Using AI to supercharge creativity with Ami Nigam

“For Benoy, AI isn’t about replacing creativity — it’s about unleashing it”

We believe AI aligns very naturally with our ethos and identity as a leading data-driven design company. For us, AI is about the meeting of design and data through the lens of technology. It’s about leveraging new tools to make us more innovative and productive, and developing our own tools to enhance design processes and outputs across our teams globally. 

There are essentially two sides to our approach to AI. Firstly, we want to use AI to improve things internally – for example, sharpening our risk analysis, enabling a deeper focus on client’s needs and aspirations when responding to bids and RFPs, and building virtual assistance to support our policies and procedures. Secondly, we’re looking at how AI can strengthen our client-facing solutions through enhanced idea generation, conceptualisation, research and design development. By empowering us to design smarter, iterate more and boost our creativity and decision-making, AI can help Benoy deliver even better design products to clients.

AI tools allow our design teams to develop visual concepts in a much more agile and efficient way, freeing up our designers to be ever more thoughtful and creative. Likewise, AI is enabling us to communicate our design ideas more effectively, with tools that, for example, can easily convert static images into video, or daytime scenes into night. 

AI is also key for sustainability. Using certain AI tools, we can understand the differences in temperature inside and outside a building, or analyse prevailing wind flows. These insights might then inform the aspect ratios of a courtyard in the Middle East, or determine the height of external walls, or guide a passive cooling strategy. Just a few years ago, this kind of environmental analysis required high-end computing and niche expertise to arrive at these conclusions. But now, making sustainable design analyses is much easier, faster and more democratic. 

“AI brings climate-conscious design out of the lab and into everyday practice.”

We use publicly available AI packages, such as Stable Diffusion, which we tweak and customise to align more closely with our inhouse design style and language. We’re also creating our own proprietary tools, which we’re implementing through standard AI software. For example, we’ve created an AI base model that’s trained on our internal thinking and on the design styles and sketching techniques of individual Benoy architects. When we feed this model new ideas or keywords, it converts these prompts into an image, in a specified design style, in about 10-to-15 seconds. To go from prompt to stylised sketch in such a short space of time, generating in seconds an image that would previously have taken several hours to create, is a really powerful innovation – a fundamental shift in how we work. 

So, we’re using standard, open-source tools, but not in their original form or out-of-the-box functionality. We’re modulating these tools to generate our own AI models, which hold huge potential for the business. Currently, I’d say we’re still in the R&D phase, somewhere between integration and development. But the progress we’re making is really exciting. 

Using AI software, our design teams are able to validate their ideas much faster. With the models we’ve created, they’re able to assess whether they’re meeting key criteria within a client brief. Are we meeting the brief? Where are we exceeding or falling short? Have we delivered against core metrics and KPIs? The speed with which our teams can now answer these questions is transformational, giving them confidence in their design decisions. 

Through the bespoke tooling we’ve started to build, we’re also developing assistance programmes to support report writing, modelling and workflows. And we’re looking at synthesising the data that exists across the company, particularly that which sits with our Strategy team. The aim is to bring this data (market trends, commercial analysis, geospatial information) to our design teams in much more meaningful ways. We have 75+ years of business and 15 – 20 years of data at our disposal; helping our teams leverage the insights this data can provide will supercharge their research and design capabilities. 

Ultimately, the improvements in speed, efficiency and precision we achieve through AI means we’re buying more time for our design teams. If we can deploy AI to tackle time-consuming tasks like image texturing or rendering, we free up our designers to really explore the solution space – to be more creative and strategic and productive. 

Firstly, it’s important to be clear: our use of AI doesn’t mean we’re providing AI-generated design for clients. The value isn’t in simply generating designs with AI, but in how AI expands our strategic thinking and accelerates sustainable design, which in turn leads to better solutions for clients. 

Benoy is working with AI to leverage our work and datasets to drive enhanced project outcomes. At the same time, we’re using AI to create improved client engagement tools. These tools will enable us to partner with clients seamlessly and bring them into the design process as we’re developing our creative options. And through earlier client engagement and involvement, there should be less reworking and revisions further down the line.

What’s more, instead of limiting ourselves to three or four early options, with AI we’ll be able to look at 20 or 30. And we’ll be able to assess their feasibility, accurately and quickly, to ensure we maximise the creative and commercial impact of our work. Ultimately, these developments mean clients will benefit from more refined end-products with more iterative exploration, thinking, data and innovation behind them.