In recent years, the drumbeat of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown ever louder across virtually every industry, its promise, its threat and ultimately its inevitability. In this climate, it would be reasonable to assume that professional kitchen design, always at the intersection of technology and craft, would be swept up. Yet, paradoxically, the reality on the ground is far less dramatic. While there is much talk, there is little action; and the gap between what AI can do and what kitchen designers are actually doing with it is not just wide but getting wider.
Walk into a design studio today, and the sights and sounds are comfortingly familiar. If you ask the practitioners themselves about AI, few will have more than a passing acquaintance. “We use some smart tools,” one might say, referring to the room-measuring feature on their phone or a rendering plugin that automatically adjusts lighting. But true artificial intelligence? Systems that learn, adapt, and propose creative solutions? These are rare indeed.
The most common applications of AI in professional kitchen design currently fall into three categories, all of which are, to put it charitably, auxiliary rather than central. First, there are generative design tools, often marketed as AI-powered, which can produce multiple layout options at the click of a button. Second, there are smart material selectors that can suggest finishes based on performance data. Third, a handful of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications incorporating machine learning to enhance simulations, allowing a client to “walk through” a kitchen long before it is built.
But in the day-to-day business of designing kitchens, balancing ergonomics, workflow, equipment constraints, and the ineffable sense of space, AI is only peripherally present. There is, at best, a cautious toe in the water.
Why is this the case? The answer lies, in part, with the nature of kitchen design itself. At its core, the profession is equal parts art and engineering. It is a discipline that demands not just technical precision but intuition, empathy, and experience. The best kitchen designers are those who can read a chef’s ambitions or an owner’s comment, sense a bottleneck in a line, or intuit the perfect placement for a salamander from the choreography of a lunchtime rush.
Overcoming professional pride
AI, for all its cleverness, is fundamentally data-driven. It analyses what has come before to predict what should come next. But kitchens are living systems, subject to quirks of personality, shifting menus, and the stubborn individuality of cooks. “Show me the kitchen that was built to an algorithm,” an old designer once quipped, “and I’ll show you the kitchen they tore out a year later.”
There is, too, a professional pride at play. Kitchen designers, having seen waves of technology come and go, are slow to embrace the latest fad. Many remember when CAD was going to make manual drawing obsolete overnight, only to find that the best designers still sketched on napkins, and that CAD became just another tool, not a revolution.
It is here that we come to the heart of the matter: the development of AI is proceeding at a pace that far outstrips the appetite (and ability) of the kitchen design community to adopt it. Each year, new products are launched, promising to automate, optimize, and innovate. Start-ups showcase AI-powered space planners, while established manufacturers tout “smart” appliances that can reorder their own filters.
Yet, when one looks at actual adoption rates, the numbers are sobering. Industry surveys suggest that fewer than 10% of professional kitchen designers use AI-based tools in any meaningful way. For most, the burden of learning a new system, integrating it with existing workflows, and trusting its outputs outweighs the putative benefits.
Closing the gap
This is not to say that kitchen designers are Luddites. Rather, it reflects practical realities. The software is often expensive, the outputs generic, and the “intelligence” more artificial than insightful. Moreover, kitchens themselves are governed by codes, health requirements, and operational demands that are difficult to encode into flexible algorithms.
The upshot is that for every leap in AI capability, there is a corresponding lag in industry uptake. The gap is not closing; if anything, it is widening. As AI grows ever more sophisticated, its relevance to kitchen design grows ever more abstract.
Some will argue that this is a temporary state of affairs that AI will inevitably infiltrate every corner of the profession. But this misunderstands what kitchen design is at its essence. There are, of course, aspects of the process that can and probably will be automated, specification schedules, cost calculations, even aspects of traffic flow modeling. But the heart of the kitchen, the interplay of function, aesthetics, and human sensibility, resists codification.
Indeed, the risk is that AI, rather than liberating designers, may actually constrain them. A system that offers “optimal” solutions based on past data is inherently conservative. It rewards what has worked before and penalizes the outlier, the creative leap, the daring experiment. In a field where innovation is often born of necessity, and where every project is a prototype, this is not a recipe for greatness.
Operating in the margins
So, where does this leave us? It is tempting, in this age of technological determinism, to assume that any tool as powerful as AI must eventually find its place at the center of every profession.
But in the world of kitchen design, the story is more complicated. AI will continue to develop, and undoubtedly, some of its tools will find their way into the designer’s toolkit. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, its role will remain marginal, its influence limited by the stubbornly human nature of the work. The paradox is that as AI becomes ever more capable, the value of true design, with all its messiness and magic, becomes ever clearer.
In the final analysis, the real revolution may not be the arrival of AI, but the rediscovery of what makes kitchen design unique: the ability to imagine, to improvise, and to create spaces that are not just efficient, but alive. As technology races ahead, the profession will, quite sensibly, continue to walk at its own pace – one careful, considered step at a time.
Tim Smallwood FFCSI
