Gresham Smith digital chief Mike Sewell urges AEC firms to use AI to augment, not replace, designers

Mike Sewell says architecture, engineering, and construction firms should treat generative AI as a tool that refines professional judgment and communication rather than as a shortcut to full automation.

Mike Sewell, digital chief at Gresham Smith, warns that architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms that push for full automation risk eroding the professional judgment that underpins design work. In an op‑ed, Sewell says efforts to automate deliverables and remove the designer from the creative process strip away the personal and affective elements teams invest in and clients perceive downstream. That loss matters because it weakens the skills and decision — making that produce long-term design value.

Sewell lays out a practical workflow for using generative AI in design: professionals should first articulate positions, hypotheses and responses in their own words, then use AI to expose gaps, strengthen arguments and anticipate questions. He recommends configuring tool directives so the model does not "make up language" for the user, and treating the system as a challenger and editor rather than the originator of professional judgment. This approach keeps the human team in control of intent, framing and final messaging while using AI to sharpen thinking.

He highlights common automation shortcuts that quietly erode professional thinking — delegating email replies, drafting RFP responses, or letting tools produce instant answers — because they replace the iterative hypothesis formation and exploration that build creative skill. Sewell warns this mental "flex" can atrophy not only among early — career staff but also mid-career and senior practitioners who stop exercising the habits of critique and defense. short — term efficiency gains may produce a long-term decline in the industry’s capacity to generate original, defensible design decisions.

Those workforce and developmental consequences extend to mentorship and leadership pipelines. Young architects and engineers working inside heavily automated workflows miss critical opportunities to iterate, defend choices and form a distinct point of view-formative experiences Sewell sees as essential to cultivating future leaders. Removing those exercises in the name of speed or cost savings, he argues, will diminish long‑run professional capability across firms and the broader AEC sector.

At the same time, Sewell identifies productive, targeted uses for AI: augmenting empathy and communication in high‑stakes public or stakeholder meetings where participants lack shared "design language," and surfacing nuance or verbal cues that help designers respond more thoughtfully. His bottom — line recommendation is deliberate, limited adoption: use technology to unlock new ways of thinking and working while protecting what makes design valuable — human judgment, creativity and authenticity. In his view, generative AI should act as a teammate that sharpens expertise, not a substitute that displaces the professional processes that generate real design value.