How We’re Using AI at RCL

There’s a conversation happening in every creative industry right now, and interior design is no exception. AI is here, and I’d rather talk about it openly than pretend it isn’t sitting right alongside the fabric swatches and finish samples.

I’ll be honest with you: We use AI here at Rachel Cannon Limited. It’s useful for research, helps us work through marketing ideas faster than I could on my own, and supports business development. And that’s a good thing because it allows me to spend more time in my zone of genius: being a creative.

Here’s what I find interesting about this moment, though. The conversation around AI in design tends to go one of two directions. Either it’s treated as a threat (designers wringing their hands, worried about being replaced), or it's overcelebrated as if the technology itself were doing the designing. Neither framing is exactly right.

AI is a tool. A sophisticated, genuinely useful one, but a tool nonetheless. The same way a well-curated Pinterest board can surface an idea more quickly than it would have taken you to get there on your own, AI can accelerate certain parts of the creative process. For example, it can free up my time as the person who’s supposed to think outside the box because I hand off mundane tasks to it all the time. 

I don’t want to use AI-generated art, so I can spend more time doing tasks. I want AI to take on the tasks so I can spend more time creating art.

In the right hands, AI is efficient. And efficiency matters when you’re managing a small business with employees, clients, projects, and contractors, all with their own timelines.

What AI doesn’t do is walk into a room and feel it. It doesn’t notice that the light shifts dramatically in the west-facing sitting room at four in the afternoon, or that the client teared up slightly when they described how they wanted the space to feel after their kids left for college. It doesn’t carry twenty-plus years of understanding how people actually live in their homes, what they say they want versus what they need, and how those two things are almost never identical.

I founded Rachel Cannon Limited with a belief that good design is relational at its core. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that the tools available to support that work have gotten considerably more interesting.

This Journal entry is the first in a three-part series on AI and interior design, and I want to use it to have a real conversation, not a defensive one. AI is not coming for your designer’s job, at least not the kind of designer who understands that the square footage is the easy part. But it is changing the way the work gets done, and I think that’s worth exploring together.

Next week, I'm talking about the thing AI genuinely cannot do, and why it matters more than you might think.