Aedas, the architecture firm founded by designer Keith Griffiths, is known for its skyscrapers, transit stations and other projects throughout Asia. The company has worked on projects like the Dubai Metro, the Hong Kong West Kowloon railway station, and Unilever's Indonesia headquarters in Jakarta.
At Fortune's Brainstorm Design conference in Macau, Griffiths noted that every one of these projects starts with a sketch. Yet that rough outline isn't enough to win over a potential customer. Clients want renders with light, color, shading, and backgrounds, among other things—and they want to see multiple options.
Putting those options together used to take as long as three weeks. Now, with an AI art generator, his team can turn a rough ink sketch into several renders of a gleaming skyscraper in an urban landscape in just a few minutes—not perfect, but good enough to start a conversation with a client.
"I can't do anything on a computer, and I haven't been able to do it for the whole of my career, for 40 years," Griffiths says. "Now I've got a computer working for me for the first time."
