Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 3 /Apr 13, 2025
Why architects are moving to AI-enabled firms
Patrick Chopson, Cove
Apr 13, 2025 /AI & Automation
Why architects are moving to AI-enabled firms
Patrick Chopson co-founded Cove, which began as sustainability-analysis software sold to hundreds of architecture firms and became an AI-enabled architecture practice. He is an architect who has seen the business from both sides of the software counter. His argument is that 2025 was the year AI joined the profession, and that most firms are structurally unable to take advantage of it.
Patrick Chopson, Co-founder, Chief Product Officer, Cove
In this conversation
Patrick's claim that within a year AI went from unable to solve a real architectural design problem to a participant in the profession.
The $30,000 revision figure and where those revisions come from: misread codes, misunderstood zoning, cost estimates that are 20 percent off at construction documents.
Why Cove abandoned selling software to firms after three years of implementation struggles and switched to selling the outcome.
His prediction that AI will propose design changes, curtain walls nobody considered, rather than just speeding up the drawing of what humans decided.
Every design revision for a reasonable size firm costs about $30,000 per major design revision.
Patrick Chopson
Chapters
The year AI joined the profession
Why Patrick believes 2025 is the year AI became a participant in architecture.
By the numbers
Share of U.S. architecture firms using AI in day-to-day work in 2023, across all firm sizes
Patrick calls 2025 the year AI joined the profession. The year before, one firm in three had put it to work at all.
Source: AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 ↗Cost and carbon in real time
Tracking construction cost and embodied carbon live, so documents are not 20 percent off at the end.
Selling services instead of software
Why Cove stopped selling software to architects and started delivering architecture.
Why partnerships can't invest
The partnership structure that makes it nearly impossible for established firms to invest.
What AI will change about design
What AI will change about the act of design, not just the speed of documentation.
We'll look back and say 2025 was the year that AI joined the profession as a participant in it.
Patrick Chopson
Takeaways
A major design revision costs a reasonably sized firm about $30,000, which is why fees leave no room to explore a better facade scheme. Fixing that economics, not the rendering, is where AI pays.
Partnership-run firms cannot invest: every partner shares the profit, so any change requires all of them to give up money now for a payoff later. The structure, not the people, blocks innovation.
Cove sold software to 350 firms and every one struggled to implement it. Delivering the result as a service, at software margins, is what finally worked.
A lot of firms are run in an old school way because they have partners that control the money of that firm.
Patrick Chopson