“We jumped in with both feet into 2025.”
ASLA’s Bill Odle talks about implementing artificial intelligence (AI) at TBG Partners, the Texas-based landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm where he is principal.
“In all of our AI use cases, the primary function is to empower teams and streamline operations,” Odle said, noting that this approach allows designers to focus on design and relationships. “People come to TBG because they are creators who want to create. Leveraging AI to free up more time and space for creative thinking and the creative process is a key benefit and use case for integrating AI tools.”
ASLA’s John Payne, a partner at SiteWorks, a 14-employee landscape architecture firm, used ChatGPT to respond to RFPs. He said SiteWorks employees can enter RFPs into ChatGPT and use carefully crafted prompts. “The result could be about 20 percent of the required documentation, but it would require a lot of refinement, including perhaps changing 80 percent of the text.” [that the] AI-generated ideas could be fleshed out, personalized, and better focused. ”
While public conversation about the use of AI in landscape architecture has focused on design iterations, the use of AI by landscape architecture firms to drive business and operational efficiencies and other improvements is on the rise and could be just as important, if not more important, to their bottom line.
“There is a transition underway from the early stages of experimentation, where most companies used off-the-shelf software and focused on generative AI, to actually using AI, especially in text-based workflows,” says ASLA’s Phil Fernberg, an assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at Utah State University who has been researching AI professionally for several years.
Since AI first emerged as a potential tool for design firms, adoption has been on the rise. The results of a recent (albeit narrow) study have set a benchmark. 43.4% of respondents said they use AI in their practice, and 56.6% said they do not use AI. The study, written by Heather Bryden, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Montreal, also found that respondents are often using AI in early stages of the design process, such as creating briefs (61%), designing concepts (51%), and responding to RFPs (43%). Notably, respondents working at multidisciplinary firms reported significantly higher levels of AI use than respondents working at landscape architecture firms.
The adoption of AI is also increasingly impacting customer relationships, with customers expecting companies to reduce project estimates and increase speed and efficiency through the use of AI. This has led to increased scrutiny by companies regarding the efficiency of specific AI deployments. Many companies are unsure whether the benefits of implementing AI will outweigh the costs. Benjamin George, associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at Utah State University and chair of the ASLA AI Working Group, says, “One of the biggest mistakes professionals make when it comes to AI is not carefully analyzing what makes the most sense to them or planning to evaluate the impact of AI.”
“I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had where company leaders say they’re using AI. [them] They say how big of an impact it has had, “We don’t really know and we don’t track it.” To me, that’s a little bit mind-boggling. Because once you hire employees, you’re not supposed to track what they’re doing and the benefits of that work,” says George.
There is also the impact that AI will have on the environment. The concerns raised by the use of AI are particularly acute in fields like landscape architecture, where environmental sustainability is a core value of the field. “You can literally see the propaganda in this industry change from week to week in terms of the narrative being controlled by big tech around emissions and energy use, or not talking about data centers and how they impact communities,” said Daniel Tull, FASLA, Digital Studio Manager at Confluence. “We need to be careful and force our participation as an industry to ensure we have a platform to voice our concerns.”
some Of the design experts interviewed We found that AI saves design firms time responding to RFPs and developing their business. John Payne estimates that using AI saved him an hour of time organizing and adding information on one RFP for a project that included an operations and maintenance plan for a public project. He added that using ChatGPT ideas stimulated creative thinking and also helped with general innovation because “creativity wasn’t exhausted by this tedious energy-draining task.”
Henning Larsen, a multidisciplinary company with 600 people, including 120 landscape architects, uses AI applications to capture documents. “What we use is [Google Labs’ AI tool] “We use NotebookLM or Perplexity to create the environment for the project, so we upload all the client information,” says Jakob Strouman Andersen, Director of Innovation and Sustainability at Henning Larsen. “And instead of searching for keywords to find out how wide a bike lane should be added, like 3-4 meters wide hidden deep in the text of an RFP, we ask the software, ‘How wide should a bike lane be?’ And that gives us the answer.”
He said data obtained from closed environments such as client briefs and RFPs is generally more accurate, but AI tools also provide references to data sources. Henning Larsen’s workflow includes humans reviewing data to ensure the AI’s responses are accurate.
In one case involving a university campus project at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, Henning Larsen received 258 pages of German text containing 3.5 gigabytes of information from the client. The company used NotebookLM to upload all the data and summaries so team members could chat in their native language and find the right information. For a team manager who hated text, Stroman-Andersen said, a project designer inspired the model to create a 30-minute podcast with a synthetic voice to explain the project’s wishes, so “he didn’t have to read anything.”
For a new landscape project in Singapore, instead of previously having to set aside two people for two days to read the brief and translate it to the entire design team, with NotebookLM, Henning Larsen was able to allocate one person for an hour and a half to give the project team access to key brief elements.
Is the AI tool smart enough to tell Henning Larsen’s team leader evaluating an RFP that the reward isn’t worth the company’s time given the demands of the project? “Not yet, but probably within six months,” Streuman-Andersen said, adding that the company’s parent company, Ramboll Group, has 30 AI specialists, including four at Henning Larsen.
AI is also commonly used in business development. “To screen clients, we set up a prompting system to screen projects so we can say no to a lot of potential projects that come in because they’re not in our area, we don’t have references, or they’re probably not clients we want to work with,” says Strouman-Andersen. To do this, Henning Larsen staff uses RamGPT, Ramboll Group’s in-house AI system.
One of the ultimate goals of AI is to organize and retain knowledge across the enterprise, allowing everyone to apply years of experience and insights from specific projects to new projects.
TBG has over 127 employees, 29 of whom are certified landscape architects and 43 others who work in landscape architecture practices, and leverages AI to share this type of expertise. “The core focus [of AI] “We’ve codified organizational knowledge into scenarios, turning what was in people’s heads into documented, repeatable systems,” Odle says.
At RDG Planning & Design, where Kene Okugbo of ASLA is a partner, AI is primarily used for storyboarding, creative writing, narrative building, and image creation. But the company is also working on leveraging AI for strategic planning. For its internal sustainability action plan, RDG began using AI to aggregate and collate data from various internal surveys, surveys, and other tools. “We use ChatGPT to input all these data points and ask questions like, ‘What trends are emerging? How should we think about this? What are our blind spots? What does the next 5-10 years look like for us?'” To generate dialogue with staff. This is a little test of how well AI can help analyze information. If it doesn’t work, it won’t be used,” Okigbo said. [Okigbo is a member of LAM’s Editorial Advisory Committee.]
Clients are also becoming increasingly proficient with AI and are looking for AI efficiencies from design firms, says Henning Larsen’s Strouman Andersen. “We had a case in Toronto, Canada, where a client asked us how they could integrate AI to create a better product and business case,” he says. “Clients knew that these tools existed and that some parts of their projects could be done more easily with AI, so they had higher demands on the designs and deliverables we delivered, including lower costs, lower resource usage, and faster schedules.”Second, the use of AI is expected to reduce project time and the number of employees assigned to a project.
Okugbo agrees that customer expectations for AI are putting pressure on companies. “I’m really proud of the approach our determined leadership has taken.” do not have Rather than saying, “AI will reduce the amount of time you spend on each project,” he says, “You may spend less time on things you don’t want to spend time on, but you will be able to spend more time on detailing and communicating design features and making sure the project is a good fit,” he says, “but communicating that to the client side, where the value proposition is challenged, can be difficult.”
According to Confluence’s Tal, customers are now being asked to clearly explain whether and how their companies are using AI. “If we don’t, there will be tit for tat.”
AI is also useful Users facilitate the technical aspects of the design. Francisca Martina Gil Sosa, a landscape designer and building information modeling (BIM) manager at SiteWorks, uses AI, specifically ChatGPT, in Revit, Autodesk’s BIM software. Gil Sosa said he finds ChatGPT useful for resolving technical issues and validating grading questions.
“I use ChatGPT a lot, and ChatGPT is trained with all these BIM questions and answers, so the ChatGPT AI knows much more about BIM management and BIM issues than I do,” says Gil Sosa. This allows her to use it to validate more technical work she is doing in other applications. “Instead of stopping the analysis because you’re doing something else, you ask ChatGPT: ‘Can you verify if the slope you’re getting is accurate or if it’s lying?’ and then feed the AI a screenshot of what’s going on in the software or why the calculations on that slope aren’t working.”
At SiteWorks, Payne also used AI tools built into Deltek Specpoint’s AIA MasterSpec software to generate and manage specifications. (Payne is chair of the MasterSpec committee for landscape architects, which provides input for further development of the software.)
“This is really useful because if you have a problem with the interface and something is behaving strangely, you can ask the AI, ‘What should I do?’” Payne said. “Also, we always refer to standards like ASTM standards, and the variety is mind-boggling. So all we can say is, ‘What’s the difference between ASTM 714 and 756?’ And – lo and behold – it produces results. ”
