Creative Intelligence 2026: AI Adoption Among Working Creatives
Junior creatives use AI at a rate of 71.1 percent, mid-level creatives at 70.7 percent and senior creatives at 69.8 percent, according to the Creative Intelligence 2026 report from Contra Labs. The spread across experience levels is 1.3 points. Contra Labs says it surveyed more than 150,000 working creative professionals and combined the answers with marketplace data from Contra, a network it puts at more than two million vetted creatives. It describes its business as building an evaluation layer for creative AI and says frontier labs use its network to judge output quality. The findings sit on a public page at contralabs.com/creative-intelligence-report-2026, and the full report is behind a request form.
Tools and workflow
ChatGPT is the most-used LLM among respondents at 78.6 percent, followed by Claude at 59.0 percent and Gemini at 37.8 percent. Notion AI and Perplexity each reach 18.9 percent, DeepSeek 6.8 percent and Kimi 3.1 percent. Counting portfolio posts that tag a tool, ChatGPT has 13,165, Claude 10,286 and Gemini 7,322. Among brand designers, the page lists Adobe Photoshop first at 69 percent and ChatGPT at 68 percent.
Respondent comments describe where AI enters a project. One designer gives a client questionnaire to AI to list direct and adjacent competitors, then has it research those brands and the industry. Another uses Claude and ChatGPT as a critique tool, pressure-testing positioning and checking whether a brand story holds up. A third runs finished ads past AI as a second check against the brief. The page attaches figures of 87 percent to ideation, 69 percent to mockup and 79 percent to refinement, ties them to Contra's Human Creativity Benchmark and does not define what they measure.
Cost, quality and clients
Cost is the leading barrier at 70.1 percent, followed by output quality at 44.6 percent, and the page's own text names those two as the main reasons creatives hold back. Respondents fill in the detail. One says a basic subscription costs about $20 and that going without one feels like falling behind. Another reports that AI invents features of newer tools. A studio owner worries that unreleased work could leak or be used for training without permission. On clients, one respondent described a stigma and said they "often want it to not look like AI was used."
Earnings and new work
The page's headline on earnings is that creatives adopting AI are earning more. The support is a chart of each creator's change in median project value before and after adoption, comparing adopters with a non-adopter control group. The display is capped at +260 percent with outliers hidden, no summary number is printed, and the page does not say how the two groups were chosen. Separately, it reports that project sizes for AI-powered creatives grew more than 40 percent.
Contra's marketplace data also counts how often tools appear in job specifications. Mentions in the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025 rose 25 times for Higgsfield, 10.8 times for Replit, 9.9 times for Claude, 9.0 times for Cursor, 5.5 times for Gemini and 1.3 times for ChatGPT. Among creatives, the share offering or planning AI-native services was 60.0 percent for AI workflow design, 50.0 percent for AI creative direction and 49.8 percent for AI landing page generation, with creative evaluation and AI QA at 32.7 percent. The page gives no survey dates or sample sizes for these subsets, and the full report is behind a request form.
