to understand what customers actually want, and energy companies use it to keep power grids stable and bring more renewable energy online.
Like any new technology that's been released over the years, it's fairly easy to see its benefits straight away, like how AI can speed up human processes and reduce admin across many sectors. As more people think: “this is great, it makes life easier and quicker”, more investors start pouring billions of pounds into systems and companies with unconfirmed business plans, structures, finances and real-world applications. Unanswered questions to a new technology become filled with blind enthusiasm and hype – despite the fact that no-one really agrees on the best way to practically use it. Does it rearrange existing value and supply chains, or replace them entirely?
What makes the current AI wave especially bubble-prone is the sheer scale of the promises being made. Tech leaders talk openly about “superintelligence,” and “AGI,” like they're able to change the world in the click of a finger, even as companies themselves admit they’re unsure of how these systems will reliably generate profit. Investors and founders alike start leaning on grand sweeping marketing narratives as a kind of crutch, propping up expectations that the technology itself has not yet earned. AI today shows all the familiar symptoms: increased investment, overcrowded competition, exaggerated marketing claims, and a rising dependence on future breakthroughs that are currently complete guesswork.
Creative pushback
Creative workers and agencies like us sure felt the full force of the AI boom that started in 2022. Illustrators, copywriters, musicians, designers, voice actors... and just about anyone whose job is in the creative industry suddenly found this newfound technology chipping away at the value of their work. After all, why hire a copywriter if ChatGPT can quickly churn out a SEO blog post in seconds, right!? If the AI bubble bursts, we creatives are the ones standing directly beneath it.
Creatives are biting back – the world’s biggest music label, Universal Music Group, started suing AI startups for training on its catalogue. Lawsuits pile up across the US as creators fairly argue that their work has been scraped, copied, or cloned without consent, credit, or compensation. The last time major labels embraced a new kind of tech (streaming), executives and corporations got rich while the actual creators were left with fractions of pennies per play. It’s hard to blame musicians and illustrators for being sceptical when they hear phrases like 'AI partnership' and 'benefits for artists.' They’ve heard those promises before.
Will the creative industries go back to 'normal' after the AI bubble bursts?
A hypothetical question on the lips of many is whether life will go back to how it was back in 2019 when creatives had their diaries bursting with bookings? Will clients abandon the tools? Will AI-powered marketing agencies slip away and quietly pretend this phase never happened? The short answer is likely 'no', but things also won't stay in this post-2024 hype-mode either. Even if the enthusiasm for AI dies back, AI won't vanish. It'll just settle into a more realistic role in everyday life, losing its mystical, world-ending aura. It'll become what it should’ve been all along: a tool in the kit, not the kit itself.
For creative workers, the current danger isn’t AI replacing everyone, but a temporary period where businesses chase speed over substance. Clients dazzled by AI’s instant outputs. Agencies overselling what AI tools can do. Creative jobs squeezed, reshaped, or undervalued. Not because AI is genuinely good enough, but because the industry is distracted by the illusion.
When the bubble bursts, the illusion breaks. Clients will realise that while AI can churn out drafts, concepts, mood boards, thumbnails, or rough copy, it still can’t produce nuanced, human creations with emotion. It can only turn out what it's been trained on. It can't understand cultural nuance, or take responsibility for the emotional impact of an idea. Brands leaning heavily on AI will eventually notice their ChatGPT-generated ads, songs, images or tag-lines all sound the same – with no uniqueness. Many will question the faster, cheaper approach and wonder whether the content or design being created is actually something people care about and want to see.
The creative professionals who will thrive over the remaining years of the 2020s will be those who treat AI like a tool, not a competitor. They'll use it for initial search, problem solving, troubleshooting, drafting, sorting, or searching. A starting point that they can then put their human skills and energy into. As the novelty of AI wears off, truly original work will become rarer and more valuable because it'll stand out in a sea of AI-generated blandness.
What does the future look like?
At the time of writing this article, Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai has spoken exclusively to BBC News about 'every company being affected' if the AI bubble were to burst, and that no-one is safe. From our perspective as a creative agency – this is a pretty blinkered and sweeping statement. There are going to be plenty of companies completely unaffected by AI. Whether it booms or bursts, their business will go on (think tradespeople like plumbers, carpenters), and beauticians and hairdressers. Their industries have never wholly relied on AI anyway, so they'll just carry on as before. Similarly, we creatives will actually welcome a bubble burst that sends AI down a peg or two. It'll stop the overly inflated value of the technology, and the undervaluing of the creative services and human skills we offer.
If you're prone to cynicism now and then, then like us you'll be thinking: “of course the head of Alphabet is saying that we're all doomed if the AI bubble bursts”. Like millions of investors around the globe, he likely has a huge financial stake in this technology and his company depends on its success. Of course he'll start fear mongering at even the briefest murmur of a bust. But then again, Google, the owner of Alphabet, has the means to ride out any financial collapse due to its full stack of technologies, YouTube data, chips, models and so on. Other smaller companies certainly won't be as lucky.
Our final thoughts
We're not against AI, and never have been. As a tool, it can do some pretty amazing stuff that shaves hours off of time-consuming tasks. But in the end, the gap between expectation and outcome is getting too wide to ignore. Wildly grand things were promised to investors and companies, and the excess investment we're seeing comes with great risk when people start to question what returns they're really getting.
If you’re using AI to churn out soulless, contextless content without any real understanding of copywriting, art or design, you’re not innovating. You’re generating what's known as 'AI slop'. Over time, more audiences will know that a human touch is missing. That something has been run through a machine in minutes. People shouldn't wholly trust AI output. It makes mistakes, and it has limitations. Why should we trust brands that sound vague and undistinguished? That’s not just a creative problem; it’s a collapse in value and credibility.
As the hype cools and the bubble edges closer to popping, AI isn’t about to vanish. And even if it does, be prepared for the tools to stick around. How we view and use them will likely change. But we'll see an adjustment from seeing AI as having the seismic ability to control us and our world, to us controlling it as a tool.
The real challenge for professional creatives isn’t to pretend nothing has changed or to surrender completely to automation. It’s to use AI sustainably and intelligently. Let the tools support the craft, rather than replacing it. When the dust finally settles, creatives' diaries will be full again with clients wanting human work. Work that's been shaped by an understanding of nuance, taste, cultural differences and global audiences. The future will favour the creatives who doubled down and kept their craft human, even when the industry chased the illusion of speed.
