Every tool promises AI. Every board asks about where it lives on a roadmap. Few deliver anything close. At Arcol, we’re not interested in buzzwords. We're interested in useful work.
That means being honest: most “AI” in architecture today isn’t AI. It’s automation. It’s parameter-driven logic that feels more impressive than shipping anything new. And while that has its place, automated layouts, parking generators, even floor plans, it’s not new, and it’s not magic.
As Paul O’Carroll, our CEO, put it bluntly:
“Some of the workflows we've built, like automated parking or automated floor layouts—there's no AI in that. It's just nicely written scripts.”
So what excites us? It’s something we call agentic workflows.
How would this work?
Imagine you’re working on a new building concept. You’ve mocked up your model, pulled together some metrics, and now it’s time to build a presentation. Normally, you’d start from scratch. You’d be dragging in screenshots, updating charts, formatting text boxes, pulling CSV files.
But what if you didn’t have to?
“What if I had a presentation agent that built it for me? Based on how we’ve built decks at your firm over the last decade?”
That’s what an agent does. It’s not just a feature. It’s a collaborator.
Because Arcol is multiplayer and real-time, an agent can join your file just like a teammate. You see it work. It sees your model. It reasons, interprets, and acts, just like you would.
“Why does it have to be a person behind the cursor? Why can’t it be a script I’ve written that goes and does reasoning for me?”
We think that’s the future. Not fiddling with more sliders. Not choosing from more templates. But asking, “Build me something like we did last time but make it work for this site.”
We're already building our first generation of these agents, starting with something boring but powerful: costing.
It takes the location, the typology, the square footage - and then it searches your internal cost database or scrapes Google and builds a cost report for you.
It's simple. It’s imperfect. But it's useful. And more importantly, you didn’t have to do it yourself.
That’s the bar we’re setting for AI at Arcol: does it save you time? Does it think for you in a way that feels valuable, not uncanny? This is critical as we start the proliferation of AI tools entering the AEC space, much like all of the other great changes we’ve seen in the past: design and functionality will become the differentiating factor.
The Road Ahead
Will we build more generative tools? Sure. But we won’t call them AI if they’re not.
What excites us more is the idea of embedded intelligence that works with you, seamlessly. Agents that build, test, adapt, and learn from how your studio actually works.
We want to support a future where AI isn’t a black box. It’s more of a visible teammate with a lot of context. One that understands your design language, your constraints, your aesthetic, and your goals.
Because real AI in architecture shouldn’t just generate. It should collaborate.