The rise and development of artificial intelligence entails a significant opportunity for the built environment industries, from real estate development, down to construction, manufacturing and design. Yet its adoption is also a challenge for multiple firms, which try to stay competitive and minimize risk as they navigate this transformation, redesigning their creative and production processes as well as their culture and strategies for investment, communication, business development or Human Resources, to name a few. Although many of the technologies involved in AI are still in their early stages, the rapid pace of development and the reference from other industries with faster curves of technology adoption is both showing the path, and revealing the challenges ahead.

Architects play a key role in the value chain of the built environment, not only providing vision, strategy and shape to all types and scales of spaces, but also defining the creative and thinking processes that give birth to these. In the last two decades, the architectural design realm has been, nevertheless, under chronic strain in terms of productivity (the ratio between resource input and revenue output) and profitability, due to multiple factors. The fragmentation of the market, the unpredictable cost and effort of creative processes or the difficulty to transmit the multiple facets of value that good design provides to the built environment stakeholders, become even more challenging when combined with a ubiquitous lack of business and entrepreneurial acumen within the architecture profession. Despite our outstanding amounts of design talent, focus has been traditionally put, more often than not, only on the creative and technical aspects of the profession, leaving the strategic and business ones aside, despite their high influence on design’s success.

Given the context of change derived from Artificial Intelligence, we invite design and AEC professionals to reflect on the impact that this technology poses for Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), as a determinant factor to shape the firm's future, as a leader in the global architectural landscape. Participants will conduct a global evaluation of the firm, and assess AI’s potential to impact BIG as a company, both bringing strategic opportunities, business improvements and challenges.

As a guiding framework, we provide the following steps and questions, which are open to each participant’s interpretation and personal methodology.

As a reference, we estimate that the overall production of the work should not take more than 2 full business days, or a week part-time.