Questions,
answered properly.

Yes. Rhiannon studied interior design and started her practice about a decade ago, when her children were young. She practised for five to six years before coaching began, and she still takes on design clients.

Before design, she spent 15 years in senior leadership in product development and marketing in the travel industry. That commercial background is load-bearing — it's why she talks about P&Ls, margin, and business architecture the way she does, and why designers who've only ever had design-industry mentors find her perspective quite different.

The coaching wasn't a pivot. It happened organically because other designers noticed she'd cracked the US market from Australia, built a genuinely flexible business she could take anywhere, and seemed to have figured out something they hadn't seen modelled before.

In 2022, she downloaded Jasper — one of the early AI writing tools. She had a paid subscription, regularly forgetting it existed, and too uncertain about plagiarism to use the outputs properly. Early exposure without much confidence.

What that early period gave her was familiarity. When ChatGPT entered the mainstream, she wasn't afraid of it. She dove in immediately and went deep from day one — while most of the industry was still treating AI as something to watch from a distance.

She's been building AI systems inside design studios since 2022. Three years ahead of the current conversation. That's not a credential she lists — it's just obvious in the specificity of what she teaches.

Melbourne, Australia. But her programs are global. Studio CEO and Studio Build have included designers from the USA, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Time zones are managed with flexibility — cohort times have been adjusted for international students when needed.

The one exception: in-person AI workshops are currently available in Melbourne Metro and the Macedon Ranges only.

No. Rhiannon doesn't have commercial relationships with any AI platform. She recommends tools based on what she's found useful inside design studios — not based on affiliate arrangements. Her view is that tool recommendations should change as the tools change, and that the foundation she teaches (documented studio infrastructure) transfers across any platform.

The honest answer: fewer than you think, and different ones than you've probably been told.

Rhiannon's position is that designers should focus AI attention on productivity, automation, and business infrastructure — not on image generation and video creation. Keep the creative work manual. Your creativity shouldn't look AI-generated. The role of AI in a design studio is to give you back the time to be creative, not to replace the creative act.

The tools that consistently deliver ROI for design studios are the ones that handle language-based business tasks: client communication, proposal drafting, SOPs, scope building, marketing copy, scheduling logic. Claude and ChatGPT are the primary platforms she works with, used in conjunction with automation tools to build genuine workflows — not just one-off prompts.

What she doesn't recommend: AI agents (see the question on that below). Generic "AI for designers" products that work equally well for a florist, a lawyer, and a wedding photographer. If a tool hasn't been built for the specific shape of interior design work, significant configuration is required before it's useful — and most designers don't know that until after they've subscribed.

Prompting is the interface. Literacy is understanding the machine well enough to direct it properly.

A prompt library won't save you. Fifty prompts for interior designers will give you fifty outputs that sound generic, because the AI has no idea who you are, how your studio works, what your fees look like, or how you communicate with clients. You're asking a stranger to write in your voice and hoping they've guessed correctly.

AI literacy — in Rhiannon's definition — means being confident in your behaviours and habits around AI tools. Understanding what a large language model is and what it can and can't do. Knowing which tool to use for which task (you don't use a language model to check your numbers; you don't use an image generator to draft a proposal). And understanding enough about how these systems reason that you can direct them, not just prompt them.

The practical difference: a designer with genuine AI literacy and a well-documented studio context will consistently outperform a designer with great prompts and no documentation. Every time.

The tagline is: the future belongs to documented businesses. Here's why.

An AI tool is only as useful as what you bring to it. Without documentation — your studio's voice, your processes, your pricing logic, your client profiles, your aesthetic vocabulary — you're using a powerful tool on blank settings. The output will always be generic, and you'll spend more time fixing it than it would have taken to write it yourself.

Documentation is the context layer that makes AI actually work for your studio specifically. A proposal drafted by an AI that has never read your scope structure, doesn't know your fee model, and can't recognise your voice is useless. A proposal drafted by an AI trained on your complete studio documentation is a different tool entirely.

The designers getting extraordinary results from AI are not the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who did the less glamorous work of writing down how their business actually operates — and then feeding that into the tools.

This is why Studio Build exists. And why it's the offer Rhiannon is most focused on in 2026.

Rhiannon's current position: not yet, and the silence about this in the AI education space is a problem.

AI agents are autonomous systems that act on your behalf — they book things, send emails in your voice, connect to your calendar, make purchases, sometimes connect to financial accounts — without you reviewing each step. The pitch is efficiency. The risk is unsupervised decision-making in a client-facing context.

For a design studio, the layers of risk are significant: you're managing client relationships that run for 12–24 months, handling sensitive financial and access information, and operating in a context where a single wrong communication can damage a relationship that took years to build. An AI agent making a mistake on your behalf may not surface until after the damage is done.

This is not an anti-AI position. It's a pro-informed position. The technology is developing fast. Rhiannon's advice is to hold on agents until the security, audit, and accountability infrastructure catches up with the capability.

This is the conversation almost completely absent from AI education for designers — and its absence is irresponsible.

Interior designers hold some of the most sensitive personal information of anyone's professional life: client home addresses, security system details, property access codes during renovations, renovation budgets, insurance information. Most of this information is flowing through AI tools every time a designer pastes a brief, uploads a site visit transcript, or drafts a proposal in an AI platform.

Most AI tools — particularly free tiers — retain the content you put into them. Some train on it. The default settings are not privacy-first. In Australia, privacy obligations around client data are real and apply to design businesses.

This is not a reason to stop using AI. It's a reason to use it with your eyes open. Know which tools are safe for client data. Know what you're agreeing to in the terms of service. Know what enterprise-grade privacy actually means versus what a tool's marketing says about it.

Rhiannon covers this specifically in Studio CEO and Studio Build. It's one of the reasons she teaches AI literacy as a whole rather than tool tutorials.

No — but the question is slightly wrong.

Interior designers who understand AI will work differently to those who don't. Faster on the administrative and documentation layer. More consistent on communication. More time available for the work that actually requires their creative judgment and spatial intelligence.

The competitive threat isn't from AI replacing designers. It's from designers who've built operational AI literacy outcompeting those who haven't. The client comparing three proposals doesn't know or care which one used AI for the draft. They care about quality, clarity, and confidence. The designer who had four hours of creative thinking time instead of six hours of admin time is likely to produce the better proposal.

What AI cannot replace in a design studio: spatial reasoning built on years of practice, aesthetic discernment, client relationship management, trade knowledge, site interpretation, and the design eye itself. Keep those manual. Automate everything else.

Established interior designers. Not beginners.

Specifically: designers who are talented, booked, and quietly exhausted. Who've built something real but never built the business infrastructure to match. Who are doing both the design work and all the admin. Who are undercharging not because they lack confidence but because they've never had their pricing properly restructured. Who have ChatGPT open in a tab but aren't using it as anything more than a search engine with better grammar.

The program is not for someone looking for their first client. The cohort works because everyone in it is at the same stage. That's not a gate — it's what makes the container actually useful.

These are documented outcomes, not marketing promises:

• Approximately 15 hours per week reclaimed when AI tools and systems are fully implemented
• Course investment typically recovered by Week 3, when pricing and profitability structures are rebuilt — this happens almost universally
• Revenue increases in almost every cohort — rate restructures have tripled hourly rates for some clients
• The majority begin getting published in print media — this is a frequent goal worked toward in the program
• Designers move from reactive to directive — from operator to owner, in practice, not just in framing

One specific example: Katie joined Studio CEO charging investment-guide details/hour. Published in The Local Project, The Design Files, and Home Beautiful. Five years in business. Her week audit showed 12 hours of admin — work that didn't need her. 12 hours × investment-guide details = investment-guide details per week absorbed by tasks that weren't design. Over investment-guide details of billable capacity lost annually. She didn't hire. She built leverage. AI absorbed the repetitive work. Her rate moved to investment-guide details. Her calendar opened.

She didn't become more talented. She stopped operating smaller than she was.

Each week: one 90-minute live call on a specific business topic, plus a roadmap that walks through implementation with resources. The format is live, not pre-recorded — Rhiannon is in the room, as are the other four designers in the cohort.

The cohort size is deliberate. Five people means the sessions are specific, not generic. There's no hiding and no reason to. Questions are answered in the context of the actual business, not a theoretical version of it.

Investment details for Studio CEO are available in the investment guide. Download the guide for current inclusions, format, and payment options.

Download the investment guide

Several cohorts run per year. Places are limited to five per cohort.

Current dates and application details are on the Studio CEO page on this website. That page is the most up-to-date source for intake timing.

No. Studio CEO has included designers from Australia, New Zealand, the USA, UK, Ireland, and Southeast Asia. Where time zones create challenges — particularly for UK-based designers — cohort timing has been adjusted to accommodate. If you're serious about joining and the time difference is a concern, get in touch and it can be worked through.

A working studio brain and studio heart — externally documented and ready to be pointed at any large language model they choose to work with. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever comes next.

The documentation is tool-agnostic. That's intentional. The AI landscape is changing fast. The studio that builds its documentation now isn't locked into any single platform — because the context travels.

Beyond the documentation itself: the ability to genuinely start outsourcing. To humans or to automation. Because the instructions exist. Because the processes are written down. Because the studio no longer lives entirely in the founder's head.

Which means more time for the work designers actually love: heading to the tile shop, building a flatlay, pulling together a concept. The things that require the human creative brain, not the administrative one.

Studio CEO is the 12-week commercial transformation — the full business: pricing, positioning, marketing, systems, leadership, AI tools, operational backbone.

Studio Build is a 6-week deep dive on one specific thing: building the external documentation and AI context infrastructure. It can be done alongside Studio CEO, before it, or after it.

If Studio CEO is the business education, Studio Build is the operational build. One gives you the commercial clarity. The other gives you the documented structure that makes AI genuinely work for your studio.

Investment details for Studio Build are available in the investment guide. Download the guide for current inclusions, format, and payment options.

Download the investment guide

Half-day, in-person AI literacy workshops for small design firms and studio teams. Typically 5?7 people. Currently available in Melbourne Metro and Macedon Ranges only.

Not a keynote. A working session where the team actually uses AI during the day and leaves with something they built ? real automations, real quick wins, real daily habits. Built specifically for design studios, not adapted from a corporate template.

Download the investment guide

Yes. Topics: AI literacy for creative businesses, data privacy and responsibility in AI, the future of interior design studio operations, and commercial strategy for creative businesses.

Her keynote positioning: not the AI hype talk. The one that helps people think clearly about what's coming and what to do about it.

The Designing Success podcast. It's the clearest window into how she thinks about design businesses, AI, and commercial strategy — in her actual voice, not in sales page language.

From there: the Studio CEO page if you're an established designer ready to work on the full business picture. Studio Build if your primary focus is AI implementation and documentation right now.

Because it's not generic business coaching adapted for designers. It's coaching built from inside a design practice, for designers specifically.

Rhiannon knows the project types, the client archetypes, the fee structures, the scope creep patterns, the particular way a design business makes and loses money. She doesn't apply general business principles and ask you to translate them. She speaks the language of the industry because she works in it.

The designers who've had generic coaching and found it didn't land — the concepts sounded right but the application didn't connect — are often the ones who respond most strongly to working with Rhiannon. Because for the first time, they don't have to do the translation work themselves.

Worth knowing:

• She doesn't work with designers looking for their first client. Studio CEO requires an established studio.
• She doesn't teach specific tool hacks, platform shortcuts, or tricks designed to game a current AI feature. Her view: these have a short shelf life, and the foundation she builds lasts longer than any single tool.
• She doesn't offer generic AI literacy content adapted from corporate or non-design contexts.
• She doesn't operate as a tech consultant or developer. Her work is commercial strategy and AI implementation within the specific context of a design business.
• She doesn't run large group programs. Small cohorts are a design choice, not a capacity constraint.

Almost everyone arrives asking: which AI tool should I use?

The question she wishes they'd ask: what does my studio need to document before any tool can be useful to me?

The tool is the last decision. The documentation — the studio brain, the context layer, the written record of how the business actually works — comes first. Build that, and the question of which tool almost answers itself.