How to Compete With AI: Give Your Clients More Than You Did Before

Everyone has the same tools now, and your clients know it. I run a small creative team, and I pay other companies to run parts of my business, so I’ve seen both sides of this in the last few months. Here’s where I feel things are, a few numbers that back it up, and how a business can still compete with AI and stay worth paying for.

I want to talk about how businesses, and anyone who provides a service, stay competitive and stay afloat in a time when customers can do a lot more on their own. I’ve had a lot of different experiences with different providers since AI took over everything, and I want to give you some perspective on where I feel things are, and how we can continue to stand out.

The “on their own” part is not a feeling. The chart below is Pew’s count of American adults who have used ChatGPT or a chatbot like it, and about a quarter of adults have used one to create or change a picture or a video. When one survey this fall asked people who had needed creative work done how they got it, three times as many said they did it themselves with AI as said they paid someone.

Your customers have the tools in their pocket

202318%

202423%

202534%

202644%

How Do You Compete With AI When Your Clients Can Do It Themselves?

What I think is necessary, and I think it’s a big thing, is that as businesses and as providers, it’s up to us to use these tools to give our clients a better experience than we were able to give them before. The tools showing up doesn’t mean we’re not needed anymore.

It’s not, oh, hey, here’s these new tools, and now we’re not needed anymore. Of course we’re still needed, but it’s up to us to be even better than we were before.

Aaron Nace

What a Small Team Can Make Now

Take PHLEARN, because this is what it looks like to compete with AI at a small company. We’re a small creative team, and we always have been. But now we’re able to use AI to produce significantly more than we could even just a few months ago.

Our latest PRO course, Skin Tones, Color Grading & Presets in Photoshop & Lightroom, went out to our subscribers this week, and we were able to include 121 presets, actions and LUTs in the downloads. They come in seven packs, one for each of the seven lessons that teach a look you can save, from Curves to Lightroom presets: Curves presets, Blend If actions, gradient maps, Camera Raw wheel presets, the Protect Skin action, LUTs and Lightroom presets, each with its own install guide.

That would have been nearly impossible even a year ago, especially operating with a small team. Now it’s a reality, and we can offer it to our customers. We can give them more value than we’ve ever been able to give them before, and I honestly feel like it’s our responsibility to. For a portrait or wedding photographer the same move might be a gallery delivered in two or three finished looks instead of one, in the same turnaround, with the hours the tools save on emails and captions going back into the pictures.

We’re not unusual in this. The chart below is the US Chamber of Commerce’s yearly count of small businesses using AI, and it has nearly tripled in three years.

Small businesses using generative AI

202323%

202440%

202558%

202666% (AI in general)

The Companies That Count on You Not Knowing

I’ve also had experiences recently on the other side, with companies I pay to run services for my own business. Some of them have fallen extremely short, and I’ve been able to use AI myself to see where they weren’t doing the job I was paying them to do.

Instead of realizing that everyone has access to these new tools now, and that it’s time to step up and do an even better job, they’re clinging to the old way of doing things. Customers aren’t ignorant. Customers are intelligent, and we’re very aware of where our money goes. If we feel we can save our money and do things ourselves, that’s something we’re going to be considering, especially now.

They’re clinging to their old model of doing things that relied on the ignorance of their customers to make a profit, and that model just doesn’t work anymore.

Aaron Nace

Most companies trying to compete with AI haven’t noticed yet. When PwC asked executives last year, nine in ten believed their customers had become more loyal. Ask the customers and only four in ten agree. Qualtrics, which surveys shoppers every year, reads its own numbers the same way: companies are using AI to cut their costs, not to solve their customers’ problems.

Why Would I Pay Someone Else to Do It?

I feel like the only way a company survives now, rather than trying to gouge its customers for more money, is to do the opposite. Give customers more for their money. Provide more of a service, a better service, something even greater than before. Without that, how are they going to stay competitive in a world where everyone has access to these amazing tools?

If I feel like I can do the job, then for the most part, why would I pay someone else to do it for me? Maybe I would, if I thought they were doing a very good job, the price was reasonable, and they were really trying their best to give me a great service. But if I feel like they’re not doing that good a job, and they’re not improving, then personally it makes me less and less likely to keep them around.

Is AI Taking Your Job?

Of course we’re all worried about the future, especially as creatives, and we know these tools are getting more powerful. A lot of us are scared that AI is taking our jobs, and I don’t think that’s the case. AI is empowering people to do more than they’ve ever been able to do before. That’s the reality of the situation.

It’s not the AI that’s taking your job. It’s individuals who now have more creative power who just don’t need you anymore.

Aaron Nace

That fear is real. In Gallup’s latest poll most Americans expect AI to mean fewer jobs. The measured losses are another matter. Nearly three years after ChatGPT launched, economists at Yale went looking for them in the data and found no discernible disruption, and Stanford found the same in payroll records, with one exception that should worry anyone starting out: in the jobs most exposed to AI, firms are hiring fewer people in their early twenties. They’re not being let go, they’re just not being hired.

Photographers are closer to the sharp end than most. In the UK, 58% of the photographers who answered the Association of Photographers’ January 2026 survey said they had lost commissioned work to generative AI. At the same time, almost half of the photographers in Zenfolio’s 2026 industry survey use AI every week, mostly for emails, captions and marketing rather than for the pictures. What’s going is the edit a client can now do on a phone, or skip. What’s staying is the work that got better.

So what do you do to fight against that? You do a much better job. Use AI and these new tools to leverage your own position in the marketplace, so that you’re doing a better job than you’ve ever done before. I honestly feel like that’s the way to survive in this new marketplace. The other side of this, what the tools are doing to the editing itself, is in The Future of Photo Editing. This piece is about how to compete with AI on the business side.

Without that, there’s really nothing you can do, because there are going to be people out there who use AI to produce more, and those become your competitors. People go where they see value. If someone is giving a lot more value, that’s where people are going to wind up going. So those are my thoughts.