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A 2024 Chill Chat Recap on AI for Creative Pros with Lauren DeVane | AI for Interior Designers™

AI for Interior Designers™ Podcast

A 2024 Chill Chat Recap on AI for Creative Pros

The final episode of 2024 — a breezy, honest year-end conversation between two designers who have both been in the AI trenches all year, sharing what they are actually using, what they have stopped worrying about, and what has them excited going into 2025.

Ep. 36 2024 Wrap-Up ✦ Jenna Gaidusek ✦ Lauren DeVane December 2024

This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording, then edited by the author for accuracy and details.

Key Takeaways

Both Jenna and Lauren approach AI from different design disciplines — interiors and branding — and arrived at the same conclusion: AI is not here to replace creativity. It is here to take the repetitive, time-consuming work off the plate so creative work can happen more freely.
Visual Electric, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Photoshop AI are the tools that have become genuinely integrated into both of their workflows — not as experiments, but as daily infrastructure. The tools that make this list are the ones that have proven themselves over months of real use.
"You can't mess this up — you just have to try it." Lauren's philosophy toward AI adoption: start small, stay curious, dedicate an hour a week to exploring. Perfectionism is the enemy of integration.
The pace of change is the biggest ongoing challenge. Both Jenna and Lauren maintain active learning practices — The DAIly, course updates, community connection — specifically to avoid falling behind in a landscape where meaningful changes happen on a weekly cycle.
2025 looks genuinely exciting. Agentic AI, deeper integrations across design software, and tools like ChatGPT's Projects feature signal that the workflow transformation designers have been working toward is about to become significantly more accessible.

Episode Guest

Lauren DeVane

Creative Entrepreneur & AI Educator — "Your AI Auntie"

Lauren DeVane is a seasoned graphic designer and brand strategist whose background includes work with major brands like Walgreens and Ulta Beauty before launching her own branding studio. Known on Instagram as "Your AI Auntie," she has become a go-to resource for creatives navigating AI adoption — practical, honest, and enthusiastic without the overwhelm. She maintains BAISCamp, her Skool community for creative professionals integrating AI into their practice.

The Bemused Studio AI Auntie Branding Creative Education

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What Jenna and Lauren Are Actually Using — The 2024 Stack

This is not a speculative tools list — it is the result of a year of real use by two working creative professionals in different design disciplines. The tools below are the ones that survived the test of sustained integration, not just initial curiosity.

Visual Electric Lauren's standout recommendation for photorealistic visuals. Ideal for polished imagery across branding, client presentations, and design pitches — with the brand style system that keeps output consistent across a practice. ChatGPT Daily infrastructure for both. Brainstorming, drafting, organizing client project details, building custom GPTs for brand voice — the tool most likely to be open in a browser tab throughout the working day. Claude Alongside ChatGPT as a writing and reasoning tool — often preferred for longer-form content, nuanced drafting, and tasks that benefit from Claude's particular strength in maintaining consistent voice across extended outputs. Perplexity AI The research replacement for both. An "answers engine" that retrieves information with cited sources in real time — leaving traditional Google searches behind for anything that requires synthesis rather than just a link. Photoshop AI Generative Fill, Remove Background, and the expanding AI capabilities within Photoshop remain foundational — the familiar tool, now significantly more powerful for enhancing photorealism in renders and creating high-impact visuals.

Stable Diffusion The category of stable diffusion-based programs remains valuable for concept development — generating and refining visual ideas efficiently, testing layouts, and experimenting with creative directions before committing to detailed production.

The Pace Problem — And How Both Are Managing It

Both Jenna and Lauren acknowledge the same central challenge that every creative professional faces with AI right now: the pace of change is genuinely overwhelming. A new feature, a new tool, a significant capability jump — these are happening on a weekly cycle, not an annual one. Staying current feels like a full-time job on top of the actual job.

Their responses to that challenge are similar in structure: structured, ongoing learning rather than catching up in bursts. Jenna built The DAIly specifically to address this for interior designers — concise, focused lessons delivered on a weekday cadence, covering tools and techniques immediately applicable to design practice. Lauren maintains course updates to reflect the latest advancements and runs BAISCamp as an active community for creatives navigating the same pace of change.

"Investing time in learning these tools, even in small doses, ensures you stay ahead of the curve. An hour a week compounds over time into genuine capability."

— Jenna Gaidusek

One specific advancement both noted: ChatGPT's Projects feature, which promises to significantly simplify organizing client data and custom GPT contexts within the platform. Features like this — that reduce the friction between AI tools and professional workflows — represent the direction the whole category is moving.

Misconceptions Both Have Stopped Taking Seriously

A year of active AI use provides a different vantage point on the concerns that dominate the early conversation around any new technology. Jenna and Lauren both have opinions on which fears deserve engagement and which ones can be set aside.

"AI is going to replace my creative skills."

AI is as powerful as the professional using it. For a designer with expertise — spatial knowledge, material understanding, client relationship skills, taste — AI becomes an amplifier. It makes the expertise more efficient to deploy. It does not make expertise unnecessary.

"I have to use AI for everything or I'm falling behind."

Start where it feels natural. Note-taking, research, brainstorming content, brand voice drafting. You do not need an AI clone designing entire projects. The value compounds from small, consistent uses — not from wholesale adoption of every tool at once.

"I might mess it up, so I should wait until I know more."

Lauren's direct response: "You can't mess this up — you just have to try it." The learning happens through use, not through preparation. An hour of actual prompting teaches more than any amount of reading about prompting. Start. Adjust. Learn from what happens.

What Has Both of Them Excited for 2025

The conversation closes on genuine enthusiasm — not the performative optimism of a sponsored segment, but the specific, grounded excitement of two people who have watched a technology category mature over a year and can see where the next phase is heading.

Lauren points to the expansion of creative AI capabilities — tools like Suno AI for music generation, more immersive 3D environment creation, and the deepening integration of AI into existing creative tools. The creative palette is expanding in directions that feel genuinely new rather than incremental.

Jenna points to the agentic AI shift she has been tracking all year: the move from tools that respond to prompts to systems that execute multi-step workflows autonomously. The friction between individual AI tools — the manual handoffs, the reformatting, the juggling of multiple subscriptions — is the specific problem that agentic systems are being built to eliminate. When that happens at scale for professional design workflows, the time savings will be of a different order than what current tools provide.

"The potential for AI in design feels limitless — new ways to connect with clients, streamline processes, and create work that stands out. The key is to approach these changes with curiosity and an open mind."

— Jenna Gaidusek

Both Jenna and Lauren are committed to continuing to share what they learn publicly — through The DAIly, BAISCamp, and their respective social channels — so that the learning stays community-driven rather than siloed. If you are navigating this landscape and feeling behind, both of them are explicitly in your corner.

Frequently Asked Questions

Lauren DeVane is a graphic designer and brand strategist with a background that includes major consumer brands before she launched her own studio. She is known on Instagram as "Your AI Auntie" — a persona built around demystifying AI for creative professionals in a practical, approachable way. While Jenna focuses on interior design professionals specifically, Lauren works with creatives across disciplines, which makes her perspective a useful cross-industry complement to the interior design-specific conversation. She runs BAISCamp, a Skool-based community for creatives integrating AI into their practice.

Suno AI is a generative music tool that produces original music from text prompts — describing genre, mood, tempo, instrumentation, and lyrical themes, and receiving a full song as output. Lauren uses it as an example of how AI creative tools are expanding into modalities beyond image and text — the same pattern of generation from description is now producing audio that would otherwise require significant production expertise and budget. For interior designers, Suno is less directly applicable than visual tools — but it signals the direction: every creative output type is becoming promptable, and the distinction between "I need a professional for this" and "I can generate a draft myself" is shifting across all creative categories simultaneously.

ChatGPT Projects is a feature that allows users to organize conversations, custom instructions, and uploaded files into discrete project containers — essentially giving ChatGPT a memory and context structure that persists across sessions within a defined scope. For designers managing multiple clients, this means a project container with that client's preferences, previous conversation history, design brief, and brand voice guide — all accessible without re-explaining context every session. Both Jenna and Lauren flagged it as one of the most practically significant feature releases for professional workflow use, specifically because it reduces the setup friction that makes AI tools feel cumbersome for client-specific work.

BAISCamp is Lauren DeVane's Skool-based community for creative professionals integrating AI into their work. It is not interior-design-specific — it serves designers, marketers, brand strategists, and other creative professionals across disciplines. The community provides ongoing learning resources, course content updated to reflect current AI capabilities, and peer connection for people navigating the pace of AI change in creative industries. It is an alternative community for designers who want peer learning with a broader creative professional context, alongside industry-specific resources like The DAIly.

Lauren's advice: one hour per week, one tool at a time. Pick the part of your work that feels most tedious or time-consuming — meeting notes, email drafting, content brainstorming, research — and find one AI tool that addresses it. Use it for a month before adding anything else. The overwhelm that comes from trying to adopt the entire AI landscape at once is both inevitable and avoidable: inevitable if you approach it as a category to master, avoidable if you approach it as a workflow to improve one piece at a time. Jenna's The DAIly is built on exactly this principle — one focused, actionable lesson per weekday, covering one specific tool or workflow at a time.

Keep Learning in 2025

The DAIly + BAISCamp — Two Communities, One Mission

The pace of change requires ongoing learning. The DAIly keeps interior designers current with weekday lessons. BAISCamp does the same for creatives across disciplines. Both are worth knowing about going into 2025.

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