In early 2026 I rewrote Day of Design's homepage.
The old version said, roughly: we help ambitious businesses turn brand clarity into better conversion. True but generic — applicable to any design shop.
The new version says: Design + AI. On subscription.
It took me about six months of internal debate before I made the change. I want to explain the reasoning, because the wrong move here would have been worse than doing nothing.
The 2025 reality I was avoiding
Through 2024 and 2025, something was happening inside our engagements that I kept trying to ignore.
Clients were asking for help with AI products. Not "help us think about AI strategy." Help us ship AI products. Build the app. Tune the agent. Write the system prompt. Design the intake flow.
At first I treated these as exceptions. By mid-2025, roughly 40% of our active work had an AI component. We were shipping the AI work, but our brand didn't acknowledge it, so clients kept asking if we even did this kind of work. I was losing deals to agencies that weren't as strong but said the word "AI" on their homepage.
Why I hesitated
Three reasons I waited longer than I should have:
1. The AI category is noisy. Every agency and consultant is claiming AI capabilities. Positioning as an "AI agency" signals low specificity in 2026. I didn't want to be in that soup.
2. Our craft is design. I didn't want to be seen as a design shop trying to grow into AI — I wanted to be seen as a design shop that naturally encompasses AI, because it does, because AI products are products, and products need design.
3. I wasn't sure we'd earn the claim. Saying "we do AI" only works if the work is genuinely strong. I wanted to run about 12 months of AI projects under the radar before putting it on the homepage. We did.
What actually forced the decision
One specific conversation. A founder we'd helped with brand work two years earlier came back for help with his new AI startup. He said, "I want to work with you — but I also need someone who can build the product. Do you know a team for that?"
I told him we build products now. He was visibly surprised. That's when I realized: the market didn't know we'd expanded, because we hadn't told it we had.
Our own brand was the bottleneck.
The positioning choice
"Design + AI. On subscription." does three things at once:
- Specificity: Names both disciplines. No hedging.
- Integration: The "+" signals that these are one offer, not two business lines.
- Commercial model: "Subscription" tells buyers the engagement shape before they click.
Plenty of agencies do design. Plenty do AI. Very few do them integrated on a subscription. That triangulation is the niche.
What changed inside the company
The new positioning forced three internal decisions I'd been deferring:
Services doc: we wrote down exactly which AI capabilities we ship (apps, agents, design automation) and which we don't (pure ML research, training foundation models).
Pricing: we decided AI hours would be included in Professional and Enterprise, not sold separately. (I wrote a whole piece on that decision.)
Hiring: we stopped hiring pure designers and pure engineers. Every new team member has to operate across both.
What this means for existing clients
Same team. Same craft. Same subscription model. Just clearer about what's in it now.
For clients who only want traditional design — we still do it, same quality, same price. For clients who've been asking whether we "can also do the AI piece" — yes, and it was in your subscription all along. Ask us.
The broader point
Nine years in, I've learned that positioning lag is one of the sneakiest ways a business leaves money on the table. The work had already changed. The brand hadn't caught up. The catchup was late, but it's done.
If there's a lesson here for other founders: the day your quiet work has been different for a year is the day you should update your positioning. Not six months later. Definitely not twelve.