Two Berlin graduates asked 30 design leaders if AI has ended their industry. The answers were somewhat surprising

Creative Boom: Resources Books Two Berlin graduates asked 30 design leaders if AI has ended their industry. The answers were somewhat surprising Studio Sprengsatz interviewed nearly 50 designers and agency heads about AI, then turned the best 30 into a book that refuses to give a straight answer. Written By: Tom May 5 August 2026 Every design conference now has its obligatory AI panel, and every panel ends the same way: a moderator asking "so, are we cooked?" and a room full of nervous laughter.

Max Voigt and Erik Burdach, two communication designers who graduated from their bachelor's degree only a few months ago, decided to stop laughing and start asking properly. Their answer to the panel-circuit small talk is a 240-page hardback that takes its title directly from that same nervous joke: Are we cooked?!. What makes it fascinating isn't so much the premise as the method. Rather than commissioning a single thinkpiece or interviewing a handful of friendly contacts, Max and Erik conducted nearly 50 interviews with agency leaders, independent artists and AI provocateurs, then whittled the results down to the 30 sharpest.

The contributor list reads like a cross-section of the industry: Kurppa Hosk, Mutabor, KMS TEAM and 27BUCKS sit alongside LVMH, independent voices like Boris Eldagsen and Jumoke Fernandez, and a scattering of studios such as kvetcch and Batlabat. Few books manage to get that many creative professionals to speak candidly and on the record about the thing they're all super-worried about. The project began, sensibly enough, as their final university assignment.

What turned it into a book was a realisation that will feel familiar to anyone who's sat through an industry roundtable: every single interviewee wanted to know what everyone else had said. Senior creative directors with decades of experience were just as hungry for other people's takes as the graduates asking the questions. That curiosity, more than any grand editorial vision, is what convinced Max and Erik there was an audience for a compiled, cross-referenced set of perspectives rather than another solo opinion piece. No easy answers The book's design leans into that discomfort rather than smoothing it over.

Its cover, a jagged red-and-black composition that looks like a corrupted skyline, sets the tone before you've read a word: this isn't a tidy trend report. Inside, each contributor gets a spread built around a single pull quote, several rounds of rapid-fire questions and, in a nice touch, a mock "file evaluation" readout scoring each subject's enthusiasm, ambivalence and abstraction level, as though the designers themselves have been run through the very tools they're being asked about.

Boris Eldagsen, the artist who won and then deliberately forfeited the 2023 Sony World Photography Award to make a point about AI-generated imagery, gets the book's starkest line: "AI can replace everything that is just 'good enough'." It's a useful reframe of our anxiety. The question isn't whether AI can do design; it's whether most commercial design was ever aiming higher than "good enough" in the first place. Elsewhere, Boris argues that large agencies still have a future precisely because branding was never just image generation.

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The article addresses a significant shift in the design industry due to AI, providing insights from industry leaders that are crucial for brand strategy professionals navigating this change.