That Home Loan Hub
Welcome to That Home Loan Hub, your ultimate guide to mastering the world of home loans and property. I'm Zebunisso Alimova, here to simplify the complexities of real estate and provide you with expert insights and the latest trends.
Whether you're a first-time homebuyer, an experienced investor, or simply curious about the property market, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we unlock the secrets to property success and help you make informed decisions. Let's dive into the world of property together!
That Home Loan Hub
AI, Architecture, And The Human Touch
Fear about AI replacing architects is loud, but the reality is more nuanced and far more useful. We sit down with architect Micah Ricards to map where AI makes the work better—clearer emails, cleaner briefs, sharper questions—and where it hits a hard wall, like carrying responsibility for design decisions that affect how people live day to day. From first contact to final plan, we unpack the line between speed and stewardship.
Micah walks us through how he actually starts a home: not with a prompt, but with training, precedent, and the lived experience of walking cities and studying how real rooms work. We talk candidly about feeding floor plans to AI to surface blind spots, then stress-test those ideas against site constraints, codes, structure, and the messy truth of budgets. The key theme is judgment. A model can suggest a layout; a professional stands by it when the dishwasher blocks a drawer or a beam clashes with services.
We also dig into visualisation. Static 3D images and simple walkthroughs help clients understand space early, when changes are cheap. VR can add immersion, but even a slick 4D tour won’t tell you how winter sun hits a breakfast table or whether two cooks can dance around a kitchen island. Used well, these tools build confidence and reduce risk; used blindly, they create false certainty. Along the way, we share prompt hygiene tips, laugh about bots with attitude, and underline why accountability and the human touch still anchor the design process.
If you care about architecture, homebuilding, and responsible use of AI in design, this conversation offers practical tactics and a clear-eyed view of what to automate and what to hold close. Subscribe, share this with a friend planning a build, and leave a review with your biggest question about AI in the design process.
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Hello and welcome back. We're going to talk about AI and architecture and how it affects people these days. And I have a fantastic guest back, Micah Ricards.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01:I went British again, didn't I?
SPEAKER_00:I'm sorry. Not at all, not at all.
SPEAKER_01:Micah, thank you so much for coming back. In the last episode we've discussed, we're going to touch on the future of architecture and AI and what it's going to look like, really. Because these days, a lot of people are worried that they're going to get redundant because, you know, the rise of the technology.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's kind of a we're on the cusp of something and we don't know how big it is going to be.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So are you worried for your job?
SPEAKER_00:I'm not worried for my job, but I'm sure it's going to shape my job. And there is definitely some training that I'm going to need to do to work out how to best use and grapple with AI and the building industry.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, hit me with it. Are you currently using AI?
SPEAKER_00:I use it in a small capacity. So a big part of my job that I alluded to in the previous episode is actually m managing a building process, managing people and the things that go wrong and the things that go right and finances and all of that kind of thing. So this is a huge part of my job. And so what that inevitably means is I'm managing risk and I'm managing communications with people. And so that means writing a lot of emails and thoughtful emails that really lay out the complexity of building. And so I find AI very useful for that. I usually draft something up and most of the time we'll run it through an AI, an AI bot just to tidy it up, but also make me think about things that maybe I haven't expressed clearly enough. Because there's a lot there's a lot riding on this professional aspect of dealing with clients' largest assets. And so the benefit of me being on the project and using AI is to really manage this process to the best of my abilities and deliver a smooth process.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. And what about like when you're drafting things? Would you use some sort of AI to help you draft? As in design. Sorry, design. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So I don't use it specifically in the early process, but what I do find interesting is actually feeding into AI, a floor plan that I've created and just seeing, well, what's it coming back with? What's what's this talking to me about? And it does make mistakes sometimes, but interestingly, it pops questions to you that make you just pause and go, hmm. And so that's really important as a sole practitioner to have someone to bounce things off a little bit. So I don't want to say that AI is my best friend. It's far from my best friend. And I do have colleagues that I talk to on a very regular basis. But I think it's quite good to just, yeah. I don't think AI is going to replace me. And there's also a big question of, well, someone might say I can get a floor plan drawn by AI. But I think the question is, is AI taking responsibility for its floor plan? Is AI really looking after you in this floor plan? And I don't think you can replace a person for that.
SPEAKER_01:And I think this is where we will hit it, right? I think we will go through this wave of, yeah, technology is taking over, blah, blah, blah. But then I feel like there will be a snap moment where people will realize that you cannot replace the human touch. Especially like in our industry, we talk a lot about how AI can help you to do your budgeting. AI can help you to, you know, sort out what home loan rates you should have or how long you should fix it for, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, I feel like people still come to us. And AI helps them, as you say, have that little voice outside of their head that they talk to, and then they get all these ideas, and then they come to us, to other real humans to talk to and exercise and to get the judgment and verify still.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and verify that goes with it.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I think AI will help us to get better and faster at our job. And I think those that have the brains, have the goods and the smarts and the tools, they will be able to maximize the use of AI for the good of their industry.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Yeah, I I I really feel like you've yeah, you've hit the nail there. Yeah. Again, the nail? The nail, yeah, the nail on the head. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But I was always curious about you know how people in your industry uh design the floor plans and what do you refer to? Like, do you if someone if I come to you and I say, okay, Mike, uh, I need a house that's functional for XYZ, where do you start?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, I definitely won't be jumping on AI at that point. Like, I'm actually drawing on the training I've done, my experience living overseas in France, looking at buildings. Every time I'm walking somewhere, I'm looking and looking at buildings and really you can't escape them. They're everywhere. And so I'm really drawing on that experience and and and drawing on my knowledge of how space works and how space functions and pulling them all together. So yeah, I I AI can't replace that. I and there's a there's a personal touch there, there's a there's a real understanding of getting into the into the person's head, the client's head, and understanding how they work and fleshing things out in ways drawing on your experience that will suit them. And uh I don't think you can replace a computer for that.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, I agree with you. No, thank you for that. Does your AI have a name, like the chat bot that you use?
SPEAKER_00:Oh no, I haven't got that far yet. No, no.
SPEAKER_01:I called, uh I gave mine a name. Uh I don't know why I call him he, but um, he's got a bit of an attitude, I've noticed. Yep, yeah, and then my friends were laughing because they're like, Well, you're the one that trained him, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, no surprise he's got an attitude.
SPEAKER_00:When I do use it, I do have to remind the AI, forget everything previous. Give me a fresh take on things sometimes, so it doesn't please forget. Yeah, that's just to give me a fresh, fresh perspective on things.
SPEAKER_01:Good tip. Good tip. I was really blown away today. I went to AI to ask something, and he referred me to my love. He goes, Okay, my love, let me get this for you. And I was like, Whoa, where did that come from?
SPEAKER_00:This is a bit much.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was really interesting.
SPEAKER_00:There is one area actually where AI will be more and more useful, and that's in creating visualizations of plans for clients so they can really understand the spaces that have been created for them. And so it is hard to understand 2D floor plans, and so being able to have an image of something gives a client confidence, understanding you're able to troubleshoot things when it's early on in the planning phase, so avoiding a costly mistake later down the line. So we can give clients confidence when they yeah, when they have their 3D imaging that enables them to walk through a space and yeah, get a feel for it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I know one of the builders here on Carpeti and they announced that they were using 4D or 5D imagery, you know, where you could like wear those goggles and walk around the space and it gives you this whole floor map, map floor, like a floor floor plan. Um and and then you could, you know, realize what it looks like once it's built.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that's definitely taking it to a next level with the whole walkthrough experience. Um I haven't gone there yet. Um we produce uh good static images that uh that give a client a good feel for things.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, as I said, like I wish this sort of stuff existed when I was building, you know, my house 10 years ago. Maybe it did exist, I just didn't know about it. But also, like even this house, you know, three, four years ago when we were in the planning stages, and I had to do a lot of planning just by imagining things and how things will look like and feel like and walking. But even then, like this is a third house I built, and you would think, okay, by now I should have some sort of sense of things. But even then, once I built it, I was like, damn, I should have done this, this way, not that way.
SPEAKER_00:I I it's funny because even having a walkthrough, a 3D walkthrough, 4D walk through a place, you're not gonna catch everything. I it's just not, I think, possible to really get an impression for things. Like the actual impression of space will not be the real one. The actual understanding of how your kitchen flows and works, like that will not be the be-wall and end all. It's a sm it's a tool that'll help us, but ultimately I think we need the the the faith and the human connection and experience for someone like an architect to to guide you through and say, no, no, I think this is a correct size for your space. My experience tells me this, this is where the dishwasher needs to be, or something like that, for example.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Because yeah, zooming through something in 4D, it's a tool, but but it's not a replacement.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, I love that. I think the human touch will remain the most important touch in a process where it involves people's biggest assets, people's place where they spend most of their time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And where they sleep and where they eat, and where they that's their safe zone, right? And getting AI to fully design this for you and not having any interactions with the human is a risk attack.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think so. Okay. AI is not taking responsibility for it at the end of the day at all.
SPEAKER_01:I think that'll be the title of this episode. AI does not take responsibility.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. They I don't know how much they've got your back, but we'll, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and that's another scary thing, right? Like what I've noticed recently was my AI, and I thought that was hilarious. So training AI agents in Core Pilot, you can create AI agents and they can help you draft those letters and you know do various tasks for you. So I went to ChatGPT because this is where I've used ChatGPT the most for the last year and a bit, and he knows quite a lot about me. So I said to ChatGPT, I'm training AI agent, I need a prompt. Can you give me the prompts? So it created prompts, and one of the prompts it said to the AI agent, do not call her Zeb, because he knows I don't know. Yes, I don't like being called Zeb, and I would have told us to ChatGPT not to call me Zeb. And then as I was reading the prompt, at the bottom of the prompt it says, da-da-da-da-da. But if Zepp gives you a task, oh then do XYZ. And I was like, dude, you just told the AI agent not to call me Zeb, but then you call me Zeb behind my back.
SPEAKER_00:Stabbing you.
SPEAKER_01:Oh no! So it definitely does not have your back. So that's why I wonder if he was you know saying to me my love, just to make it up for me today. Maybe. I don't know, but uh we all decided that um Z Bot has attitude and he needs some training further.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Isn't it funny?
SPEAKER_00:Very, very interesting. God, it's in minefield and it's a huge, huge new precipice that we're on, isn't it? It's crazy.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Micah, thank you so much for coming in today. My pleasure. And for those that missed out, we've recorded a couple of episodes with Micah, and he will be back. If you do have any questions for him that you he would you would love for him to cover, please let us know and um we'll pass them on and we'll create some new episodes. Thank you, Micah.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. Thank you, Zeboniso.
SPEAKER_01:Bye. Not Zeb.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I was careful.
