AI has clearly taken the world by storm and it's no different in design. Reading the news it's not hard to feel like everything is going to be done by agents - and soon! However, it might be worth taking a step back and to think about what is it, exactly, that designers do? 

Clients pay interior designers for judgment. Reading the brief behind the brief, walking a flat that turns out to be nothing like the drawings, choosing between two chairs that both technically fit the plan. That work depends on context you gathered over years as a professional and in person over weeks working on site and with the clients.

There's also the repetitive part of the job which is  a different story. Finding product information, retyping it into a schedule, then hunting for it again a month later is the kind of handling software has been getting quicker at. Both things are happening at once,  so let's take a look at what's really going on and how big is the touted AI change, actually. 

What the industry's first readiness score actually says

The International Interior Design Association has published its first Futures Readiness Index. Business of Home reported an overall industry score of 2.2 out of 5, which the index places in its lowest band, described as "starting". Well - you have to start somewhere!

It's two details that catch the eye though. We're not actually talking about an AI-readiness score, so we shouldn't look at it as proof that the profession is specifically behind on AI. There is also no earlier index to measure it against, so we have nothing to compare it against. We should take it as a first reading of how prepared the profession looks across what the index measures.

The reporting is more interesting on the question of what the profession should protect. Mark Bryan, the research lead on the index, points to the judgment that reads the client, the site and the wider context as the part clients most need to see, trust and pay for. That's pretty interesting and we could say more useful.

Where judgment shows up in a real project

If judgment is the valuable part, it helps to be specific about where it actually appears. It is rarely one grand decision. It shows up in small readings of a situation that only make sense if you were there.

The brief nobody writes down

A client says an apartment - warm but not beige. Three meetings later you find out they mean a rented flat in Lisbon with terracotta floors, that the dog sheds on everything below knee height and that the husband quietly hates the dining table they already own. None of that was in the brief document. You assembled it from asides and chats.

Every specification decision after that point is filtered through what you learned in those conversations. Somebody could describe the room to a tool. Describing what the client did not say is harder.

The site that argues back

Then you visit. The radiator sits under the only window where a desk makes sense. The ceiling drops in one corner by enough to kill the pendant you had in mind. The lift is too small for the joinery, so the joinery becomes flat-pack or it becomes a pivot story up stairs. You take one look at the plasterwork and decide the wallpaper is a bad idea.

That is a chain of judgments made in about twenty minutes, most of them never written down anywhere, but they make or break the project.

Sourcing and specification are design decisions

There is a tempting idea going around that research, sourcing and specification are the clerical wrapper around design, with the creative bit somewhere in the middle kind of just "happening". Anyone who has specified a family home knows better. Choosing between a fabric with a low rub count and a slightly duller alternative that survives a rental is a design decision that is going to keep the client happy for years to come. So is accepting a sixteen-week lead time because the in-stock version looks wrong in that light.

Sourcing and specification remain professional design work. What sits inside them, though, is a large amount of repeated handling that has nothing to do with the decision itself.

Where the repeated handling piles up

Ever get to the end of the week and wonder where all your time went? Well - this is the likely culprit on most cases.

You saved a pendant from a supplier page six weeks ago. The electrician now needs the drop length and the lamp type. You search your email. You check the downloads folder, which contains eleven files called spec with different numbers after them. You find the Pinterest pin instead of the product page. Eventually you go back to the supplier site and the finish has been renamed, so you are no longer certain it is the same pendant.

Or the version problem. There is the master sheet on your machine, the PDF the client received on the fourteenth and the copy the contractor was sent because he could not open the first one. Somebody approves a chair from the old file. You find out when it's too late - usually when something turns up and it's not what it's supposed to be.

Then there's the decisions themselves, all over the place. One approval arrives as a WhatsApp voice note. Something's in a forwarded email with the word "lovely" and no indication of which of the four options is lovely. You are the only person holding the thread together, so you rebuild it every time somebody asks a simple question.

None of this is measured and there is no honest number to put on the hours it costs. To add insult to injury this is also the part of the week that leaves least room for the judgment clients are actually paying for.

So - how should an interior designer use AI?

Use it on work that is repetitive and checkable and that sucks time away from the thing you're actually getting paid for. Keep your own hands on decisions that depend on context nobody else has. It's as simple as that. Your human creativity is what brought clients over in the first place and you should use every tool you have to maximise that output. 

A short self-audit for one working week

Take ten minutes to look back at the last few weeks. Look at your messages, browse your inbox and sent items. 

• Which were the recurring tasks, something you had to do at least four times? Consider those first for tooling.

• How many of them involved copying information that already existed somewhere else?

• How often did you retype something a supplier had already published on their own page?

• Which decisions depended on your reading of the clients wishes, the room or the budget rather than routine approval?

• Which decisions went wrong because someone was looking at an old file?

• What did you not get to? Be honest about which of those things was the design work.

Much of that repeated handling tends to sit around product information. It arrives from supplier sites in different formats, gets copied into a schedule, then gets copied again into whatever the client sees.

Where thesheet fits

thesheet handles the product side of that repeated handling.

Firstly - fast product capture, supported by AI. Instead of copying names, dimensions and finishes off a supplier page by hand, you save the product from the page itself with a single click. There is more on how the Product Clipper pulls products off supplier sites for a bit more on that.

Secondly - have a single source of truth for your products and specifications, so the specification you are working on is the specification. That's why we've hitched our wagon on making simple specification software so that single source of truth is as easy to get started with as an Excel file - without the fifty versions of the same document. 

thesheet does not design a room and it has no opinion on whether the terracotta works. It takes the handling out of the way of the part that needs you.

The short version

• The International Interior Design Association's first Futures Readiness Index scores the industry 2.2 out of 5, in the "starting" band. It is a single first reading rather than an AI-readiness score.

• The index's research lead, Mark Bryan, identifies the judgment that reads the client, the site and the context as what clients most need to see, trust and pay for. Research, concepts, sourcing, specification and delivery all remain professional design work, with a lot of repeated product handling sitting inside them.

• Audit one real week for the tasks you repeated more than three times, especially anything where you retyped information a supplier had already published, and hand that handling over rather than the judgment around it.

If repeated product handling is what is crowding your week, put one live project through it and see what changes. Try thesheet for free.