Image licensed via Adobe Stock
Our wide-ranging survey lays bare a profession that’s exhausted, anxious about its future, and using AI tools it doesn’t trust.
Feeling tired, less secure and resentful of AI?. Then it’s official: you’re by no means alone. Creative Boom’s flagship survey for 2026, gathering responses from 882 creative professionals worldwide (UK and US weighted, with 43% bringing more than a decade of experience), confirms what you’ve probably already suspected. This has been a tough year for creatives, wherever you are in your career.
This isn’t a survey about one bad quarter. It’s a story about a workforce under serious pressure, trying to work out what AI, the economy, and a changing client landscape mean for their livelihoods, and finding few reassuring answers.
A boom in burnout
To be perfectly honest, these numbers don’t need much analysis: they tell a pretty clear story. For example, a massive 69 per cent of respondents say they’ve experienced burnout in the past 12 months.
Mid-career creatives report the highest burnout rate at 77%, with early-career professionals close behind at 74%. Founders and studio leaders fare a little better, at 59%, though that’s still a majority struggling.
Why the distinction? My best guess is that founders, for all their stresses, generally have more control over the shape of their workload and the clients they take on. Consequently, it’s the mid-career cohort—the people running projects, managing junior staff and fielding client demands without the authority to say no—who are absorbing the brunt of a difficult year.
AI adoption vs approval
Perhaps the most telling finding is the gulf between AI adoption and AI approval. Eighty-six per cent of respondents now use AI tools in their work: a figure that would have seemed remarkable even a couple of years ago. Yet only 10% of creatives think AI’s overall effect on the industry is positive. Fifty-eight per cent describe its impact as mixed, and 28% are straightforwardly negative about it.
That gap, between near-universal use and near-universal unease, is perhaps the defining story of this survey. Creatives aren’t refusing to use AI; they’re adopting it because they feel they have to. But at the same time, they remain deeply sceptical about what it’s doing to their industry, their pricing power and their sense of authorship.
This is not a community that’s been won over, but one that’s adapting under duress. And that distinction matters. Tool-makers and commentators often use adoption figures as proof of enthusiasm, but enthusiasm and necessity look very different up close. A profession that feels compelled to use a technology while doubting its long-term value isn’t embracing change so much as bracing for it; hedging its bets while it waits to see how client expectations, pricing and competition shift around it.
What’s happening to freelance pay?
None of this unease, by the way, has been alleviated by extra pay. In fact, half of the respondents feel less financially secure than they did a year ago, compared with just 18% who feel more secure. Almost 48% are worried about where the industry is heading, compared with under 38% who feel confident. And more than a third (38%) are considering a job change, with 7.5% planning to leave the creative industry altogether.
For the self-employed, particularly, the picture is stark. Nearly 47% of self-employed creatives in our survey earn less than £30,000 a year. That’s not a poverty wage, of course, but bear in mind this is a workforce stocked with experienced professionals, 43% of whom have more than a decade behind them. So, for a substantial chunk to be earning well below the UK’s median full-time salary of £39,039 (ONS: April 2025)—with none of the security that salary typically comes with—is worth reflecting on.
Are creatives quitting?
Most creatives aren’t planning to leave the industry altogether: the figure is a modest 7.5%. But the bigger problem isn’t people quitting creative work outright; it’s people quietly looking for a way out of their current role, agency or set-up, while staying within the profession itself.
That’s arguably a harder problem for employers and clients to spot and fix than outright attrition. A wave of resignations is visible; a slow drift of disengaged, undervalued talent looking sideways for something better often isn’t, until it’s too late.
As a whole, our survey paints a picture of a profession where rates haven’t kept pace with costs, competition, or, increasingly, AI-enabled undercutting. Clients now have a cheaper, faster option for certain tasks, which inevitably puts downward pressure on what freelancers can charge for work AI can approximate, even imperfectly.
Indeed, when we asked which design trend creatives are most sick of, one answer dominated by a wide margin: AI itself, with more than 70 mentions. Gradients (19 mentions) and minimalism (10) trailed well behind. Remember when those kinds of stylistic niggles were the biggest bugbear for visual creatives? Happy days…
Awards are being ignored
With creatives so stressed out over burnout and pay, I’m not surprised awards have slipped down the priority list for many. Consequently, a full 80% of respondents haven’t entered an award in the past year. Perhaps more significantly, only 12% still believe awards meaningfully help careers, and 35% believe they’re too expensive and inaccessible to bother with.
For a profession that’s long used awards as a shorthand for credibility and as a marketing tool for agencies and studios, this looks like a vote of no confidence. Is award entry becoming something larger agencies do for visibility, rather than something the wider creative community sees much value in?
What would actually help
While complaining about the current state of affairs might be cathartic, it ultimately won’t get you anywhere. So we also wanted our survey to include potential solutions.
Asked what would genuinely improve their working lives, our respondents didn’t point to new software. Instead, networking and community came top, cited by 57.5%, with mentorship close behind at 53%. New tools and technology trailed well behind, at just 31%.
That’s an interesting result for an industry that could once have been accused of an obsession with tooling. What creatives say they need most isn’t a new AI feature; it’s people. Peers, mentors and a genuine sense of professional community matter to them more than the next piece of software, and they’re harder to find than ever in a fragmented, increasingly remote working world.
The instinct in difficult years is often to retreat: to get your head down, cut costs, skip the conference, let memberships lapse. But if this survey tells us anything, it’s that retreating from community is precisely the wrong move at precisely the wrong time.
The creatives who are struggling most don’t want another dashboard or plug-in. They want a room full of people who understand what they’re going through, and someone a few years ahead of them willing to offer some guidance. That’s a far harder thing to build than a new feature, but on this evidence, it’s the thing that actually moves the needle.
