This blog is about staying agile in AI-Driven creative market. How the market shift affected me, and the journey about making it to the other side. What we run from, pursues us, and what we face, transforms us.
The Work That Paid for the Work
I have supported my creative itch by solving business problems.
That sentence sounds clean. Simple. Almost strategic. The reality is messier.
For years, I learned to make ads and visuals that convert not because I loved selling things, but because it funded something far more fragile. My curiosity. My experiments. My need to keep making.
By 2025, that balance had been running long enough to feel stable.
It was my third year doing a full-time job. My tenth year freelancing alongside it.
One foot inside structure. One foot outside it. Enough order to pay the bills. Enough freedom to keep the craft alive.
It worked. Until it didn’t.
When the Floor Moves
The layoff came in 2025. No long warning. No dramatic buildup. Just a clean exit in a market that was already shifting faster than most people could admit. AI was no longer a headline or a side experiment. It was entering workflows, conversations, expectations. Staying relevant now meant adapting in real time. Not adopting tools blindly. Not outsourcing thinking. But reworking the process itself.
That transition was not immediate. It took close to five months to find stability again. Five months of re-calibration. Of sitting with uncertainty. Of testing what still held value when titles disappeared and routines collapsed.
Those months did something important. They stripped everything down.
What remained was skill. Patience. And belief.
I am deeply thankful for the people who stayed close during that stretch. The ones who supported quietly.
Who believed in my comeback before there was proof to point at.
That belief mattered more than momentum ever had.
Parallel Progress
While work was finding its footing again, something else was moving in the background. For two and a half years, I flew FPV in a simulator. Practicing. Crashing virtually. Learning restraint before speed and precision.
This year, I finally got my first FPV drone. A DJI Avata 2.
And around the same time, something clicked.
I am proud to be collaborating with IIT Bombay to create a FPV cinematic of their prestigious campus. Flying through a space built on ideas, discipline, and legacy felt deeply meaningful.
The video will be out very soon, and this opportunity was one of the most exciting moments of 2025 for me. It felt like timing finally met preparation. (Experienced my first FPV Crash as well.)
What I do for businesses is design.
What I do for myself is art.
2025 was also the year I deeply integrated AI into my creative workflow. I got fluent with tools like ElevenLabs, Google Veo, Node Based AI Workflow, Kling, Seedance, Google Nano Banana, Adobe Firefly, and modern image and video generation systems.
Not as shortcuts, but as accelerators.
The real power came from blending.
Pairing pre-AI production tools like DaVinci Resolve, After Effects, Photoshop, real videography, and story-driven footage with AI unlocked speed without sacrificing intent. I no longer feel limited by tools.
If I can imagine it and visualize it, I can make it.
Design stays structured and outcome-driven.
Art stays exploratory and personal.
One funds the other.
One protects the other.
Looking Ahead
As I look toward 2026, the intention is not grand.
Travel more. Fly more. Make more videos that come from curiosity instead of briefs.
Keep designing systems that work. Keep building visuals that solve problems. But never at the cost of the part of me that still experiments without permission.
That balance is the real craft.
And learning to hold it through disruption, through layoffs, through evolving tools and shifting markets, might be the most important thing this year taught me.
Not everything needs to resolve to move forward.
Some things just need to stay in motion.
