When Anthropic launched Claude Design, I noticed their choice of language. Design systems. Communication architecture. Infrastructure. The vocabulary of how things work together, not what they produce.

The traditional agency model has operated on an output basis for a long time. The client commissions the deliverable: the annual report, the infographic, the campaign assets. A production-based approach, scoped against a deliverable. Strategy and communications expertise sat somewhere else in the mix. The system worked because execution was genuinely skilled and had real value.

AI is eroding that value fast. What took a week now takes a day. What required a specialist now requires a well-crafted prompt. This is happening in studios right now.

Craft as a standalone value is under assault. Typography, layout, visual polish – the execution skills that separate professional work from amateur work. For teams whose offer begins and ends there, the answer is uncomfortable.

The creative teams who will hold their ground are the ones who carry more than craft: strategy literacy, systems thinking, the ability to translate complex regulatory, scientific, and financial information into something a wide audience can understand and act on.

Last year our team was engaged by a logistics organisation on their 2030 sustainability framework. The scope began well upstream of communications. We worked through the strategic positioning first: what the organisation’s materiality looked like, how decarbonisation and circularity targets connected to commercial reality, and where the genuine tensions lived between business growth and environmental commitments. The communications architecture came from that – a narrative platform, tone guide, campaign framework, and a programme brand layer sitting on top of the masterbrand, designed to hold together years of internal and external content without losing coherence or credibility.

The hard part had nothing to do with how things looked. It was the tension at the centre of the brief: a business committed to a circular future while volumes continue to grow. Making that tension legible, rather than covering it with aspirational language, required understanding of regulatory disclosure obligations, investor expectations, internal alignment, and where honest complexity ends and convenient vagueness begins.

None of that can be automated. You can’t prompt your way to the judgement needed to navigate it.

Some of the most demanding work in sustainability communications right now is turning complex climate data into something a general audience can understand. The demanding part is the architecture of argument, not the aesthetics. A poorly designed emissions graph doesn’t just confuse. In a disclosure context, it can constitute a greenwashing risk. A well-designed one gets used – shared across teams, referenced in contexts it wasn’t made for, still in circulation long after it was published.

That’s design as risk mitigation.

Credibility is becoming a competitive issue in ways it wasn’t before. A 2025 Blue Yonder survey found that only 20% of consumers believe brands’ sustainability claims, with 70% actively verifying them. Among growing consumer segments, the quality of an organisation’s sustainability communications is now directly linked to brand preference and purchasing decisions.

Compliance regimes have compounded this by creating volume without clarity. Every organisation now needs a sustainability report, a modern slavery statement, a climate disclosure, and a range of stakeholder briefings. Treating all of it as a production run – working through an asset list – misses the point. The organisations building real communications credibility are building connected systems: reporting, campaigns, and internal communications that all speak from the same strategic foundation, in language calibrated for each audience.

When Anthropic describes the future of AI-aided design using the language of systems and architecture, I don’t read that as competition. I read it as a signal that the space where technology, data literacy, communications logic, and strategic thinking all converge is where the work worth doing will happen.

The harder question is about pricing. The industry is used to billing for outputs: the PDF, the report, the set of assets. Shifting to systems and strategy means billing for thinking, tools, and capability transfer – work that is worth considerably more, but that clients don’t yet have a framework to value. At the same time, production revenue is shrinking. The transition sits somewhere between those two realities, and it won’t be comfortable for anyone.

The creative teams already operating in this space aren’t immune to that. They’re just better prepared for it.

About the Author

Clare Théophane is Creative Director, Strategic Communications at sustainability advisory BWD Strategic, and an expert in sustainability communications and strategic branding.