As you might know, I closed up shop in March, sold my contacts, and took a director’s job. We do homes for the largest builder in the US and other builders and do a couple hundred renders a week (no-slowdowns in site). Over 100 engineers and over 100 architects on staff. That said, everyone I know who’s been as busy as I was for years hasn’t seen a new project in 5 months. Is it that bad out there? Did I bail just in time?
From what I’ve seen in the forums there are lots of people talking about leaving the field. From what I have seen most are frustrated with the amount of work available and also the pay especially with the hardware costs going through the roof. I dont personally know people in the field this is just what I’ve seen in most the forums past 6-8 months.
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It’s a bit silent right now, however my one-man band cash reserves cover twelve months of operations without any incoming projects. The company’s reserve capital is invested in publicly traded stocks, and the dividends provide additional income. There has been times, I had to sell some stocks to pay the company’s bills.
Winding down business takes 6 months, so it’s necessary to have enough money to cover that period.
The overnighters will leave, but the diehards, who dedicated their lives to their crafts will survive. I do recall a few OG’s went away awhile back (housing crash), and it was a loss to the community, for sure.
I talked to a few people, a small sample of my connections, and all seem to be seeing an uptick in work. Most do not seem surprised to the slowdown and contribute it to Summer. Summer is wrapping up, and they are all anticipating work to start flowing.
Remember, people want to be a part of something, it is easier to gather around the negative then the positive (caveman), so fear is running wild. Don’t believe the doomsayers, who say the sky is falling. Let the weak run for the hills, listening to that junk, so we can feast on the rest.
Smart business. I hope to get to a similar spot in the coming years. I work in industrial automation atm, worked a lot of physical labor throughout my life, fortunately or unfortunately, the way we have been treated the past 20 years have caused such a shortage of skilled labor that we are finally getting paid a decent living. Hoping to transition out of the physical labor within the next 10 years, hopefully my body will give me the full 10. With all the field experience and coordination work I’ve done im hoping to find a niche is designing, blueprints, concept renders etc. Investing personal funds is definitely a tool im going to have to use to keep the business up until I get into creating
I think AI capability is causing shrinkage on professional visualisers, I’ve worked with a number of companies that have scaled back on those people and it’s sitting with architects and mid journey or Nanobanana now .
It’s perhaps folded back some of these functions to the stararchitects themselves
The result? Lots of Buildings that look like Zaha Hadid and HR Geiger dropped some acid and had a brainstorming session.
Which to some extent is a worry if the very top level most expensive projects don’t seem to warrant it. I would have expected the very low level stuff to be the ones that raced to the bottom first.
It’ll bite them in the butt when these things can’t be built, go way over budget, and fail. Architecture is a strange business, and I think most architects (not all) fight for any extra revenue they can get. Now they can do their own renderings, charge 2X what they are worth, and hit an Ai button. They also want to make a name for themselves so that they can get more work, which is why you are seeing these non-buildable AI designs. A recent study shows AI optimism fades as young adults worry about jobs, which says a lot.
I talked with a co-worker yesterday who got laid off at a manufacturing company because they switched to Ai for design. Instead of building a feasible design that is sent to engineering, they tossed Ai crap over the fence to the engineers who couldn’t make it work - the company went bankrupt. They were basically selling clients ideas that couldn’t be done. Her mind too.
Physical jobs and soft skills might be the future.
I have managed to stay afloat, sort of, seemingly regardless of any AI intrusion. I’ve had the best 6 months so far and beat the previous several years, oddly.
All my work is word of mouth and is very very varied. Probably not much can actually be done with AI, so that’s part of it I guess. We’ll see how it pans out.
Where a client used AI to brief me recently, I caught an error late in the process - it was wine bottles and their dimensions, presumably good to get right - and although previous render iterations were wrong, based on them, I fixed them and alerted them, at no extra charge. Unbelievably, for an ad campaign they chose to use the incorrect images because they didn’t want to spend to fix their error. Dumb.
Also, one thankfully little AI segment I produced was approved but then later changed. Unsurprisingly the AI model simply could not reproduce what it done before, so the changes couldn’t be done with it.
Fortunately I had the skills to be able to work something out and for me, lesson learned.
So yeah, for strictly archvis and such, I’d say that the already mentioned anecdotal stuff will increase. My advice; diversify or retrain. Good luck everyone - rough(er?) times lay ahead most likely.
I believe it’s the Saudi mega-projects that have all come to an abrupt end in the last 6 months. AI hasn’t helped but I think it’s only 1/2 the story (or less).
What happened in Saudi? I don’t think that would affect the US.
It’s a global industry so unless you’re doing something hyper-local that’s somehow protected from cheaper labour, then you’re at risk.
These Saudi ‘giga-projects’ drew a huge influx of artists into the industry as well as architects. Some of these projects funded 1000s of images at full price and there seemed to be anew one of these popping up each month.
These started about 10 years ago. Corona 1.0 was released about the same time so the technical barrier to entry was massively lowered. Suddenly there was a huge amount of very capable artists who didn’t need to bother with the baggage of simply getting a decent render out; they could just concentrate on the art side of the job.
Fast-forward to 2025 and these Saudi projects are all getting canceled. Architects are out of work, 3D artists are out of work and there’s too many mouths to feed. The supply outweighs the demand.
Sad, but it happens to all industries all the time.
My workload went down to zero the last few months; it never happened before.
I know with certainty that the Europe is in deep recession right now and the real crisis just begun. Next year will be total mayhem in the European economy when numbers go public. Not sure how about the rest of the world but I know the Middle East slowed down drasticaly, many investments stopped completely. Each and every industry lays off people in enormous numbers.
20 years in the industry and now total silence.
When I sold my business, I had a slow month (I panicked), so I got a small dividend check each month, but the last two months were zero. Someone I keep in touch with thought he was immune to AI because he used the model to help with the design; he hasn’t seen a job since March. I am not sure what happened, but it happened. Ai has nothing to do with investors stopping investing, so there is something bigger going on.
On a positive note, other people I keep in touch with are seeing things come alive: one said work exploded, and another is seeing several good jobs come in. Others, I think, are waiting until Summer is over and hoping for the best.
I hope something is going to start flowing. Otherwise…not a great perspective. Here, in Europe, people I talk to, almost all of them, are getting laid off or are out of work. Without exceptions.
Do you guys have good safety nets, like unemployment? I had to terminate someone yesterday, and I sent him to the unemployment website, food and health assistance, so he’ll be fine for 6 months.
FYI
Architecture’s longest billings slump just keeps going for U.S. firms.
So it may not just be an AI-taking-our-jobs thing.
Almost good news. Slumps can turn around. Computers taking jobs can’t.
Exactly my thoughts. Only time will tell