How To Spend It

Overview

Location: Venice
Type: Thought Leadership
Year: 2024

How To Spend It, the Financial Times' influential luxury title, has spent decades setting the agenda for how its readers think about value. In 2024, the publication turned its authority toward artificial intelligence, an unusual subject for a title built on craftsmanship and heritage, and brought in Kelly Wearstler to make the business and creative case for why the design industry should engage with it seriously. She took the stage in Venice, at the 20th anniversary edition of the title's Business of Luxury Summit.

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Speaking from Practice

Wearstler was an early mover on the technology itself, her studio had been building generative AI into its process since 2021, well before the tools were a fixture of any design conversation. That made her a credible messenger for a publication whose authority rests on telling real value apart from a passing trend, someone already living with the tools rather than speculating about them from the outside.

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A design case for AI

Kelly refused to treat AI as a single black box and instead broke it down into specific collaborators assigned to specific jobs. Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini for drafting creative briefs and shaping a design narrative before anything gets built. Midjourney and Krea for early visual exploration, massing studies and material palettes that sit alongside hand sketches on the studio wall rather than replacing them. Internal models trained on her own design archive for form development, testing proportion and joinery across dozens of iterations. Runway for turning a concept into something a client can feel emotionally before a single element exists physically. The throughline was the same one she's made elsewhere: the tools expand what's possible to try, they don't replace the judgment that decides what's worth keeping.

Many people see the introduction of AI as a challenge, but I think of it as one of the greatest tools for growth. AI has exponentially enriched our creative process.

Kelly Wearstler