Jenna: 
Okay. I think it all starts back in middle high school growing up as the product of a nineties kid and growing up with computer technology where SIMS was the first program that came out. Did you play SIMS? Have anybody around you that played SIMS? 
 
Sue: 
I did, totally, yes. 
 
Jenna: 
So those cheat codes were just building mansions and designing back in the day before I even knew what interior design was. So I've always been a tech nerd where I grew up with computers as they were really coming to fruition into the world in general, and design has always just been a passion. So growing up in Vermont, I actually didn't know any interior designers. There was nobody there to say, here's a profession that you could pursue. 
So by the time I was in high school, I was like, I need to move to New York City. I need to pursue this, I need to do this. So I took AP art classes and I cannot draw, cannot draw perspectives to save my life, but I'm really good with color and I am really good with design and figuring out space planning, love Tetris, those types of things. So technology and design has just always gone hand in hand for me. It's always been a passion and something that interests me in so many different capacities. So that led me to go to design school where SketchUp was just hitting the market when I went to school and learning that crashing on my computers, trying to use this Google based program, it took forever to create renderings and models and all of that stuff, but it was exciting to know that I didn't have to sketch perspectives because I can't draw. 
So taking my ideas and being able to visually see them, both in Photoshop and in three-D models in college, that just propelled my passion even further. So after college, I got into a little bit of real estate and high-end furniture company because it was 2010 and it was difficult to get a job right after school, especially when I went to school in Albany, New York. So to be able to pursue that, I ended up moving around with this furniture company until I was back in New York City around 2015. And at that time, eDesign was really starting to hit the market. There were larger companies out there that were allowing designers to submit and be able to win projects. 
And at the time it was paying my bills. I was winning a lot of projects, but simultaneously I had quit my job. I had left my job after working my way up the corporate ladder for five years. I just was no longer passionate about that, needed to design again, and I was pursuing the virtual. Design at the same time I had my daughter and I was building a website for myself to get my own clients, and then I started to just engage in Facebook and find new people and find new clients, and it was lonely. So that's where eDesign Tribe came, which was my community. 
 
Sue: 
So talk about that. Just describe what that community looks like. 
 
Jenna: 
So I launched that community on Facebook when Facebook groups were huge back then. Yeah, yep. In 2018. And it was because it was so lonely. I had a newborn baby and I was literally nursing, building a business, trying to pay all the bills at the same time and barely leaving the house. So to do that, I needed to feel connected and I have always had a passion to teach. And so eDesign Tribe was the community that I built and was able to launch, which were classes for interior designers to learn how to do Photoshop, to learn how to collaborate virtually, build your website, all those things. So the community honestly got me through the loneliness parts of this, but also we helped each other. And so from there, I also created a rendering program that attached to the education and in 2022 that was acquired by Mydoma Studio, which is a project management company. 
 
Sue: 
That's fantastic. Oh my gosh, I did not know that angle. Okay, so many things I want to ask. So we'll get to where AI took off as your newest point of view and venture, but what was the biggest, were designers hungry for that digital education in 2015? 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah, absolutely, because so many designers wanted this and it was pre COVID, so nobody was really doing it, or it was really faux pas to be doing virtual design at the time. People looked down on that. But for me as an introvert and somebody that was starting a new family, it was the perfect opportunity for me and also brought all those passions in. So I knew that I had to teach other designers different techniques and be able to bring us all together. And luckily when COVID did hit, we had established the rendering program, the community, the resources for virtual assistants, and we were ready to go. So that community when I was acquired was at 5,000 designers. 
 
Sue: 
That is absolutely amazing. Well, good for you because recognizing obviously a need in the industry and being able to react before we actually needed it was pretty tremendous. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah, thank you. 
 
Sue: 
So what did designers, did they like the most about it at that phase? Just the access to digital capabilities. What was the thing that was really sparking interest? 
 
Jenna: 
The ability to not have to travel so much and be able to create visuals and visual communication with their clients just all online. Something that could have been a meeting in person previously is now a 30-minute Zoom call- 
 
Sue: 
Yeah, touch base. 
 
Jenna: 
... where we can go through the rendering touch or send a VR walkthrough tour and they can just walk through themselves. 
 
Sue: 
I am a tech lover, right? Early adopter when all these things come up. So for me, that always made the most sense. I went to design school. I went to school in the late nineties, early two thousands. And so at that point, it was a small program where we were just rendering by hand and AutoCAD was coming online. So it was the beginning of the tech generation for design, but I feel like I missed my windows had I just been 10 years later. It would've been exciting. So it's cool to hear everything that you went through, but now let's talk about AI. So AI is this new, sometimes scary for people don't know that, don't understand the opportunity. So talk about AI as an exploration of interior design. 
 
Jenna: 
This all started for me about two years ago when I started seeing some apps pop up on my phone and it's like, okay, upload a picture and change your space, which I later learned is stable diffusion. It's a part of AI and it's a branch of it, but basically what these apps were doing was being able to upload this photo and then change things, and they were super weird. So I started to share the weirdness on my Instagram, and then from there I was like, no, this is actually getting cool. I got to lean into this because this is helpful. So that led me to where I am today. 
 
Sue: 
So talk about that. Oh gosh, there's so many things trying to be organized here. So recognizing, I think the speed to market of technology is a hurdle for a lot of designers. They just get comfortable using something and then all of a sudden there's new tech on the market and how do they, you get frustrated. There's so many inputs on interior designers that having to pivot so quickly is a frustration. So do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think AI is going to be the next thing that people really have to pay attention to, or will it phase quickly? 
 
Jenna: 
I think it's going to be when Google came out, let's compare it to that. So when Google came out, we were all like, okay, cool, it's a search engine, but then it got better and better, and now can you imagine not Googling the answer to something? 
 
Sue: 
Even imagine. Yep. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah. So now though, I actually very rarely use Google. I actually use AI and search engines built in through AI to do all of my research. That's how second nature it's become. So it's not just, I think a lot of designers and people in general are afraid that it's going to replace, and there are certain elements that it's going to replace in just our jobs and daily lives. However, it's going to elevate and help us so much more with not only business, but creativity. 
 
Sue: 
Totally. So my take on it is I think that AI is going to learn to do the things I don't really want to do, I'm not good at. The organizational management, the keeping up with the things, almost like the AI on your shoulder, the assistant, which will allow me to do more research, to do the things that I want to do that enhance the work I'm doing to make it better. So I am a big, big, big fan. But for people that aren't in the space, if you had to narrow it down, what would you say are top three game changing advantages of AI and design? 
 
Jenna: 
Sure. So generative AI, which is basically taking a prompt and saying, okay, here are the words, now create an image for me out of thin air. Okay, so that's helpful, right, because- 
 
Sue: 
It is. It's fun. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah, it is fun. And it not only boosts creativity because designers, we innately already have the creativity, but if we can look for other sources of inspiration using these tools, we can elevate our existing creativity to the next level. Where previously, if designers were looking for inspirational photos, maybe something to kick off during the ideation phase of their project, they might've been scouring Pinterest, Houzz, Instagram and looking for the idea that they had in their mind to piece together to show their client before they sat there and rendered for four hours. So now we can create that in 90 seconds versus an half an hour scroll. 
 
Sue: 
All right, so that's one, we'll go back to that. That's going to lead to my question on prompts and how you use the tools to get what you really want because you could go down the wormhole of crazy real quick. So what's your second thoughts on game changing and like advantages? 
 
Jenna: 
So this one is for not just designers, but really everybody that's in business. And that would be ChatGPT. It's the lowest hanging fruit. You cannot use the free version to get the best out of it. You have to at least be on the Pro, the $20 a month plan. And the reason for that is you can create custom GPTs that are basically just little assistants that are trained on your brand voice, your information, spreadsheets of data that you want to have it reference, and it can help you with everything from writing newsletters, blog posts, helping with SEO, search engine optimization, and even design assistance. I've got a few for that too. So that for $20 a month has been instrumental in helping me to work three times as hard as I was last year. 
 
Sue: 
But much more efficient. It optimizes your time. So the things that you would like writing an introduction email to a client, some people are like, I don't want to do that. You can get some support very quickly that's very professional and ready to go, and then that will free up that hour to do something that a computer can't do for you. So I think for me, that's one of the biggest advantages. All right, so I asked for three. What's one additional one? 
 
Jenna: 
So the third one actually feeds into that, and that would be AI note takers. So if you're in a Zoom meeting or if you're on a phone call, there's different apps. So if you're in a virtual meeting, you can use, I use Fathom, which is one, but there's tons of them out there so see what works best for you. It just joins your meeting and it records the notes and then it provides you with a very detailed summary and the transcript. I also, if I'm on a phone call or sitting in a meeting room, there's a device called Plaud, P-L-A-U-D, and I just put that on my phone, always disclosing that we are recording this conversation, of course, right? 
 
Sue: 
Yes. Always have to do that, of course. 
 
Jenna: 
And that's also grabbing the transcript and putting it into an app on my phone, and it can give me mind maps, it can give me summaries and a ton of different capacities. But the transcripts are what is gold right now for AI. So if you take a transcript, you can literally upload it to ChatGPT or other programs and say, hey, I can't remember what we discussed for cabinets. Can you pull that from the transcript? It can give you itemized and detailed client information from every single call. I've also used it to take onboarding calls for new clients and literally create the proposal for the design project within less than five minutes, which previously was awful. 
 
Sue: 
It just takes time. Agreed. I am so excited about all these things that we're talking about. So from, we definitely, we're going to dig into how to create an image. From my perspective, thinking of something new and next is difficult when you're looking for validation, inspiration, whether it's on Instagram or Pinterest or wherever, because it doesn't exist yet. So how do you come up with some new visionary idea? ChatGPT has been an awesome tool. The limits are literally limitless in how you put the prompts in and get images generated out of it. But what is the difficulty if a designer has never used image generation, what are the key learnings that you can help them with? 
 
Jenna: 
So know what you want to create first and start small. It doesn't have to be intricate. You can start by saying, I'm designing a kitchen. This is the style. And it could be contemporary, coastal. It can be a mix of different things. And then you add a few colors, you add a few material selections and just start with that. If there's anything specifically that you want to see in the space, try and describe it. Sometimes when you add too many things, it only does half of what you're requesting, so don't get frustrated. Just do a new iteration after you get your first image and hone in what you're looking for. But if you get those core fundamental parts to your prompt, you've got something that you can work off of and then make adjustments going forward 
 
Sue: 
And build from it. I think that's the most important thing. And that's where experience and just playing around with the tools is really helpful because if you just say, I want a kitchen, that's not going to be enough information for the tool to generate something that's useful. So really the creativity comes into what you ask the tool, and that just takes time and it's a fun exploration. It's mind-blowing with what comes out. I've enjoyed it. I think that's been a great exploration. So I have a good quote here from Jesper Dramsch, PhD, Scientists for Machine Learning, who has said designers will not be replaced by AI, but by designers who use AI. Do you agree with this? 
 
Jenna: 
So much? Yes, 100%. 
 
Sue: 
I think AI, in my opinion, is going to enhance creativity and elevate design, but do you have any specific examples in your work of how this maybe came into play on a project or? 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah, if you're watching this on video right now, you can see what's behind me. And that is all Sherwin-Williams paint, of course- 
 
Sue: 
Thank you. 
 
Jenna: 
But it's a motif that I created for this space, basically using generative AI to create the concept. So I said, I'm putting all these cabinets behind my desk. Here's what my desk looks like. Here are the colors that I would like to use. I actually converted into hex codes when I put this in there for the actual paints that I was looking at. And I said, I'd like to do an arch, give me some ideas for that. And so I created a ton of different generative idea concepts for what I could potentially do. And in the end, I didn't use any of them, but I was inspired by so many different combinations to create what we have here in my room now. And it's not just this wall. I did other cool things on the other walls too, from that inspiration. 
 
Sue: 
So did you take a picture of the blank wall behind you and the cabinets and feed that into the tool, or did you just describe it? 
 
Jenna: 
No, it didn't. 
 
Sue: 
Okay. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah, I just described it because it didn't exist at all yet. I built all these cabinets at the same time. 
 
Sue: 
At the same time. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, knowing the hex code is really important. So you could talk about color in the AI tools, but it'll just pick something arbitrary. But when you feed it with actual hex codes, it gives you a much better representation, which is really important. I think designers could get frustrated because it can go so cerebrally out there if you don't give good guidance to the tool and it's easy to find hex codes, you can just do searches, you can come on our website. Sherwin-Williams has a color detail page for every color, and it lists the hex code related. So if there are particular colors you want, they're easy to find. So talk about great tools like tools, you've mentioned a few. So Fathom you said is one, obviously ChatGPT is a great tool. What else do you like? 
 
Jenna: 
So Plaud is that recorder. You can get that on Amazon or on their website too. I use for the generative AI imagery, I have two favorites, Midjourney of course, which has been around for a while, and now you can do editing in there with existing photos, which is cool. But Visual Electric is my other favorite. 
 
Sue: 
I don't know that one. Tell me about that one. 
 
Jenna: 
It's for creatives, it's for designers, photographers, brand creators, and there's so much control in that program. So you can set your own styles if you have certain color schemes that you wouldn't be using and apply it to all your colors with different sets of images, you can apply that. So you set your own styles. It can help you create the styles and you can make them in a matter of minutes. 
 
Sue: 
Oh, that's cool. 
 
Jenna: 
So that's how I do all my branding. And the images are pretty phenomenal. 
 
Sue: 
Are they? 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah. So I actually run, I run my prompts through Midjourney and Visual Electric and then some others just to see where they're at. And I always love the Visual Electric ones, even with all my training in Midjourney, Visual Electric is great. 
 
Sue: 
I find Midjourney is complex, especially if you're a new user. So I think the newer tools maybe are a little easier, even though Midjourney's had some good updates. So we are a huge brand, and there's some complexities on my side that make it a little frustrating because with AI, the sourcing of the material goes everywhere. So the tool takes information from the universe and brings it back together and puts an image together. From the corporate side, we're concerned the images that they're sourcing are unprotected. So we're trying to figure out a way that we create a Sherwin-Williams tool that will take all the images that we have and create image generation in a space that is protected and trademarked, which is no easy feat. We're getting closer to that. So again, that leads me to the question on ethics. There's a lot of talk about authenticity or trust in what people are seeing. So what are your thoughts on that, the ethics of AI and how designers can be transparent about what they're creating so that their clients trust what they're producing for them? 
 
Jenna: 
I love that question, and it's how I start every single presentation, because right now it is the Wild West and we're going to see a lot of litigation before we see improvement, and I would hate to see somebody in my community be that example. So I try and set the standard right away. So a few things, Adobe Suite products are actually only trained on Adobe images, so the ones that they have the rights to, and I love that. 
 
Sue: 
So explain that a little for somebody that doesn't know that the Adobe environment. 
 
Jenna: 
So if you were to go to Midjourney or another open-sourced generative AI program, they basically just went on the internet and was like, oh, free information to train all of our models. So while it might've been free and accessible, you probably did not give permission to have your work included in that. Where Adobe owns stock, like Adobe stock photos and all their other media, and they only pulled from what they intellectually their IP. So they own those products. Okay. 
 
Sue: 
That's important because the images they pull from a user like me, we pay Adobe for rights to use that. So we're a customer, so we can use that whole world of stock photography and Adobe, and there's literally millions of images. And that to me is a better source of information. It's a little less of the wild, wild West, if you will. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah. 
 
Sue: 
So from there you say, this is where I'm getting this information from. Then what's next in talking through your presentations? 
 
Jenna: 
So the other thing that I do, because I do use Midjourney and I do use Visual Electric and I use other open sources just because sometimes the quality is better. Because with Adobe, they are pulling from a smaller pool and it's learning and it's training- 
 
Sue: 
And it's learning. 
 
Jenna: 
It's always improving. Yep. 
 
Sue: 
Yes. 
 
Jenna: 
So when I am using either stable diffusion programs, which I haven't really talked about, but there's a lot out there, or generative AI, and let's say I want to take an image as inspiration to use to either apply the style to another image, which basically it'll take the colors and materials and then apply it and override it to another image that you can upload. So that's one option. Or you can just use it as a style reference or picture reference and upload to create a new prompt. 
But what I do is I never use another designer's imagery for this. I understand that collectively, all of the images that are generated from these programs were open-sourced, but what I can control is that I will not myself take another artist's art, another designer's work or photographers also get credit on those images, too, without ever asking permission or sourcing. And the reason is because I would not want somebody to do that to me and then have my work be basically what comes out after I apply that image. It is such a gray area for me that I will always either create my own flat lays, my own renderings, my own photography, or generated AI images and use those as my source images, but not somebody else's work. 
 
Sue: 
So if you were trying to figure out how to unpack all that, you could say you just do for inspiration and creation phase. You can go into this open source model or use Firefly or whatever. And then when you're applying this to your real work, you're still going to create a flat lay. You're still going to create a CAD drawing. You're still going to create something that is truly yours, but maybe your mood board shows this inspo and these go-bys that were created in that space. Does that sound accurate? 
 
Jenna: 
Yes. That and when I'm creating those images, I'm never applying other people's work to create the images. But to go also on what you just said with the flat lays that could potentially be digital that I'm sharing with clients, I'm always disclosing these are not real. This is AI generated. Even this stuff that's on here probably is not real in real life, but it's a starting point to get the color and the idea to move forward into the real world with samples. 
 
Sue: 
And what are clients, so far, what have clients' feedback been? Are they okay with it? Do they think it's great? Are they like, "Ooh, I don't know. I don't trust it." What's the take there from the client perspective? 
 
Jenna: 
Half the time I don't even show them my behind the scenes work, to be totally honest with you. That is part of my process, and they don't need to know where I started with the paint selections. If I started with a concept board that I made in Midjourney, what I do is I extract the hex codes, I do the conversion into the paint color, and then I look at it in real life because it's not going to be what it was on the computer screen, and it's not going to be the same when we stand in the space. So I need to tangibly take those paint colors into the real world. So why show them something when it's not exactly the same? It's not realistic. 
 
Sue: 
Exactly. 
 
Jenna: 
So sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. If we're doing an exterior elevation, for instance, and I start with a line drawing and then I render it with some colors, I'll say, look, this is not realistic. You have Aquaverde for your exterior color, which we're doing right now in Florida. 
 
Sue: 
I love it. 
 
Jenna: 
But that is not going to look the same in your computer screen. So we need to pull the sample, we need to go outside, we need to look at it on site- 
 
Sue: 
Get some chips. Yes. 
 
Jenna: 
But it's a starting point. 
 
Sue: 
And again, that's why we're going back to these tools are not going to replace, they just enhance the design experience. And that I think is what designers have to get over the fear of. This is a great way to help communicate to clients in a much easier speedier way. So I love that example. But it also brings up the real live difficulty of rendering color in the digital world. And so there are some limitations unless you do truly understand how to get a hex code associated. So talk about your favorite ways to do that. So to take a color and put it in the digital space. 
 
Jenna: 
So the extraction tools that have been around honestly for a long time. So Canva has one, Photoshop. So you take the eyedropper tool, you can go find that color, convert it over to the hex code, which it automatically does. So you grab that hex code I use in Encycoloropedia or ChatGPT to say, here's the hex code, what is the Sherwin-Williams conversion to this paint color? 
 
Sue: 
Oh, I've never done it through chat. Yeah. So there's websites that do that. And we also, for those that don't know, we have a little tool, which I don't have one with me. It's called the ColorSnap Muse, and it's a little hex code reader. So you can put it on your wood flooring or your piece of fabric or a swatch or whatever, and get the immediate hex code associated and the closest Sherwin-Williams equivalent. So there are great tools already out there to translate into the digital space. So if a designer still has concerns after everything we've talked about, what would you say to reassure new users about the usefulness of these technologies? 
 
Jenna: 
You got to lean into it and just explore, okay, I do teach this. I have Instagram. Just check it out. I hope that's okay to do a shout-out. 
 
Sue: 
Yes, yes, for sure. 
 
Jenna: 
Because I'm always sharing little tips and tricks to get you started, but in the end, I really hope that you're going to embrace it more than you're afraid of it, because looking for the connections to where can I cut out something that either I don't enjoy doing very much or can help me enhance my creativity. You have to walk into every single program with that mindset versus how is this going to take my job and where's this potentially going to lead to? It's more of how can I make this an advantage so that I can better myself and my career? 
 
Sue: 
I totally agree. I look at it like how is this technology going to help me do the thing I hate to do because it does it very well, and then I don't have to worry about that and I can focus on the really creative great things that we all love doing. So that's my two-second take on it, and I'm very excited for the future. I think that there is going to be some risks for sure, but so much upside. So what do you think our hope is next for the world of eDesign? Where's this going to go for you? 
 
Jenna: 
So now SearchGPT is out. I've also used Perplexity AI, which is, they're both searches. 
 
Sue: 
Oh, I don't know that one. 
 
Jenna: 
That's a cool one. Okay, so upgrade to pro, but $20, because that one also has Claude 3.5 Anthropic, which is really good at language and writing and ChatGPT, and it's a search, so you can literally search and reference back to the articles. So I do this for everything. I did this to- 
 
Sue: 
Super important. 
 
Jenna: 
... To just research like ADA compliance, what are the best knobs that I should have for this house that I'm designing? Or should I have knobs? Those types of questions. Research, because I graduated design school about 15 years ago at this point, and I don't remember. And things have changed. So being able to research and stay on the cutting edge of all of these tools with SearchGPT and also Perplexity just helps to give us a huge advantage in our own profession as well. So utilizing those tools and then the other generative AI programs, and then where AI is also being baked into your existing programs, maybe rendering softwares, things like that, and apps, utilize them. 
 
Sue: 
Yep. 
 
Jenna: 
And see how they can help you. 
 
Sue: 
Totally. I tell you what, even in Photoshop, which I've been using for 25 years, and I love it, and it's an amazing tool. But the AI functions that are helping in retouching are awesome. I can't even tell you. It saved me. I had to re-render about 42 images this weekend, it was not fun. It was effortless. It took probably three hours off the timing of what I needed to produce. So again, it just takes time and exploration of it. And so I would just advise people to jump in. The resources that you talked about are great, and we'll obviously put those in the show notes for sure. And also connect with Jenna. So Jenna, tell us about your podcast. How can people find and learn more about what you've talked about? 
 
Jenna: 
So the website is aiforinteriordesigners.com, and the podcast is AI for Interior Designers Podcast. Tried to make it as searchable as possible. 
 
Sue: 
Well, I am going to become a new listener for sure, because I love this topic. But going back to design at its core, what's your favorite color moment? It could be in tech, outside of tech, in the world that's going on today, what are you loving? What's happening. 
 
Jenna: 
That we're getting out of the gray ages. 
 
Sue: 
For sure. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah. I love my sister-in-law, she lives across the street, but she's still stuck in the grays, and I'm like, let's add some color, let's add this. And so I'm gradually getting her there, but starting to see it at all the showrooms where they're not at high point and stuff. They're not just showing the white and the muslin and here, use your imagination. Now we're seeing it trickle into retail. We're seeing it online, and we're away from the gray everything, and people are showing personality. It's awesome. 
 
Sue: 
Yes, I think that is what 2026 is going to be about. We are definitely here for it. It's time. People are excited about design. It may be, I was just talking on a panel about the next COVID moment where everybody looked inward. There's so much chaos in the world right now. People are like, you know what? I'm just going to paint a room, or I'm going to work on something in my home, or I'm going to hire a designer and finish my kitchen. I think we're going to have this moment in time again where people are excited about design. So that's my hot take. I don't know if it's going to happen, but I believe it will- 
 
Jenna: 
I love that. 
 
Sue: 
And use AI to help you get there, everybody. It's a great, great resource. 
 
Jenna: 
And the Sherwin-Williams app. 
 
Sue: 
Yes. Oh, yeah. So what do you think about it? Talk about that. I would appreciate that. 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah. So I started using this when it came out, the Sherwin-Williams app, and I'm going to mess up the name here. Is it the color- 
 
Sue: 
It's called The Color Expert. Yep. 
 
Jenna: 
Color expert. Okay. So I upload images of either the room that I'm standing in right then, or I upload a generative image to use as inspiration, and then I pull color palettes from that with the actual paint colors. So I think this is a great app for everybody. 
 
Sue: 
It's super easy to use. We really love it. And I have not done that yet to use an AI generated image and pull color. So I'm going to try that. That's a great tip. 
 
Jenna: 
Ooh, try it. 
 
Sue: 
Yeah, that's fun. Well, Jenna, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your time. And again, go find all the resources that we talked about. Did you mention everything? Podcast and your-? 
 
Jenna: 
Yeah. Yep. Thank you. 
 
Sue: 
I cut you off with excitement. 
 
Jenna: 
No, you're good. 
 
Sue: 
All right, well thank you so much for joining us on Colormixology and everybody go check out the technology that's out there to help. It's great. 
 
Jenna: 
Thank you, Sue. Appreciate it. 
 
Sue: 
Before we talk to our next guest, we'd like to take a moment to congratulate our February designer of the month, Melissa Roberts. Melissa's work will be featured on our Sherwin-Williams Design Pro Social in February of 2025, but you can also check out her beautiful work at melissarobertsinteriors.com and @melissarobertsinteriors on Instagram. Now we welcome to the show Brandon Dorsey, a technology director at design and architecture firm, Vocon, which has an office here in Cleveland. So welcome, Brandon. We're excited to have you on Colormixology. 
 
Brandon: 
Thanks, Sue. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. 
 
Sue: 
Vocon is an amazing design firm, which we've had the privilege to work on on a large project with Sherwin-Williams. But tell me about your role because it sounds very fancy, the technology director. 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah, no problems. 
 
Sue: 
So what does that mean exactly? 
 
Brandon: 
So I get the privilege of researching all new technology that is impacting the AEC community and how we serve our clients. So you can imagine the vast amount of technology that's coming to market right now. I have a team that I work with that goes out, looks at those technologies that are coming and evaluates how those are going to impact design and how we can start to augment our design process and deliver better projects for our clients. 
 
Sue: 
That is fascinating, especially because we're going dip into AI and its impact. But how long have you been doing this? Have you been at Vocon for a bit? 
 
Brandon: 
Yes, I've been with Vocon for going on 12 years now. Went to Kent State. I've been in the industry over 20 years. I actually went for interior design and architecture, but just always had a passion for technology. So that's where my career took me. 
 
Sue: 
So how has tech impacted pre-AI? Did you see the arc? What did that look like? For those that aren't familiar. 
 
Brandon: 
It all goes back to starting with early days, working with hand drawings, going into CAD, and then a software called Revit, which is BIM technology, so building information modeling, to start to build a model in 3D and be able to use that model to understand how designs coming together. And then you have started to see technology applications that hooked onto that, which allowed us to do real-time rendering and actually start to visualize that model for our clients. With that, we are able to now start to understand early in the design process how our projects would come together and we were able to leverage that to make better design decisions. 
So the arc is interesting because it started slow, but it's exponentially been growing, especially with what we're about to talk about with AI. We're seeing a boom in technology within the AEC community and how we're starting to use these different technology platforms to expedite the project deadlines and come up with iterations and design decisions faster. So you can imagine what used to take a designer a week or two to up with different design options for the client to choose from. We're now able to iterate faster and come up with better solutions with more information at our exposure. 
 
Sue: 
I think that is the thread we really want to pull on is that these AI technology or this technology is not taking designers jobs. It's really about speed and acceleration. And that's really exciting, allowing designers to be more creative, to do the business of design in a more impactful way and the technology can take over and just make it speedier to market. So that's what I'm really excited about. But tell us your take on Vocon's position on AI now in design. 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah, so actually if you rewind about three years ago, as part of my research, we started to see this coming, right? So there's a book called the Coming Wave that I was reading by an author named Mustafa who talks about this wave of technology and one of them was AI. So back then I started to look at how we're going to leverage AI and really starting to figure out what does it take to bring AI into the workforce within Vocon in particular. So we developed an AI task force, which comprised of several people within the office, both Cleveland and New York office, designers, technical management, and actually office services and overhead, meaning our finance team, our HR team, because we wanted to get a full spectrum of how AI could impact the business. In doing so, that task force was then launched and we were assigned different aspects to explore. 
So if you can imagine the design team in the AI task force was tasked with exploring how can AI impact design. So you talk about generative design, where are tools coming to market that are going to impact how design comes together? If you talk about technical: where are tools in AI going to help leverage the technical aspect of how details come together, for example? Management, is there AI solutions out there that are going to help to augment the process of how we manage projects, how we assign team members to projects. And then overhead, HR, finance, are there technologies out there that are going to help just in the overall process of how we conduct business even within our marketing team? So you can imagine some of these tools are going to sound familiar to some of the people on the podcast today because they're now being used within organizations throughout the world. 
So when you talk about ChatGPT, you talk about Grammarly, for example. Just simple tools like that that are helping to augment the process of how we used to do our jobs are now at our fingertips and it's helping us immensely because we're actively being able to be more productive and efficient with how we're doing our work. Not to mention other softwares that are natively being integrated into the applications that we use. So we're an Office 365 house and we use Microsoft with has copilot, right? Whether you're Google or Microsoft, it doesn't matter. These enterprise solutions are starting to embed AI within their own software that you are using today. So that's how we're starting to use that. 
 
Sue: 
So many questions. We have an internal task force as well at Sherman Williams doing the same thing and evaluating the constant need of this. But I think what's overwhelming, I sit on that task force too, that's why I'm so passionate about it. But there's so many tools now and evaluating which are the right ones because they're exploding onto the marketplace. So you have to constantly audit what's coming to decide if this is right for your business. So I think at the end I'm going to ask for smaller firms that don't have such a large staff to go after this technology. We'll ask about resources or any recommendations on where people can find more information. But do you think it's fair to say that AI is going to become essential to the work that Vocon does and the designers do 
 
Brandon: 
It already is, not is it going to, it is today. We're leveraging AI on various projects to help, like I said, expedite and augment the process. It's one thing I talk about in the office is do not fear AI taking over your job. Instead, embrace it because you're going to start to leverage this even though you don't think you are today, you actually are in the tools that you're using. It's happening behind the scenes. So the more you can start to embrace it and recognize it and learn how these tools work, the better off you'll be. So to answer your question, we are leveraging it today. 
 
Sue: 
And even in really familiar software like Photoshop, there's already AI tech behind the scenes. That's awesome. And those little edits are making even your day-to-day Photoshop work so much easier. So again, I'm a fan and I love this conversation. 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah, so to that point, I just wanted to add one thing because that's an interesting software. Obviously we use Adobe Photoshop, all Adobe products, but what is done for the process of what used to take an hour or two on a rendering, to modify that rendering using Photoshop, using generative fill and AI on Photoshop is amazing because- 
 
Sue: 
It's awesome. 
 
Brandon: 
.... We can replace the sky, for example, in the background, and that used to, well that was a daunting task. So it's just helped immensely. 
 
Sue: 
And in my world, right in the color side, so this weekend had to re-render like 42 images for a project, and that would've taken a week at least, and it took me a couple of hours, it was like a half day. But the isolation tools to outline shapes like effortless and it's perfect. So anyway, this is not a commercial for Adobe Photoshop, but I will say that those tools are just getting better and better with AI technology. So if we pivot again and talk about the design and construction industry, what has AI brought to the world of BIM? Again, you said that's building information modeling. Has it changed the game there as well? 
 
Brandon: 
Oh, 100%. I mean, there's tools that we're using in our tech stack today that, when I started in this industry, we didn't have. And it made the timeline to deliver a project so much longer. For example, when you talk about early on in the process for field verification and you're talking about how we used to do a tape and measure, going out to site and having to do it, now that's all digitized. It's creating a digital twin using software like Matterport or OpenSpace, which has AI built into it, and you can send one person out to the site, do a scan of the site and then have all that data back in your office to be able to manipulate and use and share with not only your internal team but your clients. So just that alone on the field verification side early in the process has helped. 
 
Sue: 
So let me ask you about that because is there a little bit of a trust issue at the beginning when you start using these tools? Do you double check that they're accurate? I picture that field measuring tool, you scan it with some tool and it would measure the distance of a job site, right? 
 
Brandon: 
There's different cameras for it. And yes, to answer your question, we are always double checking. I mean, I say tape and measure was early. We still use tape and measure because you want that checks and balance. So we're always validating whether or not the information's right to the best of our ability. Obviously we don't have all the time in the world to double check everything, but even on their own website, they verify the accuracy within an X degree of accuracy. 
 
Sue: 
Yeah, I mean that's amazing. Remember the days when we went from GPS to Apple Maps and nobody really trusted the technology and it works. So I love that. I think there's probably a little learning curve for all of us in this technology space, but they're all opportunities. So what's your favorite AI technology that you use so far? What are you really excited about? 
 
Brandon: 
Well, I mean it depends on what task I'm trying to complete. And I say that tongue-in-cheek only because there's so many AI solutions in the market right now, and I can't say one's my favorite over the other. Depending on the task though, I could say when we're talking about just creating visualizations, we have a team dedicated, just visualization. There's so many cool tools in the market that are blowing my mind on how they're coming up with this imagery. So you talk about EvolveLAB's Veras, so Veras is a tool that sits over top of our BIM model, our Revit model that allows us with our Revit model to render out variations of what the project may look like. That didn't exist even three years ago. So just the fact that that is there is just mind-blowing. 
 
Sue: 
Can you describe how that would work? 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah, so if you can imagine, we take a project and we model it. So we model it in 3D. So we have a digital representation of what the project will look like, and there's an add-on that sits on top of Revit that allows you to prompt-based what you might want that project to look like. So you can imagine if you were to say, create me a award-winning rendering with a night effect of a building that sits on Lake Erie to produce a rendering. So I'm generalizing it, but you have to be really good at articulating design. And I actually talk about this with our junior staff and our designers and our principals. How we're going to start to use AI will really come down to how well you can articulate design. Are you good with your vernacular? Are you good with prompting? Because it's only as good as what you tell it. 
You got to imagine AI is like a small child or a junior designer in the sense that you are starting to leverage what little they know and you have to train it, you have to tell it what you want. So the LLMs, the larger language models, the more you build it, the better they'll get and you have to help assist it. So that's where the human aspect comes in because as designers and going to design school, you learned about the different key elements and what it means when you talk about creating design, whether you're going to have a honed finish versus a matte finish. Those mean things in design world and you have to be able to articulate it because the software won't know unless you tell it. 
 
Sue: 
And it'll fill in the blanks unless you tell it. And then that's where you get the wild west, right? Where you get crazy images. 
 
Brandon: 
You get the hallucinations, correct. Yes. 
 
Sue: 
Yes. Oh, it's so fun. It's fun to play around with. It's really exciting. But I think there's some ethical questions too, that we've talked about. So do your clients have any of those issues or has that come up in your conversations early on, the authenticity factor? 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah, so one thing that we try to do is over communicate, over communicate when we're using AI so that the client knows that we're using it on a project. Part of my responsibility on the task force was we created an AI governance policy within the firm, which really helped to articulate how we're using AI, where we can use AI more importantly, where we cannot use AI, how we need to talk to our clients, where are those ethical issues, where are those biases? So it really outlined to our staff what AI is to Vocon and how we should be using it and using it in a way that is productive and not harmful to the project or the client's vision. 
 
Sue: 
Then do you have to evaluate things or do you trust the team as like- 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah, so that's part of the process. We talked about checks and balance within using AI. We should be, at the end, validating whether or not that design was accurate to what we prompted it. One example I give is interesting within the design tool that we use, it sometimes has a bias to swap out male versus female. And when I say swap out, not even swap out, it merges them together. So you get this weird form of a human and we know that's not right. So what do we need to do? We need to go back in to Photoshop and correct that because we don't want to put to market something that is not accurate and that's the importance of that checks and balance. 
 
Sue: 
Yeah, that's great. And again, so it's about playing around with the tools, understanding their capabilities, trying new things, and then editing. The human side of this is what's really important and that's what makes it a powerful tool, but just a tool, it's not going to take over the world. 
 
Brandon: 
Correct. Today they're just tools. Now I will say as AI gets exponentially better, like I keep talking about, you're going to need to be able to have different roles within your firm. And we talk about this. What is the makeup of your staff today? You may need to have somebody on your staff that is responsible for AI governancy. It's a reality that maybe some aren't ready to face, but it is coming. The jobs and how we do them today are going to shift and we need to be ready and start to train our staff to understand what they used to do may not be what they're going to be doing in the future. 
 
Sue: 
Yes. Well, and that's a whole other conversation and you've been very generous with your time, so we will talk about that another time. But talk about some of your favorite resources where people that are just dipping their toe, smaller firms starting to learn about AI, how can they get started? 
 
Brandon: 
So I can share afterwards or provide you with that information, but there is a couple of people that I love to follow on LinkedIn, on social media, YouTube, et cetera, that actually focus particularly on AI in the AEC industry. And this gentleman that I'm referring to has an amazing amount of resources at your disposal to go and look at, where he puts together the top 100 tools in the market that you can start to explore. Because like I mentioned, there's over 300 applications that you could start to look at some of the... At the very top there I would start to explore, is just within your own ecosystem, whether you're a Google house or a Microsoft house, how can you start to leverage Copilot for example? You already are paying for that's part of your subscription, maybe invest some time and energy into evaluating what could Copilot do for you? Others that are free? You can look at ChatGPT. 
Now, I will caution what we do for Vocon is make sure if you're going to use it, you're not using client information within the products. If you're going to make sure you're on an enterprise solution. Enterprise solution basically protects you behind the curtain from your information being put into a large language model for the rest of the world to use. So understanding when and how you're going to use those applications is very vital, but there are free applications that you can at least start to explore on the surface and understand how they might be leveraged within your office. 
 
Sue: 
So Brandon, tell me about this resource hub that you had talked about. You could just mention the website and then we'll put it in our show notes. 
 
Brandon: 
So the website is aiinaec.com. The gentleman does an amazing job at documenting all the various tools within the AEC community. And he even takes it a step further where you can filter by specific types of AI that you're looking for, whether it's AI related, it's just design or management or technical. He does a great job at creating that list for us. 
 
Sue: 
That's wonderful. And it looks like he's got his own website and then he is on LinkedIn too, so you can find him in both ways. So very cool. Yeah, that's a great place for people to start. So we're going to close here, but tell me about what is most exciting for you looking forward in five years? Where do you see technology taking us that maybe we're not, just blue sky thinking? 
 
Brandon: 
Yeah. Well, I mean can't predict the future, but I will say one of the things that I'm really excited about is the evolution of not only where AI is going, but all these various technologies that are coming to market and how we're going to start to leverage them. And when I say various technologies, you got to think about robotics, you got to think about autonomy, all these other things that are coming that are going to start to impact within the AEC community. I'm talking how we augment our jobs today and what does that mean for the actual workforce. So AI is one aspect, but there's so many more technologies that are coming. You talk about quantum computing, I mean that's just starting to scratch the surface of technology that's coming. So how we're going to start to leverage these technologies is going to be so important for not only our projects but our careers. 
 
Sue: 
And I think AI is going to be the tool, the human assist that can help with that enormous amounts of data that a human mind would really be hard for us to process that. That's where AI can help. 
 
Brandon: 
And I mean that's where you're starting to see a terminology called AI agents coming to market. Those are your AI assists where it's not a human that you're interacting with. It truly is the computer, but don't be feared by that. 
 
Sue: 
Right? I want that so much. 
 
Brandon: 
I mean, imagine if we could all have our own personal assistant. 
 
Sue: 
Totally. 
 
Brandon: 
How awesome would that be? You can start to offload- 
 
Sue: 
Tony Stark- 
 
Brandon: 
These tasks. 
 
Sue: 
Jarvis, I want it. I want it so much. I know it'll happen. 
 
Brandon: 
Biggest message I could leave is don't fear technology. Learn to embrace it because that's been our journey as humans. We have evolved technologically throughout the evolution of our existence and this is just the next journey. 
 
Sue: 
Brandon, mic drop moment. We're going to quote it here. You've been an awesome guest. I very much appreciate it. Thank you for your time. Any other closing thoughts or just I think it's don't fear. Don't fear the tech. It's here to help. 
 
Brandon: 
Don't fear technology. And I appreciate you having me on. I love talking technology. I could go on and on. 
 
Sue: 
Me too.