AI and the Future of Interior Design (Douglas Robb)

Welcome to the Creative Genius podcast, Doug. I’d love for you to just tell us a little bit about yourself and your business. Thanks, Gail. Interior Design Her. It really came about during like the darkest days of COVID when we were all locked up at home and I was helping to homeschool my kindergartener and realizing how amazing teachers are. But what happened was,

About six months before then, I had sold the second of my fitness businesses. I’d had a real life and an online. And I’d sold the second one. I was kind of at loose ends. I’d been working since I’d been 14. This is the first time I’d been without a job of some sort. And other than, like I said, homeschooling my daughter, I got to watch a lot of Netflix and listen to my wife run her residential design business.

from home on the phone. And going back to selling my businesses, the only reason I was ever able to do that was because I had systems set up that at that point, I was irrelevant to the business. People or automations or software did everything. you know, I stuck around for three months when I sold the business to the new owner.

just to kind of help ease them into it. But I really wasn’t necessary. And I realized that my wife, with her design business, she will never be able to sell it. It won’t happen because she’s everything. She’s the creative, she’s human resources, she’s everything. So because I love being married to my wife, I very gently suggested that maybe we could look at pulling those processes out of her brain.

and putting them down on paper and then eventually building that up into something more self-sufficient. And that’s what we did. And that led to us talking to other friends of hers, other designer friends of hers and helping them with that. And then that led to why don’t we do this on kind of a broader scale? And it’s not that I’m an expert on systems by any means.

or running a business by any means, I’ve bought and sold a couple of companies. But I understand that.

designers do a lot. They wear a lot of hats beyond the design side of it. It’s the business side of it. And design school never taught anyone how to run a business. I mean, I guess that’s why you exist, right? Exactly. You fill that gap in the industry and help designers create a better business. So that was my idea for interior designer to create a low cost or no cost business education resource.

for residential interior designers with a soft spot for solo designers and like tiny micro team designers. So that’s where interior designer came from. I got it. Well, that’s great. And of course, isn’t that all is the case every time you build a business is because you see a need in the market or something that’s missing in your own life or your own business. And it just leads you to the direction of developing something that hopefully other people will want to buy. Yeah.

So you’re also a podcaster. So what led you to starting your podcasts? It wasn’t a natural thing. It came about because of Interior Designer, but part of how I started putting my website together and the concept for Interior Designer was listening to podcasts, listening to interior design business podcasts like yours, like Luanne Negara’s and…

You know, I found out pretty quickly that some were amazing and some were less than amazing. And it was the less than amazing ones that gave me the confidence to say, okay, I think I could do it at least that good or bad. So I dove in. are your goals for the podcast? to, to educate. Right.

across the board. that’s fantastic. If anybody gets something from it, I’m happy. But if I can also redirect them back to the website and to all the other content that we’re building out on interiordesigner.com and improve their business. And that could be stuff that we’re building. I’m building different kind of low cost barrier to entry tools, but I also want to…

kind of create a hub where designers can feel comfortable knowing that they can come to the site, find things that they need. And if I can’t provide it, then I can direct them to somebody who can. And that could be a business coach. That could be someone who creates, I did a podcast. It just came out the other day with a lawyer who designs templates for interior designers exclusively.

And I know there’s a lot of templates out there already, but not many of them are created by someone like this who is a lawyer and focuses exclusively on this aspect of the law, contract law for designers. I’m like, you know, instead of using some DIY thing or asking chat GPT, you know, what should I put in my, in my contracts? You go to, to a lawyer who does this every day and is constantly updating.

her templates because she’s working with other designers and they’re finding new ways to make your company bulletproof from a litigious homeowner. Good luck on that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It’s kind of funny because we teach contract sessions to our team or to our clients. And what I find is that no matter how much you think you can prevent

some of those problems, you’re always going to have something else that pops up that you just didn’t anticipate. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s constant. So just out of curiosity, do you think designers should have podcasts? And if so, why? Oh, 100%. And nothing like what you do or what I do or Luanne does. What they should do without a doubt is start up a hyper local

interior design podcast about their town, their town, their city, their neighborhood, wherever. Like, I mean, if you live in New York City and there’s 10 million people, then maybe you make it even more local to like your borough of the town. Interior design is such a local business, right? Like to the point of almost for some designers, it being like the neighborhood they live in, right?

And if you become that person, they hear your voice, right? And you’re interviewing trades, you’re interviewing contractors, you’re interviewing other designers, you’re interviewing retail establishments. They keep hearing your name. Well, geez. When it’s their turn to go looking for an interior designer and you’re the name that keeps popping up all over the place and where you live, like, and it’s free.

It’s free. You don’t have to pay for this. It’s crazy. Well, it’s a great way to advertise. And I think the nice part about it is it allows people to get to know you as a person before they actually make the phone call or reach out to you by email. And I think today it’s really incredibly important to stand out. And right now, not everybody has a podcast. So that’s certainly one way you can stand out from your competitors. Yeah. It’s definitely not a saturated market.

Yeah. Definitely not. So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about a hot topic for today, which is AI. And I’d like to spend some time talking about how it can be used in the interior design business and maybe just a little bit of your history with it. When did you start using AI? Like most people when chat GPT

came on the scene and like suddenly exploded and everybody was using it or, or Dolly, everybody was playing with like, you know, creating these weird images. I started playing with it and I started having conversations with friends who are way more nerdy than I am. And I said, like, this all looks really cool. And I said, but like, if I wanted to apply AI to a business, you know, how am I?

What am I going to do with it now? And to a person, the people that I trust that understand what AI is and how it can be used or will be used, they said, okay, everything we’re doing right now is like going back to the dial up days of internet. Like we are at the starting line of starting lines.

I would say, I mean, I use, probably play around with 20 different tools at any one time, chat GPT, Claude.ai, Dolly, let me think what else, perplexity, Gemini, Google has a fantastic new image generator and it’s also free. And so I’m using those all the time now, but.

It’s at this point, it’s still more of an education process of for me to learn how to use this tool correctly. It’s like somebody just handed a six year old a hammer and asked them to go build a house. The tool is there, but we don’t know how to use it yet. And that’s where I am kind of in that stage. I consider myself an enthusiast. I’m trying to learn things and yeah, I’m no expert yet. That’s for sure.

Well, it takes some time, but you know, honestly, all of us have been using AI for probably at least 10 years. We just didn’t necessarily identify it that way. Cause we have Alexa, we have Siri on our phones. have maybe chat bots that are talking to us on websites. So we’ve been using it. We just didn’t necessarily identify that that’s what we were doing. Yep. Good point. It’s a tool. It’s a tool.

It is a tool and it does make things easier. I use it every single day. have my favorite, which I’ll share. It’s called granola and it is for Apple computers. So I turn that on every single time I have a phone call today and it summarizes my notes, which is great because I can take notes at the same time. And then when the call’s over, it’ll just pop in all of the summary of everything that needs to be done and puts it into more complete sentences, which is a.

great little tool. Yeah. And in the coming months, that tool will end up being, when, conversation you’ve had, the AI will recognize who you had that conversation with, right? Send them the notes that they need to see, possibly send a note to one of your employees that needs to take action on this conversation you just had, and you will do none of it. It will just, boop, do it.

I love that. can’t wait. No kidding, right? Yes, absolutely. Especially because we as owners of businesses, we’re so busy and we have so many things that we’re doing and doing those admin things that’s not a good use of our time. So if we can automate and use AI to do that, why not? Yeah, for sure. How do you see AI being used by designers in the future? Currently, designers are using it for design concepts.

Right mid journey. Give me a room that looks like X, Y, and Z. That will continue and that will get better as as we learn how to prompt the AI better. Those images will improve design presentations. Imagine so now we’re combining AI with like augmented virtual reality stuff. Imagine going to a client’s home you’ve you’ve put together.

a design package and in addition to the physical design package, they slip on a pair of glasses like yours. And now, in addition to being able to see through those glasses and see their existing living room, they can see your design concept laid down on top of that. Right. How much better will that be for them to understand the design that you’re trying to present to them and get them to buy into?

or all the back of the house features of running a business that nobody really, well, most people don’t want to do, right? Imagine all of that stuff being partially or fully automated with AI or like you said about your meetings being transcribed and recorded or, oh, how about this? We go to a job site, it’s demo day, right? You go in wearing a,

GoPro style camera, right? Or it’s on your hat or something where it’s showing like a 360 degree and every image is captured on video and still, and then that automatically gets turned into social media posts and content for your website. And you don’t have to do any of that. I mean, this may be five years down the road. It may be longer than that even, but that is what AI is gonna end up doing for us.

taking away all these jobs that we don’t wanna do. Right. Yeah. Well, and the nice part about that is that it takes some of the tasks that are tedious and time consuming and allows us to have more time to be creative. Right. Yeah. And not just creative, but the time with our clients, right? Where we now have more time to sit down and draw out of them.

all of the dreams they have for their home that maybe they can’t articulate. And maybe you didn’t in the past have time to do that, but now you can sit and have these discussions and you’re creating better designs as a result because you understand really what they want and what they need. And, but because you’re not having to do a lot of the drudgery that we have to do today for our business, it freezes up to be more creative, to be more.

human, I guess, for lack of a better word. of being, I think machines, I think sometimes as designers we’re machines and we are constantly just working, working, working. And if we can free ourselves up from some of those working things to doing these fun things that we enjoy doing, and that’s really our gift. That’s where we provide value to the client. Yeah. And, and feel better. mean, like

going back to the COVID days when, you know, I would overhear, listen to my wife’s conversations with her clients and, you know, she’s painting a picture of what she wants to do. And not only is it coming to life in their heads, but like there’s me sitting on the couch eavesdropping, okay, I get it. I get what you’re saying, right? And it’s a pretty cool thing. Like, I mean, it’s a cool job interior designers have. I mean, there’s, yeah.

It’s a hard job too, which people underestimate how hard it is. Yeah. Well, this is really interesting. We just did our industry survey. We do it every year. And it was so interesting to me that hardly any designers answered questions about AI. And we had, oh, over 1100 people take the survey and it was just maybe 150 people. So maybe a little over 10%. Why do you think they didn’t want to answer questions about AI?

Do think they’re afraid of it?

I don’t think fear is the right word. uncertainty, uncertainty, because I mean, I think people are excited about AI and most people have played with it and maybe not got the output that they thought they were gonna get. It’s not as simple. mean, if we look at how we use the internet today, right? We have browsers, we have apps.

We have tools that make our experience simple from our side of the equation. AI is not there yet. It requires our input almost like we’re kind of halfway between being a coder type person and who we are today in how we use the internet. We’re being asked to do more and we haven’t been trained how to do that properly.

I put together, well, not just me, I mean, me and a couple of much nerdier people and I put together a guidebook on how to do prompts for interior designers. So it’s not specifically just for image design, but it’s for any kind of prompt. And it goes through all of the different things you need to take into account to come up with a successful prompt to the AI. And if you’re gonna ask laypeople,

to do that, I think uncertainty is fair. I think that’s to be expected. Okay. How would you suggest that the listeners get over their uncertainty about AI? Start playing with it. With no expectations. Don’t do it on your own. Instead of using, instead of next time you have to think of something or you’ve got a question, don’t ask Alexa. Don’t go on Google.

Go on chat GPT, go on Claude.ai, go on Perplexity, go on to Gemini, go on to one of the AIs and the free options are fine for that. You don’t have to pay any money and just start having a conversation. All right. And see where that takes you. Create some images, play with different things. I definitely, I mean, it’s a little self-serving, but I would say definitely get my, the guidebook on prompt engineering for designers and

take a quick flip through that and start, you’ll start being able to ask it more intelligent questions, more specific questions. And then once you start feeling comfortable with it, then you can think about maybe using it in your business. that could be something as simple, say someone, a designer has a blog on their website and they’ve been told, you know, you’ve got to start creating content if you want people to find you on Google.

Well, use a chatbot to start creating that content. And I don’t mean, you know, say, hey, chat GBT, you know, give me a blog article about this because it’s gonna be terrible. But you could ask it things like, you describe your business, what you do, who your ideal clients are, and what you wanna do for them and say, I need to create content for this avatar.

and then start having a conversation. It’ll spit out a bunch of suggestions and they’re probably going to be terrible. And then we start fine tuning it. You come back and little things like, you know, when you send a prompt, when I send a prompt to Claude, I always say, you know, please ask me clarifying questions until you are 95 % sure that we are going to have an effective answer to my question. And suddenly it asks me half a dozen different questions.

and I answer them, which then quite frequently now leads to me thinking, I should have done this or this, and then I’ll ask it more questions. And I’m 10 minutes down the rabbit hole before I’ve got an answer to my initial query. But the response is infinitely better. And you’ve probably saved yourself hours of time researching and doing this on your own. Yeah, right. Especially if you want to put out original content, right? Sure. Like we talked about doing a local podcast,

a designer’s blog should also be local. I mean, you should be writing about what homeowners in your city have access to. And you can talk to the chat bot about that as well and make everything very specific. And then you have to turn the text that they give you and make it sound like yourself, which is the trickiest part right now because, you know,

People have all sorts of ideas to how do you make an AI sound more human? It’s like, well, I don’t think anybody has that answer yet, really. Well, you can’t actually say I want it to sound like Gale Dobie or Douglas Robb. And so you can ask it to do that and it will pick things up because it does learn. Yeah. And if I did, so if I wanted to write, if I, okay, how about this for my next podcast, I want to,

do an interview podcast in the style of Gale Doby. So what I’m gonna do then is grab the transcripts of your past five interviews that you did for the podcast. I’m gonna feed it into the AI and I’m gonna say, okay, using these five pieces of content and then I’m gonna ask this question about like how to come up with a podcast, I’m gonna interview this person and I wanna do it in the style of Gale Doby, give me all of the questions I need to ask. It’ll analyze.

It’ll analyze your podcast and pretend it’s you. Love it. Yep. Geez, I don’t have to do it anymore. Seriously, right? No, it’s so funny. But I actually do enjoy podcasting. It’s fun because we end up going down different rabbit holes that we didn’t think we were going to talk about. So we’ll see where we go here today. How do you think AI will transform the design industry? Looking ahead five years, what do you think will happen? I think everything on

business side of the business is going to be able to operate faster, cheaper, better, more efficiently. But I think it’s not going to do, it’s not going to replace creativity. It’s not going to replace relationships. And that’s relationship with your client, relationship with your suppliers. And it’s not going to replace

the level of caring that a good designer needs to create truly amazing work. Yeah, that’s great. Well, that’s actually what most of us enjoy the most is the relationship piece and the creativity. So that’s a good thing for all of us. What has AI done for your business so far? For the…

For my wife’s design company, right now, just design concepts. But what I’m excited about for that is a lot of designers use different kinds of business platforms, right? Whether it’s a interior design specific platform or using some other customer relationship management software, AI is going to become part of that.

And I know, and I can’t talk about it yet, I’ve been sworn to secrecy of a business platform that is reworking their entire code base to use AI, but not in a chat GPT way where it scrapes the entire internet and tries to come up with better solutions, but where it is trained on

your business data for the most part and to a lesser extent the data of other business owners who use that platform and then start making suggestions and then start doing things that will help your business in a very non-generic manner. That could be something like, imagine if a designer

could feed all of their design concepts, all of their architectural drawings into an AI that could analyze those and possibly analyze drawings of other designers. And then when you meet with a new client, it already has a few suggestions for you, but not suggestions based on, like right now there’s a bunch of different softwares.

AI driven that are marketed towards the homeowner, more the DIY homeowner. And we’ll give you a room layout for your, you you want to spruce up your kitchen. It’ll say, okay, here’s what we do. So you’ll feed in some measurements. It’ll come back with a plan. And without a doubt, it’s going to be horrible. And in the same way that mid-journey, if we ask it the same question, it’s going to return a horrible looking

image. But if it’s been trained on your drawings, on your images, it’s kind of like that saying garbage in, garbage out, or feeding it very specific information, you’re going to get a much more detailed, much more effective response from the AI. I think that’s going to be a huge thing for designers.

For my business, for Interior Design Her, AI is all about, for me, creating content. And for me, learning about AI, because it’s going to be such a huge part. mean, the more I can know, the better I can be as a resource for designers. And to work out ideas in my own head, right? I sit there and I have conversations with it. you know, it’s…

And it’s getting better at learning from me, from what I’ve been feeding it, right? Its responses are better. It keeps getting better and better just a few months in. Yeah, it’s really fun to see where it goes. And I keep playing with it. I have a lot of work to do on that. When I go on sabbatical this year, fourth sabbatical, that’s my focus is AI, really learning more about AI and how we can use it in our business. Yeah.

Well, we always like to end our podcast with three takeaways that you would like to share with designers. And I’d like for you to maybe think for a second about what we’ve talked about today and share three different points you’d like to get across. Number one, interior designers do not receive a business education. And it’s kind of a unique industry in that it is dominated by

small, small, teeny tiny little businesses. And we don’t have MBAs that can run the backend of our company for the most part. So we end up doing everything. Designers end up doing everything. That’s why I’m trying to build interior design here. And that’s why you do what you do. number one, business education has to be important if you want to have a successful interior design business. Two,

AI is going to change the interior design industry. It’s not a question if it’s a question when. it’s creatives. mean, you know, I’m kind of looking into a crystal ball here and maybe I’m going to be completely wrong. But I think creatives are uniquely situated to like succeed fantastically with AI.

Everybody, when AI first was getting talked about and robots were getting talked about, was saying jobs that were going to go were like the low income jobs where people working at McDonald’s, everything’s going to be robots. And then coders are freaking out now because these chatbots are like being able to crank out decent computer code already. I mean, but creatives, artists.

And I would lump interior designers in that bucket. Like the images, the best images that they can do right now still require an input that the lay person can’t do. So I think creatives are uniquely situated to thrive in a world where AI, you know, becomes our business confidence. And third thing I’d say, let’s go back to the podcast. Like interior design is such a local business, podcasting,

Low barrier to entry, zero cost. You don’t have to do video. If all you want to do is audio, that’s fine. And it can be phone calls. can be going to the local custom furniture builder and having a 20 minute chat with your iPhone recording the conversation. Build your name up in your local area by using a podcast. So much better than

Instagram, so much better than paying somebody to flog your business on Google. Like, it’s free and I mean, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Well, it’s been a delight having you on Douglas and I wish you and your wife great success and thank you so much for sharing your insights today. I’m sure everybody’s going to enjoy this and going to go play with AI. Fantastic. Thanks, Gail.