Case study
Four AI opportunities mapped for an architecture practice
Leach Rhodes Walker, an architecture practice of around 60 people, wanted to know where AI would pay off. Discovery calls, a scoping session and a day of workshops in November 2025 narrowed it to four opportunities: an appointment checker, a compliance statement generator, email and CDE automation, and re-use of standard details.
2025
- 3,000
- documents in a single CDE drop, to find the 200 that matterbefore
- ~6 a year
- compliance statements for higher-risk buildings, written by handbefore
- 4
- discovery workshops in one dayNovember 2025
The challenge
LRW delivers residential, hotel and mixed-use projects in the UK and abroad, and is part-way through a move from AutoCAD to Revit. Standard details were often redrawn from scratch because finding an earlier one relied on someone remembering where it lived. Files from half a dozen common data environments were downloaded and filed by hand, and a single project could drop 3,000 documents of which around 200 mattered. Client appointments were trying to stretch liability, for example from 12 to 15 years under the Building Safety Act, and the review of every appointment rested on one senior consultant's experience.
What we did
- August 2025 — discovery call to map the practice's tools (Revit, AutoCAD, Newforma, Procore) and its priorities for AI
- October 2025 — virtual scoping session to rank the opportunities, find who owns each process and agree the access we needed
- November 2025 — four workshops in one day, one per opportunity, each covering the current process, the pain and its cost, and what great would look like
- Market check: detail libraries and compliance guides reviewed; none learned from a practice's own past projects
- Recommendation: scoping, prototyping, then deployment, starting with the appointment checker as the early demonstrator
What we built
A recommendation for each opportunity on what to build first and what to leave in place: an automation layer around Newforma rather than a replacement, and a standard-details library that starts with the 50–100 most-used details rather than the whole archive.
- Appointment checker against an approved standard
- Compliance statement drafts with regulation checks
- Incoming email and CDE files classified and filed
- Register of every CDE upload and download
- Tagged library of the most-used standard details
- One search across Revit and AutoCAD
The result
LRW left discovery with four opportunities mapped and a sequence for building them. The appointment checker came first because it protects commercial position as well as time, and gives the practice a way to keep appointment review going beyond one person. Compliance statements are few today, about six a year, so that tool was rated lower urgency, though it will matter more if hotels come into the higher-risk building regime.