A client arrives with a render they made themselves. The room looks beautiful. The lighting is convincing, the furniture feels right, and they are excited. They want you to make it happen.
You can see the possibilities, but you can also see the problems. Whether the layout works in their actual space. Whether that chair exists. What it will cost, and which parts matter most when the budget cannot stretch to everything.
And underneath all of that, a bigger question. What does this mean for the work you do?
You have probably already asked AI to explain your accountant's advice or check a clause your lawyer drafted. Your clients are doing the same thing to you. They arrive with their own render, alternatives to your selections, questions they have run past AI first. The change that made you feel more capable as a client is the change you are now facing as a designer.
Here is what we think. You became a designer to shape the places where people live and work, and how those places make them feel. To turn an idea in your head into a space someone calls home. You did not become one to spend your days chasing quotes, retyping schedules and managing an inbox, and the arrival of AI is the best chance the profession has had to stop. Everything we are building at Programa is about giving you back the hours for the work only you can do.
Concepts and renders got cheap. Judgement didn’t.
AI is going to change how ideas are developed, visualised and communicated. Some of the work will take less time. Some services will be harder to charge for the way they are charged for today. Clients who once arrived with magazine cuttings and Pinterest boards now arrive with renders and fly-throughs, and their expectations are moving with them.
Telling you none of that is happening would insult what you can already see.
But look at what happens in that meeting. You ask why they love the image. It turns out what matters is the warmth of the room, or the way people can gather in it. You notice the layout closes off the view they bought the house for, and that recreating the render would blow the budget. You find another approach that keeps what they love and works for the space and what they can afford. You are reading a brief, questioning assumptions and getting to know a person and a place well enough to make choices that hold together. A client’s render is a better start to that conversation than a Pinterest board ever was. It is not a substitute for it.
Clients can generate more ideas than ever. Choosing the ones worth building is your judgement, your taste and your experience, and that’s still the hard part.
We are not building Programa to do your job, and we will never sell it to your clients as a way around you. Programa is built for the studio and sold to the studio. We are building it to give you more time for the decisions that need your judgement.
Design was never the hard part
There was a reason you chose interior design, the satisfaction of getting a layout right, or discovering a material and knowing exactly where it belongs, and the creativity.
Your ideas take shape in products like SketchUp, rendering software, mood boards, sketches and materials. The moment a design is good enough to build, it has to become a list of hundreds of real products from real suppliers, each with a price, a lead time and a delivery date that all have to agree. Programa handles that work, connecting the design to the products and suppliers needed to build it.
Today it’s done by hand. Products are read off a model and typed into a schedule, then typed again when the model changes. We are bringing the design tools into the project instead, so a product placed in the model lands in the schedule with its details intact and stays connected to it. We started with the SketchUp extension we launched this year, and more connections will follow, including some very exciting integrations with SketchUp. You can keep using the tools you love, with less information to move between them.
For every product, you still need to confirm the finish, agree the price and arrange delivery for a day the site can take it. Then do the same for the next product, and the hundred after that. A working day disappears into emails, chasing quotes and checking whether someone has replied. It is where the hours go, and where a studio’s margin is made or lost.
You can care deeply about every decision and still have far too many to make. Thorough care on every one of them has always been possible. It has never been affordable.
That is the constraint we are removing. The same AI that makes a render cheap can take the admin off your desk and give the hours back to the work only you can do. It is the best news for designers in a generation.
You decide. Programa does the rest.
Picture opening a project and seeing what needs to be done, with the information already brought together. A supplier has confirmed the wrong finish. Another has moved a delivery date. A client has approved a selection and the next step is ready.
For the wrong finish, Programa has already compared the confirmation with the approved specification, shown you the mismatch and drafted the clarification. For the delay, it has pulled the affected dates and commitments into view so your team can decide how to respond. And when an alternative is needed, it knows why you chose the original. If you rejected the cheaper fabric for durability, the cheaper fabric is not what gets suggested next.
You decide. The work around the decision is already done.
Programa learns which products you return to and which suppliers you trust. It remembers what you learned on the difficult projects. It also learns from your choices about what belongs together. When you need a black dining chair for this room, this budget and this location, you want three that fit, starting with one from a supplier you already know. The result still feels like your work, because it is built from your decisions and your standards. A solo designer gets a second pair of hands on every detail. A principal sees where their judgement is needed without being the person everyone has to ask. A new team member picks up the reasoning behind a decision along with the task.
Across a project, that means less coordination for your team and fewer details that depend on someone remembering them. It gives you more room to take on the work you want and protect the margin on it.
That is the studio of the future. It is the one we are building for.
Your suppliers, inside the project
A quote arrives against the wrong finish. Nobody has checked the lead time against the install date, or a delivery turns up after the installers have gone home. Sorting out these problems takes time you could have spent on the design, and eats into the project’s margin.
Design is the part you love. Getting it priced, approved, paid for and delivered is the part that eats your time and profits.
Soon, you’ll be able to invite your suppliers into the project itself. When you need a price, the request goes out with everything the supplier needs to answer it properly, and the answer comes back against the items your team is working on, ready for you to review before it touches the schedule. When a product is unavailable, alternatives that fit the brief are put in front of you. From there, orders, invoices and deliveries stay connected to the decisions that started them, on both sides.
You control which suppliers are in your project and what they see. We are not building a marketplace nor selling access to your schedules. We believe strongly that designers will benefit from making the brands do the work for you, encouraging competition, allowing you to get more quotes with less effort, and making it easy for brands to answer you properly and on time, because that is how they win the specification. You get more useful answers, less chasing, more competition, better client outcomes and fewer surprises on site.
Eighteen months of work you could not see
You will not have noticed most of what we have been doing for the last eighteen months, because it happened underneath the product rather than on top of it, although you’ve probably noticed we’re shipping more improvements faster and faster. We rebuilt the foundations so that every product, approval, quote, change and payment in a project sits in one connected record, and we changed how we build software so that a small team can ship what used to take a large one.
You have started to see the first of it already, in Pulse bringing the next action to you and moving approved products straight into an invoice, in client approvals, meeting notes that become tasks, search across your studio and payments through ProgramaPay, and in the alternatives Programa suggests when a client rejects a product. Small pieces so far, and the pace picks up from here.
All-new Schedules are just a few weeks away
The next step is the big one, and it is not a roadmap item. It is built. Studios are using it right now in final testing, and it reaches you in the next couple of weeks.
All-new Schedules is the biggest thing we have ever shipped. It takes five years of feedback from more than 200,000 completed projects and rebuilds the schedule around how studios actually work. See your products as a list, a grid, a gallery or the classic view. Group by status, supplier, location or revision, and save a view once you have it right. Light fittings and fabrics have fields suited to each. Products can be built from components, so a joinery unit includes its stone, hardware and finish. Freight sits on the product where it belongs. Approval, procurement and payment each have their own status, so a chair can be approved, in transit and unpaid at the same time and you see all three. Change a product once and it changes in every room it appears in. Every change is recorded, so you can see what changed, when, and who changed it.
The part we are proudest of is memory. Every schedule you issue is kept exactly as the client saw it, and it cannot be edited afterwards. Every revision since is named, with a note on each product explaining what changed and why. When a client asks what they approved in March, or a supplier disputes what was ordered, the answer is there.
Getting things right no longer depends on who remembers what, because the schedule remembers everything.
To check a confirmation or propose an alternative, Programa needs a record of every product, what was approved and what changed. The new schedule keeps that record. You can try it on an existing project when it arrives, and migrating existing projects to our new schedules is easy.
Programa in Claude and ChatGPT
This year, studios have asked us more than anything else whether Programa works with Claude and ChatGPT. Some of you stopped waiting and found a way, pointing Claude at your browser or building your own assistant around exports. We are bringing that connection into Programa soon.
Programa is opening a secure connection to the AI assistants you already use, Claude and ChatGPT first. You will be able to ask it about your projects, schedules, suppliers and procurement. Which items on the Hawthorn house still need the client to approve? Which orders put the install date at risk? Compare the three joinery quotes and tell me where they differ. Pull together a status update for the client. Give me the products we approved that are still not ordered. What did we specify for the guest bathroom on the last three projects?
Today each of those questions costs someone twenty minutes of clicking, exporting and re-reading. Soon each of them costs a sentence, and the answer comes from the same project your team is working in, so it is right.
We are starting with reading, so we can establish that the assistant answers reliably before it makes changes. Once that is proven, your assistant will start to act as well, beginning with the everyday work of tasks, notes and to-dos, and reaching the schedule itself only when we are certain it can be trusted with it. You decide what an assistant can see, and nothing in your project changes without a person saying so. Your decisions stay with the project.
Programa on the go
You make decisions on site, in a showroom, in a client’s living room and in the car between the three. The project has stayed behind in the studio for all of it, so the decision gets made, written down, and typed in later.
We are building Programa for the phone and the iPad, so the project comes with you.
On site, in the showroom or across the table from a client, the schedule, the approvals and the products are in your hand, and what you decide there goes straight into the project. You are working in the same project wherever you are, without having to sync or re-enter anything.
The time is yours
Faster work on its own does not make a studio healthier. How you scope a project, explain your value and charge for your judgement will all move as the tools do, and that is your call to make. We can take on the coordination that eats time without improving the outcome, giving you more capacity to run a profitable studio without working longer.
Another project. Fewer, more ambitious ones. The care a project deserves, given without losing another evening to it. Not every studio will take to AI the same way, and you should never have to hand over more than you want to. Every step we add is one you can review, and one you can choose to delegate.
You became a designer to shape the places where people live and work, and how those places make them feel. To turn an idea in your head into a space someone calls home.
You did not choose this life to spend it chasing quotes and managing an inbox. We are building Programa to take that weight off your shoulders, so your creativity gets your best hours. So you can spend more of your life doing the work you fell in love with.
Freedom, by Design.
