How to choose AI spatial planning for your product range
A guide for kitchen, wardrobe and joinery manufacturers, furniture suppliers and home builders.
By Anthony Wei, Founder & CEO
AI spatial planning lays out a real project on its real plan, using only your products and rules, the way a designer would (what that means). Here is what to check before you choose one. We design, build and operate AI planning for building-product brands, so these are the checks we hold ourselves to.
Nine checks before you choose
- Does it plan, or does your team? Give it a real floor plan. A real AI planner returns complete layouts that fit, built from your products. If someone still has to drag every cabinet into place, it’s a configurator.
- Only what you make. Every module, size and finish in the layout should be one your factory can actually produce, with your rules for what fits with what and the clearances that work.
- The real dimensions. Change the room size and the layout should change with it: a longer wall, a new run, an L instead of a straight line, all still from your standard parts.
- A few right options, not dozens. It should offer a handful of layouts that fit, with product combinations and upgrade packages, compared side by side.
- 3D, and a configurator inside it. The customer or your team should be able to change the size, finish and options of any part in 3D, checked against your rules, inside the whole plan.
- Drawings from the same model. Shop drawings, professional drawings, schedules and a specification shortlist, from the same 3D model, ready for your technical team to approve.
- Repeat across a project. For builders and developers: can it plan a room type once, repeat it across many homes and flag the ones that don’t fit?
- Your product data. It should work from your catalogue and rules, so a change is made once and flows through to every plan.
- Who runs it. Choose a team that builds it, operates it after launch and keeps your range and rules current.
How to test one
Give it the floor plan of a job you’ve already designed and compare. Are the layouts ones your best designer would draw? Are they buildable from your parts, to the real dimensions? How much does your team still have to fix by hand? Then change the room and see how fast a new layout comes back.
Comparing costs
Compare the build with what it costs to run: hosting, support, range and rule updates and improvements. Ask whether 3D models of your products are included, and whether you can use them elsewhere.
When you don’t need one
If your products don’t have to fit a space, or every project uses the same fixed layout, a product page and a spec sheet may be enough.
Frequently asked questions
How do we test AI planning before committing?
Give it the plan of a job you’ve already designed and see whether it lays it out the way your best designer would, from parts you actually make.
Can it plan from an address or a photo?
Yes. It starts from an address, a floor plan, a photo or measurements from site.
Does it replace our designers?
It takes the redrawing off them. Your designers review, adjust and approve, and spend their time on judgement.