What Clients Should Ask Their Design Partners

Five questions that distinguish AI-ready practices from the rest.

Scott Whittaker, Group Creative Director, dwp

Clients commissioning architecture and design in 2026 face a new dimension of due diligence. The firms pitching for their projects will, almost universally, claim some form of AI capability. Distinguishing substance from positioning requires asking the right questions.

Is it built or bought? There is a material difference between a firm that subscribes to third-party AI tools and one that has built proprietary systems integrated into its design process. Subscription tools are available to everyone. They offer generic capability. Proprietary platforms — trained on a firm’s own project data, calibrated to its design methodology, embedded in its workflows — offer something specific. The question is not whether a firm uses AI, but whether it has invested in making AI work within its particular practice.

Where does the intelligence come from? A generative AI tool is only as useful as the knowledge it draws upon. A firm with thirty years of project data, structured and accessible through an intelligent platform, brings a different quality of analysis to a brief than one relying on publicly available training data. Institutional memory — the accumulated insight from hundreds of completed projects — is a competitive advantage that cannot be replicated by software alone.

What has changed in your process? The most revealing question. If the answer is “we use AI for rendering” or “we have a chatbot for internal queries,” the integration is superficial. If the answer describes changes to briefing methodology, concept development timelines, design review processes, and client interaction models, the integration is structural. The former is a tool. The latter is a capability.

How do you maintain design quality? Speed without quality is not an advantage. AI can generate options faster than any human team, but generating options is not the same as designing buildings. The firms that will deliver the best outcomes are those that have thought carefully about how AI amplifies their design philosophy rather than diluting it. Ask about the relationship between technological capability and design judgement. The answer will be instructive.

What will be different for my project? Ultimately, clients are not buying AI. They are buying better buildings, delivered more efficiently, with greater confidence in the outcome. The technology is a means. The question that matters is what it produces: faster concept development, more thoroughly evaluated options, better-informed decisions, and designs that draw on deeper institutional knowledge.

These questions are not intended as a test. They are a framework for a conversation that clients and their design partners should be having now. The firms that welcome these questions are likely the ones that have done the work to answer them.

We welcome these questions. If you’re evaluating design partners for an upcoming project, I’m happy to walk through how dwp.intelligence shapes our approach. scott.w@dwp.com