EP 66: What’s Next for 2026 in the World of AI for Interior Designers
What's Next for 2026 in the World of AI for Interior Designers
No year-end recap. Instead: where AI is going, why firms are closing, what agentic and multimodal tools actually mean, and how designers can own their tech instead of renting it.
- Free prompts for everyone are hurting the design industry. Teaching homeowners how to replicate designer work is not neutral — it actively undermines the profession. Be selective about who you learn from and who you support.
- Firms are restructuring, not just closing. The ones staying afloat are building collaborative consulting teams with fewer fixed employees and more strategic partnerships — copywriters, renderers, permit specialists, social media support.
- Agentic AI is here and about to become invisible. Agents that do tasks on your behalf — not just answer questions — are already built into Gemini, Perplexity, and most major tools. They are slow and imperfect now. They will not stay that way.
- Designer-built apps beat developer-built apps. A tool built by someone who has never done a paint schedule will never be as useful as one built by a designer who has done a thousand of them. That is the premise of the AI App Studio.
- 2026 is the year to own your tools. Reduce bloated subscriptions. Build or adopt apps made for your actual workflow. Stop letting outside companies train on your data and sell it back to your competitors — and to your clients.
The Short Answer
The designers who will thrive in 2026 are not the ones who use AI — everyone will be using AI. They are the ones who use it to amplify something genuinely original, build tools tailored to how they actually work, and protect their expertise instead of giving it away for free. The technology is in your hands. The question is what you build with it.
Protecting the Profession: Why Jenna Gates Her Content
Jenna does not post AI prompts publicly. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. The reason is straightforward: a public social feed is a free forum accessible to everyone — including the homeowners who might otherwise hire a designer. Teaching the general public how to use professional-grade AI tools does not democratize design. It undercuts the people whose livelihood depends on being the one who knows how to use those tools.
If you are following accounts that give out free prompts for image generation and AI visualization to anyone on the internet, consider what that actually supports. Those accounts are not protecting your industry — they are building their audience at your expense.
Jenna's position is clear and consistent: she teaches professionals. She builds tools for professionals. She gates content, charges for access, and keeps certain workflows inside the certificate program specifically because she wants designers to keep their jobs. That is not gatekeeping for its own sake. It is a deliberate strategy for protecting a profession that is already under pressure.
Why Firms Are Closing — and How Others Are Staying Afloat
Small design firms are closing in meaningful numbers. The combination of economic pressure, AI tools lowering the perceived barrier to DIY design, and the overhead of maintaining a full staff in a variable-revenue business is breaking a lot of firms that cannot adapt fast enough.
What Jenna is seeing among the firms that are staying profitable: they are restructuring around flexible, collaborative teams rather than fixed employees. They are building consulting networks — a copywriter here, a renderer there, a permit specialist on call — so that overhead stays low and the firm can scale to a project without committing to full-time hires.
"I'm seeing a lot of professionals building their consulting teams. Going forward in the new year collectively versus independently — and I think it's brilliant."
— Jenna GaidusekThis is also how Jenna has been building her own team — including bringing on Dixie Willard for app building and studio development, and her local assistant from the Charleston School of Interior Design. The model is intentional: know what you do best, build the network for everything else, and stop trying to do it all alone.
The AI App Studio: Tools Built by Designers, for Designers
The biggest announcement in this episode is the direction Jenna is taking the AI App Studio into 2026. The premise is simple and significant: AI tools built by developers who have never done a paint schedule, a procurement spreadsheet, or a client proposal will never be as good as tools built by someone who does those things every week.
Every app Jenna builds in the studio started as a real problem she needed to solve. The paint schedule app is a good example. It is one of the most time-consuming deliverables in practice — cross-referencing hex codes, Pantone values, paint brands, finishes, trim suggestions, and metal pairings across multiple rooms. She built an app that does all of it. You upload an image you own, select your paint brand, and it outputs a formatted, exportable paint schedule. Voice input, CSV import, PDF export, beautiful formatting. Done in seconds.
The paint schedule is one app. Jenna is releasing a new one weekly inside the certificate program. Proposal builders. Project dashboards. Custom visualization tools. All built around real design workflows, not imagined ones. The long-term goal is to replace enough of the subscription stack that designers can cancel tools they are only using for one or two features.
Agentic AI: What It Is and Why It Matters
Agentic AI — also called agents — is AI that does things on your behalf, not just tells you things. The difference between asking your voice assistant what is on your calendar versus telling it to go schedule everything you need for the rest of the week. One retrieves. The other acts.
Agents are already built into Gemini, Perplexity, and most major AI platforms. They are slow right now. They time out on complex tasks. They need supervision. But the pace of improvement is significant — Jenna notes they are already dramatically more capable than they were six months ago when they first became accessible. Within a year, agentic features will be embedded so deeply in the tools designers already use that they will stop feeling like a separate thing and just feel like the tools working.
Jenna uses Gemini's "Flows" — a form of agentic automation built directly into Gmail and Workspace — for things like meeting prep: aggregating past email threads, transcripts, and client notes into a summary delivered before a call. No separate tool, no extra subscription. Already there, already useful.
Multimodal AI: Everything In, Everything Out
Multimodal just means that an AI system can work with multiple types of input and output simultaneously — text, images, audio, video, documents, spreadsheets — rather than being limited to one. A few years ago, most tools did one thing. Now the major platforms handle all of it in a single workflow.
Google NotebookLM is Jenna's go-to example: upload a PDF or a set of documents, ask it questions, generate a mind map, export an audio summary with two voices discussing the content, or pull out a formatted FAQ. All from the same source material, all in the same tool.
For design practice, multimodal means you can upload floor plans, mood board images, SketchUp files, and a client brief, then ask for alternative style directions, annotated mockups, or visual summaries — all in one session. The apps Jenna is building in the studio are built on this capability: voice input, image upload, document import, formatted export. Not just a chat interface that gives you text back.
Owning Your Uniqueness — and Why Trend-Followers Are at Risk
AI is already capable of generating the median of everything that has ever been posted to Pinterest. The average, the on-trend, the widely shared aesthetic — it can produce that faster and cheaper than any designer. If that is the value you are offering, the competition is now free and instant.
What AI cannot do is generate the perspective of someone who has been designing for twenty years, has developed a point of view, and brings something to a project that has never been trained into any model. That is the only thing that makes a designer irreplaceable — and it requires actively cultivating it, not just consuming what is already everywhere.
"People that aren't techy and are creative see different ways to use the tools than others. The 'non-techy' designers embracing AI are often doing it better than the people who say they are tech people."
— Jenna GaidusekThe designers she sees thriving are the ones using AI as acceleration, not as a substitute for originality. They are training their models on their own sketches, their own brand voice, their own project history. They are using AI to go from idea to execution faster — not to skip having ideas in the first place.
Questions Worth Sitting With Over the Break
Jenna ends this episode with a set of questions for designers to take into the end of the year — not a to-do list, but a genuine invitation to think clearly about where the business is and where it needs to go.
- What is my actual process right now, and where does it cost me the most time?
- What are my deliverables — and are they still the right ones for the clients I want?
- Am I getting clients? What kind? Are those the clients I actually want to work with?
- What subscriptions am I paying for that I only use for one or two features?
- Who do I need on a consulting basis that I am currently trying to do myself?
- If I could build one tool that eliminated a half-hour task in my week, what would it be?
- What makes my work unmistakably mine — and am I leading with that?
Jenna is the go-to educator for design professionals who want to use technology without losing their creative edge. A designer turned tech advocate, she's a nationally recognized speaker, podcast host, community builder, and custom app builder based in Charleston, SC.
Her mission: make AI accessible, practical, and ethical for every interior designer — from solopreneurs to established firms.
Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.
