Project Summary: 

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping architectural practice, both disrupting established ways of working and enabling new ways for firms to design, work with clients, deliver projects, and generate value from their expertise. Many architecture leaders can already see these changes coming. The harder challenge is deciding how their firms should respond – and turning that foresight into viable business model innovation: changes to the system of interdependent activities through which the firm creates, delivers, and captures value. 

This research examines why some AI-related strategic initiatives gain traction inside architecture firms while others stall, despite an apparently strong commercial or operational case. As part of a broader UNSW research program across professional service firms, it investigates how strategic foresight translates into business model innovation – from recognising emerging technological change, through designing a response, to putting that response into practice. In doing so, it explores how organisational capabilities, internal dynamics, and external pressures combine to shape that process. 

Architecture provides a particularly revealing setting. AI is reshaping the expert work at the heart of the profession, while professional standards, partnership structures, client relationships, and liability exposure can all influence which changes firms pursue and how they implement them. Within this broader process, the research is especially interested in how partners, staff, clients, peers, and regulators react to proposed changes (measured as organisational/managerial expectations) – and how those reactions shape progress. 

The project will draw on interviews with architecture professionals, followed by a cross-firm survey. Participating firms will contribute to a broader evidence base and receive practical insights drawn from anonymised cross-firm findings on where and why initiatives gain or lose momentum, and what distinguishes those that progress from those that stall. These insights are intended to help leaders understand what they can do to turn strategic foresight into viable business model innovation.