Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch: It’s No Different for AI
The question isn’t just whether to adopt AI, but how to align it with your firm’s core strengths and values. Without this foundational step, any AI strategy runs the risk of failure.
The January Design Futures Council was a great opportunity to spend time on the big question of value — defining and redefining value in the built environment. How do firms create and sustain value in the face of accelerating change? How can they articulate and deliver value?
What’s clear is that AEC is at a crossroads. On one side, traditional inefficiencies persist, slowing projects down and limiting innovation. On the other, firms leveraging AI, automation, and data-driven decision-making are accelerating ahead — improving workflows, reducing risk, and delivering better outcomes. Of course, the AEC industry’s journey with AI tools and systems is still in its early stages. But preparing for the future begins now.
The Built Result: Where AI Can Help (or Hurt)
The ultimate goal of architecture and design is to deliver a built result that stands the test of time.
AI has the potential to help firms execute more intentional, informed decisions — eliminating inefficiencies that lead to approximate solutions and costly field issues. But without a clear understanding of your own firm’s culture, priorities, and balancing forces, AI could just as easily create misalignment as it could create value.
What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?
Whether a firm is taking the first steps in considering AI or refining its approach, it must assess what matters most within its practice.
Ultimately, the key to AI adoption isn’t about simply automating workflows. It’s about asking: What problem are we trying to solve?
AI is only as effective as the strategy behind it. Let’s explore how Skema can enhance your design process while staying true to your firm’s values.
Balancing Risk, Value & Artistry
Against this backdrop, I offer a framework for thinking through the questions firms should be asking when considering AI, not as a prescriptive roadmap but as a way to help leaders make intentional decisions about where to invest.
Firms face a fundamental balancing act — the interplay between artistry, value, and risk.
Artistry is the creative foundation of design, shaping distinctive and meaningful spaces.
Value is how that artistry translates into solving an owner’s problem, ensuring the project serves a real need.
Risk represents the financial, legal, and technical challenges of bringing a design to life.
From my experience, firms are constantly negotiating these forces. AI doesn’t replace this balance — it amplifies it. Whether AI strengthens a firm’s ability to manage these forces or disrupts it depends entirely on how it is integrated. Understanding this dynamic is the key to making AI adoption successful.
The execution of a project hinges on how a firm manages the interplay between artistry, value, and risk. And every firm negotiates these balancing points in its own way.
In the value space, the key question is: How does our firm create value for owners? Some first operate in highly standardized environments — like multifamily housing — where market forces drive design choices. Others work on signature projects where artistic expression is paramount. The role AI can play in each of these contexts is entirely different.
Similarity, in the risk space, firms can ask: Where do we take risks, and how do we mitigate them? AI might offer ways to streamline risk management — whether through automated quality control, predictive analytics, or enhanced documentation — but only if the firm understands where its greatest vulnerabilities lie.
Team Players: Design and Production
At the intersection of these forces are different roles. The cultural divide between designers and production staff is common and fairly well known, rooted in differing priorities and workflows.
Designers shape the application of artistry to a project to generate value.
Production and technical teams ensure that value is delivered while mitigating risk — ensuring constructability, managing technical details, and integrating systems.
And in some firms, computational designers occupy the center, applying technical expertise to both creative and production challenges, with scope across all aspects.
Understanding the firm’s culture — and the relative value it assigns to design exploration, production efficiency, or both — is key to determining where AI efforts and investments will be most effective.
A Path to Transformational Change
Adopting AI goes hand in hand with taking stock of your firm’s culture. Where do you sit on the artistry-value-risk spectrum? What problems are you solving today, and where could AI make a real impact? Answering these questions first will help ensure AI strengthens — rather than disrupts — your practice.
Yet, a cautionary note emerged during the conference: AI’s reliance on large datasets may push the industry toward uniformity. If AI only generates designs based on what has been done before, it risks producing the lowest-common-denominator solutions. Instead, AI should be leveraged to explore unique, differentiated approaches — offering architects a competitive edge rather than reinforcing mediocrity.