Disruption

Let’s have a chat about the disruption happening while you read this.

3 October 2026

I’ve spent my working life around marketing, sales promotion, graphic design, printing, signage and product development. I remember my dad having graphic designers doing artwork by hand and using bromide machines. I’ve worked with screen printing, offset printing and steel rule cutting dies, then through the transition to computer cut lettering, laser cutting, large format digital printing and flatbed digital cutting equipment.

People developed new skills and learnt to work with the technology as it evolved. Artwork moved from the drawing board to the computer. Printing and manufacturing processes changed, businesses adapted and others were left behind.

Now we’re going through another transition with AI and robotics, and building the Driving About and HaveAChat.AI websites has brought home to me how much is changing.

I’ve used ChatGPT to develop the artwork, content and briefs for our websites, then Lovable to build them. We’ve also been trialling Jitter to animate the artwork. We’re creating artwork within hours and taking websites from concept to completion within days, including the changes needed along the way.

Much of this happens simply by talking to ChatGPT and Lovable AI. I explain what I want, ask questions, review what comes back and tell them what needs changing. It feels like having graphic design and coding departments available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Once the websites are live, we keep developing and improving them through that same conversation.

Work that previously could take weeks or months is now being completed within days. Looking at what we’ve done, I struggle to see how agencies and established platforms compete without fundamentally changing how they operate and what they charge for. I wouldn’t have predicted this speed or scale six months ago.

That has serious implications for graphic design, website development, advertising, marketing and sales promotion. As businesses produce more of their own content, artwork and websites, they will have less reason to pay agencies for that work. Businesses charging for services their customers can increasingly perform themselves will need to rethink what their offer is.

I believe many agencies will struggle unless they change what they offer. The same question applies to established platforms such as WordPress, Canva, Adobe and Shopify. They serve different purposes but they all need to demonstrate why people should keep choosing and paying for them as the alternatives develop.

You still need to understand a brief, create a good layout, know your customer and recognise when something isn’t working. Producing something quickly doesn’t make it good. But those skills are now being applied through different tools and processes, and people need to understand what that means for these industries.

Tasks will be automated. Some jobs will disappear and others will be created. Experience alone won’t protect someone whose customers no longer need the service they’ve been selling. People need to identify where their skills fit into what comes next and start making that transition.

We’re also working through this with a new product for electric vehicles, which we’ve introduced on Driving About. I’m not releasing the design yet but we’ll document the process from scanning and CAD modelling through to prototypes, testing, production and selling it through our own platform.

That includes building our own platform to sell the product, take payments and manage delivery.

There are still costs, engineering decisions and manufacturing problems to solve. What interests me is how quickly we can move through the process and how that changes the opportunity for someone developing a product or business.

Our EV product is the starting point for developing ongoing design, engineering and manufacturing services for Australian businesses. That work will also include the solar dome we’re developing and other products. As we build the workshop and introduce tooling, production equipment, automation and robotics, it’s critical that education is part of that process.

With guidance from their teachers, high school students will be able to follow how an idea becomes a product and a business. We want TAFE apprentices and university students to connect digitally to the workshop and, wherever possible, contribute to the design, engineering and production decisions, not just watch the finished result.

That means sharing how we choose equipment, test designs, solve problems and change the process as the technology evolves. Their involvement is an important part of what we intend to build, with ongoing projects for Australian businesses providing new work to learn from and contribute to.

Authenticated News will help explain that work, with the knowledge checked by the people who understand it. That verified knowledge is part of how we intend to develop Authenticated Intelligence.

Australia needs people who can design, engineer, manufacture and build businesses using these tools. We need to develop our own capability and prepare people for the work ahead.

The disruption is already happening. If people and businesses put off thinking about the transition, they risk finding themselves with skills, services or business models that customers no longer need.

Paul Nelson | Founder | HaveAChat.AI