When I got into this industry, the brochure still mattered. The cut sheet, the leave-behind, the tri-fold you handed a prospect on the way out the door. Somebody wrote the copy, somebody shot the photos, somebody laid it out, and a printer charged real money to produce it. A good one told people you were serious.
Today that brochure is close to free and instant. With AI, I could make a new one every morning.
But no business wins with a better brochure anymore, no matter how cheap it is. If producing the status quo faster were the answer, we’d all still be perfecting our leave-behinds.
I keep thinking about that, because I see the same debate everywhere right now.
Two arguments, one assumption
This week a CEO argued that AI is turning websites into contact lenses. Early lenses were expensive, so you took care of them. Then production got cheap and we started throwing them away every night. He thinks websites are next: spin one up, use it, toss it.
Christopher Butler wrote a thoughtful response. (opens in a new tab) He agrees the throwaway end is real. Landing pages, event microsites and quick experiments are cheap now. But his firm is replatforming an enterprise site with tens of thousands of URLs, dozens of integrations and thousands of pages that need legal review. Production on a project like that is getting cheaper. The decision-making, the consensus across stakeholders, companies and time zones, he says, “costs exactly what it has always cost.”
I agree with a lot of both. But they share an assumption: that the website we build today will be the same in the future, and the only question left is how fast we can produce it. One says it’s so fast it’s disposable. The other says it’s still slow at the big end. Both are describing today as if it won’t change.
My view sits somewhere else. The big projects aren’t going to become disposable. If anything they’re going to get bigger. But we also can’t keep delivering them the way we do now, at the speed we do now.
It climbs or it floods
When production gets cheap, the freed-up capacity doesn’t go into making more of the same thing at the same scale. The way I see it, it goes in one of two directions.
It floods. Twenty years ago a corporate video was a production: a crew, a budget, weeks of review, executives in a room. Today a brand can publish ten short videos (Reels) before lunch. Nobody knew there was demand for that volume until it became possible.
Or it climbs. The best brand video today does things a 2006 crew couldn’t have attempted. The web is the same. Say you’re making a free brochure every day and feeling efficient. Meanwhile your competitor has built an online presence that recognizes its customers on every device, learns what they need, and gives them the right thing at the right time. They’re eating your lunch. Making another free brochure doesn’t help.
That’s what keeps happening. Once everyone can do something cheaply, it stops being what sets you apart, and the standard moves up. Today that means personalization, audience prediction, better customer journeys, content built for agents, protocols we haven’t agreed on yet. The big projects stay big because the standard keeps climbing.
Where I agree with Butler
My work is about as close to Butler’s as anyone’s. We lead large projects with thousands of pages. Clients trust us with decisions about who they are. And I agree with him that this work isn’t disposable. A project like that makes an organization look hard at itself: its purpose, how it describes what it does, whether its categories are right, what the competition is up to. Even if AI does all the work and shows you the options, somebody has to decide the answers are right and stand behind them. That takes attention, and attention isn’t getting cheaper.
For years, getting to those answers meant getting everyone in a room, sometimes flying to a client with sticky notes and scissors in our bags and running a series of design thinking workshops until people saw the same thing. I respect that. It was human, and honestly it was fun. Some of that will be lost, and we’ll need to find new ways to make this work meaningful.
But I don’t think that way of working survives.
Orchestration has to change too
Twenty years ago a film studio executive could have made Butler’s argument about video. Real production needs crews, approvals and leadership in the room, and that won’t change. Every part of it would have sounded sensible. It changed completely.
The flood forced it to change one way. Ten videos a day can’t go through the old approval process, so brand safety, design systems and content approvals became systems instead of face-to-face meetings.
The climb forces it to change another way. Once a project is ambitious enough, a hundred meetings can’t hold the magnitude of it. The coordination has to move into the tools: agentic interviews, research across everything an organization already knows, prototypes that settle arguments because people can finally see the thing, and scenarios tested against synthetic audiences before anyone builds.
There’s a common design thinking exercise for when a project hits a wall. Take the constraint everyone accepts and ask what it would look like if it weren’t true. What if orchestration weren’t slow?
I don’t think the room disappears. I think we walk in having already run the interviews and the scenarios, and spend our time on what people are actually needed for: deciding, talking through what surprised us, choosing what’s next. What can’t continue is four workshops over six weeks to reach what Claude can reach in a morning. Clients will see what’s possible, and they won’t pay for a year of planning that ends in a site map.
I could be wrong about how fast this happens. I don’t think I’m wrong about the direction.
No protection in the old way
I’d love it if Butler were right. Orchestration is a real skill, and it would be nice to think it protects people like me. It doesn’t, any more than taste protects the designer. What protects you is keeping up as the standard moves. That’s what I’m trying to do, for myself and for the people I lead.
The brochure was never the final version of how a business tells people who it is. Neither is the website.
Written by
Micah Slavens
Principal, Lift
