FULL EPISODE LINK: S3:E8 Artificial Intelligence in Design
Last week, three different customers walked into the store with the same thing on their phone.
A photo of a room. Their room, sort of. The room they wanted. Generated by AI.
Each one held it out the same way you'd show someone a wedding ring. Look what I made. What do you think?
And the honest first answer, every time, was: oh, that's pretty good. Because it is. AI makes a beautiful picture. The lighting is dreamy. The colors are coordinated. There are throw pillows that match the rug in that pleasing not-too-matchy way that takes most people years to figure out.
But then the second answer comes, the one that only shows up when you start looking at the actual nuts and bolts of the picture. The sofa is the wrong scale for the room she described. The coffee table the AI picked would block the path her kids cut through every morning. The "open shelving" she's swooning over would be a cluttered nightmare in real life because her two kids and a labrador live in that house. The whole image is pretty, but it's not hers, and the more you look at it, the more obvious it becomes that the AI doesn't know her.
It doesn't know her family. It doesn't know her habits. It doesn't know the way she actually lives in that room at 7am with a coffee and at 9pm with a glass of wine.
And that, three times in one week, is everything you need to know about AI in your home.
AI has read every book in the world. It has never walked into your kitchen.
This is the post I want every woman building a home to read once and then go on with her week, no longer worried she's missing the boat. Because here's the truth about AI and your home, which I'm going to walk you through over the next ten minutes: AI is a useful tool. It is not the enemy. It is also not the answer. And the women who use it well in the next few years are going to be the ones who understand the one rule that those three customers were about to learn the hard way: your house is yours to design, and no machine that has never stood in your living room gets to make that call for you.
Let's go! Listen to our full podcast about this here -> S3:E8 Artificial Intelligence in Design
AI is an intern who's read every book ... and that's exactly the problem
Here's what I want you to picture.
You hired an intern this morning. Day one. You sit her down at the desk and you ask her what she knows about interior design, and her answer absolutely floors you. She's read every book ever written on the subject. Every magazine. Every blog. Every product description. She knows the entire history of the Eames chair. She can quote the Pantone color of the year going back to 2000. She can recite the rules of color theory in her sleep.
You think: okay. This intern is going to be incredible.
Then you ask her to help you finish styling your living room and she suggests a sectional that's two feet too long for your space, a $4,000 coffee table for a room your toddler treats like a trampoline, and an "open shelving moment" that would require you to keep your kitchen counters perfectly styled at all times, which, ma'am, you have a life.
She means well. She knows everything. But she has never been in your house, she has never met your toddler, she has never seen what your light does at 4pm in November, and so she's giving you advice that's technically informed and practically useless.
That is what AI is.
Read this part twice if you need to: AI is the smartest intern you will ever hire, and it has the worst judgment of anyone you'll ever work with, and both of those things are true at the same time. That contradiction is the entire game. It can recall anything. It can decide nothing. It will hand you a confident answer to a question it doesn't actually understand, and if you take that answer at face value, you're going to end up with a home that looks like someone else's idea of beautiful.
So the mental shift you need to make, right now, before you ever open ChatGPT or Claude or any of the others, is this: stop expecting AI to design your house. You wouldn't want it to, even if it could. Start expecting it to help you think faster about your house. Then check its work. Every single time.
The intern is brilliant. The intern is fast. The intern has never been in your kitchen. Don't ever forget that last part.
Listen to our full podcast about this here -> S3:E8 Artificial Intelligence in Design
Where AI actually earns its keep ... the parts of your life that look like a pile
Open your Pinterest right now.
How many images are on your "home" board? Be honest. Two hundred? Six hundred? Mine has somewhere north of a thousand and I am, allegedly, a professional. Half of them are wedding tablescapes I saved in 2022 for a wedding that already happened. A quarter of them are pinned with the description "love this" and zero indication of why I loved it. There are seven different shades of cream in there and I could not tell you which one I actually want my walls to be.
This is the part of your home life that AI was made for.
Here's the pattern, the only one you really need: AI is brilliant at the parts of your life that look like a pile. Hand it the pile. Keep the room.
A pile of 437 Pinterest images that you don't have time to sort by hand? AI can pull the color palette out of all of them in under a minute and hand you back a clean five-shade lineup that's actually you, not aspirational-you, not 2019-you, now-you. A pile of fifteen paint chips you've narrowed it down to and can't tell apart anymore because they're starting to blur into one giant beige blob? AI can lay out the undertone differences side by side in a way your tired eye can finally see. A pile of six different emails, three text screenshots, and a Google doc your sister-in-law sent you about her wedding next May? AI can turn that into one clean planning page in the time it takes you to brew a coffee.
Anything that's a pile. Anything that's a pattern hidden in too much information. Anything that involves taking notes across more pages than your brain wants to hold. That's the work. Hand it over.
What you do not hand over: the call. AI doesn't get to tell you which of the five paint colors goes on your wall. It can show you the differences. You decide. AI doesn't get to tell you which of the 437 Pinterest images actually represents your taste. It can summarize the pattern. You decide. The pile is its job. The room is yours.
Here's the screenshot-this-and-send-it-to-your-best-friend version of this whole section, since I know that's what some of you came for:
Hand AI the research. Keep the room.
That's it. That's the whole framework. Tape it to your laptop.
Listen to our full podcast about this here -> S3:E8 Artificial Intelligence in Design
Where AI falls apart ... and where you become irreplaceable
A friend of mine had a customer come in last week with an AI-generated living room design. The image was beautiful. There was a long curving sectional facing a fireplace, a coffee table styled within an inch of its life, art on the walls, the whole nine yards.
The customer's actual living room was twelve feet wide.
That sectional in the AI image was, in real life, going to be sixteen feet long. You would not have been able to walk around it. You would have had to climb over it to get to the fireplace. The image was beautiful and the room it depicted did not exist and could not exist in the space the customer actually had.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it's a useful failure. The AI wasn't bad at its job. It was missing the information that only a human in that house could have. It didn't know the room was twelve feet wide. It didn't know there was a doorway on the left wall. It didn't know the fireplace mantel was actually 38 inches off the floor and not the 52 the image was showing. And there is no version of this technology in any timeline where a computer is going to know all of that about your specific room without you telling it, in detail, every single time. At which point you've done most of the work yourself anyway.
So here, in plain language, are the things AI will never know about your home:
AI doesn't know your light. It doesn't know that your kitchen window faces east and the morning sun bleaches everything on the left side of the counter by August. It doesn't know that the corner where you wanted a moody dark armchair is actually the only spot in the room that gets real afternoon light and putting a dark chair there is going to make the whole room feel like a cave.
AI doesn't know your traffic flow. It doesn't know that your kids cut diagonally through the dining room every morning to get to the back door because that's the way they've always gone, and no rug you place there is going to survive their cleats for more than a season.
AI doesn't know your scale. It will give you a "design" with a coffee table the size of a stamp next to a sectional the size of a Volvo because it has no actual physical sense of how a room is supposed to feel when you walk into it.
AI doesn't know your life. This is the big one. It doesn't know that your cat sleeps on the back of the sofa every night and any fabric you pick has to survive that. It doesn't know that your husband works from home now and the corner you were going to "leave open for breathing room" is the only spot in the house where his desk is going to fit. It doesn't know that you cry at the dining room table sometimes and you need it to feel safe, not impressive.
It doesn't know any of that. You know all of that. And what's about to happen, in the next two or three years, is this: a whole lot of women are going to use AI to make their homes worse. They're going to outsource the actual work of figuring out what they want, the slow, annoying, sit-on-the-floor-of-the-room-and-think-about-it work, to a machine that has never been in that room. And then they're going to wonder why their finished house feels like a stranger lives in it.
The good news is that you don't have to be one of them.
A pretty picture of your home is not your home. It's a picture. Your home is what happens when you, the woman who knows the light and the traffic flow and the cat and the husband and the kids and what it feels like to cry at the dining room table, make a hundred small decisions that an algorithm could not have made for you.
That is not a limitation of AI. That is the entire point of you.
Listen to our full podcast about this here -> S3:E8 Artificial Intelligence in Design
The bottom line
I want you to come away from this post with one thing.
Use AI. Try it. Hand it the piles. Let it save you the hours you used to spend sorting paint chips and Pinterest boards and wedding logistics. It's a brilliant intern and you should put it to work.
But the call, the one about your sofa, your paint, your stems on your mantel, the way your dining room is going to feel on Thanksgiving morning when your mother walks in the door, that call is yours. It was always yours. It still is.
Your house. Your eye. Your life. Your call.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AI going to replace interior designers?
No. AI is excellent at sorting information and generating inspiration, but it can't see your specific light, traffic flow, family rhythm, or the way you actually use a space. Designers who understand those things, and the clients who hire them, aren't going anywhere. AI will likely create new design-adjacent roles, but it's not a replacement for human judgment in a real room.
Can I trust an AI-generated room design?
Trust it as a first draft, not a final answer. AI can show you a beautiful image, but it doesn't know your scale, your climate, or your life. Use the image for inspiration and direction, then bring it to a designer (or your own well-trained eye) for the real decisions.
What are the best ways to actually use AI for home decor?
The jobs AI does well are the ones that involve sorting through a lot of information fast. Use it to pull color palettes from your Pinterest boards, compare paint undertones across a long list of options, summarize product reviews when you're choosing between options, plan a tablescape that doesn't repeat last year, or organize wedding and event details into one document. Hand it the research; keep the design decisions for yourself.
Is AI bad for the environment?
It has a real cost. Large data centers consume significant electricity and water. Some use millions of gallons of water per day to cool the chips. "Free" AI tools aren't free in that sense. The takeaway isn't to never use AI; it's to use it intentionally on jobs that actually save you meaningful time, rather than asking it every passing question.
I'm not tech-savvy. Is AI too complicated for me to use for my home?
No. If you can type a question into Google, you can use AI. Start with one specific task, like "give me a color palette from these five Pinterest images," and see if it saves you time. If it does, try another small task. You don't need to learn the whole system. You just need to learn which jobs are worth handing over.
