How we built a Dubai architecture and development studio a custom AI assistant for its repetitive work, introduced AI tools for drafting and document handling, and set up a workspace to run it all. The website was tidied along the way.
A founder-led architecture and development studio delivering residential and commercial projects from first concept through to handover. A capable team producing high-quality work, with a clean public presence, but, like most studios their size, without anyone whose job it is to keep the tools and admin tidy behind the scenes.
Most of the studio's non-design hours were going to work that repeats, exactly the kind of thing AI now handles.
We started the way we always do: a short look at how the studio actually runs and where the hours go. The answer was not a big platform, it was a handful of AI tools aimed squarely at the repetitive work, led by a custom assistant.
We set up an assistant on the studio's own tools, built on today's leading AI models and tuned to their work, that drafts replies, answers the repeat questions and pulls details out of documents, with a person approving anything client-facing until they trusted it.
Quotes and proposals now start as AI drafts from the studio's own templates, and incoming documents and drawings are summarised, named and filed automatically instead of by hand.
We gave it all a home in one lightweight workspace built around the studio's stages, so the tools plug into real structure, and fixed the website's unfinished basics while we were in there.
The engagement is designed to change the shape of the week: the assistant and AI tools absorb the repetitive drafting, answering and filing; the team works from one place instead of piecing it together from chats and spreadsheets; and the hours that used to disappear into admin go back into the design.
As the tools bed in over the coming weeks, we're tracking the admin time reclaimed so it can be reported here in the studio's own numbers, alongside a note from the team.
Prepared by Aptly. Client identity withheld for confidentiality. This engagement is in progress; this page is updated as results are measured. Figures and quotes are added only once verified with the client.
We tell you which tools are genuinely worth paying for and which aren't, then help you put them in place. Independent, with nothing of our own to sell.
Get your assessment