WHAT 2025 AI WORKSHOPS HAVE TAUGHT ABOUT THE
Future of Lighting Design By RANDY REID
Emad Hasan (IALD, moderator), Matt Alleman (IALD), Ketryna Fares (IALD), and Brandon Thrasher (IALD, CLD) at the 2025 IALD Enlighten Americas Conference
Over the past year, I’ve become a repeat customer at AI sessions. I’ve sat in packed rooms at Boston Lights, IALD Enlighten Americas, ArchLIGHT Summit, and the NALMCO Convention, laptop in hand, trying to make sense of what this technology really means for our industry. At Boston Lights I attended a workshop called “Lighting the Way With AI” that aimed to give designers and manufacturers a practical starting point. At IALD Enlighten Americas, the panel “AI and Lighting Design: Creators, Challenges, and Protecting the Craft” dug into ethics, education, and data. In Dallas, ArchLIGHT Summit hosted “Intelligence by Design: How AI is Shaping Lighting, Architecture, and Everyday Workflows,” where a cross-disciplinary panel showed how quickly AI is moving from novelty to daily tool. And at NALMCO’s 72nd convention I listened to “AI Surge,” a session for maintenance contractors and distributors who care less about prompts and more about truck rolls and margins. Different audiences, different pressures—but the same undercurrent: AI is no longer theoretical. It is here, it is messy, and it will reshape how we design, sell, and maintain lighting.
AI as a Fast, Opinionated Collaborator
The first consistent theme is speed. At ArchLIGHT’s 28
designing lighting
“Intelligence by Design” session, Joshua Miller, Manager at Acuity, described how generative tools are changing visualization. A quick sketch and a few lines of text can now turn into near-photographic imagery in minutes. Joshua’s team uses AI to “up-res” concept renderings at the end of the process, making everyday visuals look like polished marketing pieces. He also noted something I’ve seen in multiple studios: when AI is in the mix, more people participate. The quiet team member who would never touch a pencil will happily type a prompt and share an idea. That broader participation is healthy, as long as someone still curates the results. In the Boston Lights discussion “Lighting the Way With AI,” AI was framed as a pushy junior collaborator. It throws out options at reckless speed. Some are brilliant, many are unusable, and all of them need a senior designer’s judgment. Used well, AI becomes an extra set of hands, one that never gets tired of iterating the fourth option for a lobby cove or rewriting the sixth version of a concept statement.
Keeping Concepts Honest When Images Look Too Real The dark side of that speed is realism. AI images are so convincing that they can quietly reset expectations.
At ArchLIGHT, Lisa Reed, Principal at Reed Burkett Lighting Design, warned that clients often arrive with AI fantasies in