The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
It’s 2026, and let’s be honest: we’re most using AI in our workflows one way or another. But the real question is—do we tell the client?
The other day, I prepared a proposal for a 3D project. Alongside the traditional production method, I offered an alternative: using AI to deliver the project in less time and at a lower budget.
Guess what happened?
The client didn’t choose the traditional route. But they didn't pick the AI option either. Instead, they convinced themselves they could just "do it with AI" on their own.
Result: A rejected proposal and a frustrated client. A total lose-lose.
Does saying "I use AI" undermine your professionalism, or does it project the image of a "tech-savvy pro" who masters time and tools?
Which path do you take?
—Be transparent.
—Keep it yourself.
—Mention it if they ask.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Challenges
View all
Related posts
A client shouldn’t have to learn Webflow just to publish their next case study.
On a recent build, I spent a lot of time on the CMS: setting up reusable blocks and the logic that lets the team update content without rebuilding pages.
The tricky part is deciding how much control to give them. Too little, and every update becomes a request. Too much, and they’re suddenly responsible for the layout.
I want them to open the CMS, know what to do, and get on with their day. There’s a fair amount of work behind making that feel simple.
The CMS thinking here is spot on: the best handoff is the one that gives a client confidence without exposing all the complexity underneath.
Walk into most marketing conversations right now and someone's showing off what AI produced. A landing page made in minutes, a week of emails in an afternoon, and a funnel plan drafted before lunch.
They exist but they’re not really built as one cohesive system.
A system is what decides how those pieces connect. Which offer the funnel actually serves. What happens the moment someone opts in. What the email sequence does differently on day three versus day seven. AI can generate any single piece on command. It has no opinion about how the pieces are supposed to fit together, because fitting them together was never the part it was asked to do.
This is worth sitting with on an execution day, because execution days are exactly when it's easiest to mistake a fast pile of pieces for a finished system. The page got built. The emails got written. Nothing about that guarantees they were built to work as one thing.
The tools build pieces quickly now. Someone still has to build the system the pieces live inside.
At CRITER.AI, we’re building AI that helps migrants avoid expensive legal mistakes and visa bans by auditing Australian visa applications against immigration law. We’ve been getting a healthy amount of investor interest, but there was one recurring piece of feedback: our pitch deck was lackluster.
Fair enough. As a lawyer, my creativity usually goes into finding the legal issue everyone else missed, not deciding which shade of blue says “invest now.”
So we set out to change that. We chose Contra over its competitors because the caliber of people looked considerably stronger.
When I posted our request for a pitch-deck redesign, I expected a few people to reach out with quotes. As of today, we have had 303 applicants.
For a bootstrapped business, working through that volume was simply impossible. So we created a challenge:
“Here is my pitch deck. Pick the slide you think needs the most work, and show me what you can do.”
What followed was fascinating.
101 applicants (around 1/3) never replied. Of those who did, around 10% simply reiterated what they had already said. One person replied that, with 250 applicants, they were not going to bother trying. lol.
Several asked whether the test would be paid. 12 sent a quote for the work to be paid first, after which I could decide whether to go further.
Less than 25% of the applications were obviously AI-generated. We are by no means AI-phobic, but the Claude watermark was perhaps a little too much. You know who you are dude!
2 people had trouble opening the Google file we sent. I’m still not entirely sure why.
7 people were so impressed by the work they did that they watermarked it, labelled it “draft,” or otherwise made it impossible to download for further review.
12 people reached out through LinkedIn rather than the app; a further 18 emailed; and 1 person even called me.
18 people not only sent an example slide; they also signed up for our free immigration-advice beta test.
From 303 applicants, we narrowed the field to 15 people who were simply too good to ignore.
Every one of those candidates took the time to understand what we were trying to do, what CRITER.AI is about, and spoke to us as people rather than as another job listing. Two spotted mistakes in the pitch deck that we would not have noticed without them. Another created a 3-minute Loom presentation explaining the changes they made and why they mattered. Most went beyond the requested single slide. One applicant redesigned the entire pitch deck and sent it watermark-free.
It was a difficult decision, but the person we chose had just that little bit more talent than an exceptionally strong group. They not only showed that they understood what we wanted and impressed us with the slide they redesigned; they also suggested another slide we had never considered relevant, then created it using information we had not even provided.
They took our AI immigration-law business and made our pitch deck speak to investors on a human level.
Can't wait to come back to resign our website, social media and other design work.
Lovely and impressive!