◆ THE NEW CHAPTER · 2026-10-01

AI Is Changing Everything. Now Is the Time to Pivot.

I've remade myself a few times now. Hand-drawn art and animation first, then somehow I ended up founding a resin company, which meant learning enough chemistry to have real conversations with chemists and enough business sense to build something people actually wanted. Then, more recently, I sat down with my son Xavier and we built a browser game called STONK together, and I had to learn to code to do it. None of those pivots felt obvious from the outside looking in, and none of them felt entirely comfortable from the inside either. But each one opened a door I didn't know was there.

I'm telling you this because I think we are living through one of those rare moments when a lot of doors are opening at once, and the people who are paying attention are going to walk through them.

The Ground Is Shifting. That Is Not a Bad Thing.

AI is genuinely disruptive. I'm not going to sugarcoat that. If you've built a career on a specific skill, and that skill can now be approximated by a tool anyone can access, that is a real thing to reckon with. The honest response isn't to pretend it isn't happening, and it isn't to panic either. The honest response is curiosity.

What I keep noticing, in my own work and in the broader creative world I move through, is that AI is lowering barriers that used to keep people out. The technical floor for doing impressive things has dropped significantly. Someone who has a strong visual sensibility but never had the technical chops to execute on it now has new options. Someone who has always wanted to start something but couldn't afford a full team has new options. The gap between having an idea and being able to test it has shrunk in a way that would have seemed almost impossible a decade ago.

That is not hype. That is just what I'm seeing.

Reinvention Has Always Been the Strategy

When I look back at my own path, the common thread isn't any particular skill or medium. It's a willingness to not know what I'm doing for a while, and to keep going anyway. I wrote about that feeling more directly in this piece about going back to school later in life. The discomfort of being a beginner again is something you have to make peace with if you want to keep growing.

The animation work taught me to think visually and tell stories through movement. Founding ArtResin taught me that I could learn entirely foreign domains, chemistry, operations, partnerships, brand building, if the problem was interesting enough and I stayed patient with myself. Building STONK with Xavier taught me that coding is learnable, that it's creative, and that doing something hard alongside someone you love makes it better.

Each of those experiences compounded. And now, working with AI tools as part of my creative process, I feel that same compounding happening again. The tools are new but the underlying move is familiar: stay curious, stay humble, figure out what the new thing is actually good for.

Now Might Be the Best Time in a Generation to Start Something New

I really believe that. Not because AI is magic, it isn't, but because disruption creates openings. Industries are being reorganized. Assumptions are being questioned. The people who are attached to how things used to be done are distracted by defending the old way, which means the field is less crowded for the people willing to learn the new way.

This doesn't mean throwing out everything you know. I still care deeply about craft. I still believe that taste, storytelling ability, and the capacity to make something emotionally resonant are irreplaceable. I wrote about that in a piece about hand-drawn animation in a world full of templates, and I stand by every word of it. The tools change. The underlying human thing that makes work worth experiencing doesn't.

What AI does is give people with genuine skills and ideas a better set of instruments to work with. If you've been waiting for the right moment to make a move, to start the thing, to learn the skill, to change directions, I'd argue that waiting for a more stable moment might mean waiting indefinitely. Stable moments and disruptive moments are just different kinds of uncertain. You might as well move when the doors are open.

The Pivot Is the Point

After I exited ArtResin in 2024, I made a deliberate choice to slow down and return to the things I actually love making. Craft. Learning. Creative work that feels alive. It would have been easy to immediately chase the next venture, to let momentum carry me into something just because I could. Instead I wanted to be intentional about what came next.

That intentionality is what I think matters most right now, for anyone looking at this AI moment and wondering what it means for them. Not rushing, not ignoring it, not picking a side in some culture war about whether AI is good or bad. Just paying attention, experimenting, and staying honest with yourself about what you're building toward.

The people who thrive through this period won't necessarily be the ones who moved fastest. They'll be the ones who stayed adaptable and kept asking good questions.

If you're curious about the client work that's come out of this ongoing reinvention, you can find it at davidzak.com. And if you're in the middle of your own pivot right now, I hope some of this landed.

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