AI assisted design at scale, lessons from Kohler
Kohler's industrial design team cut presentation production from 50% of a designer's time to 20%. Same headcount, 60% less time making pictures, more time on product.
The problem
Two years of dead ends
General AI tools had already proven the idea was viable. Kohler's design team tested them on a full project two years earlier. But the tools never stuck in the day-to-day workflow. Meanwhile, half of a senior designer's week was still going to renderings, posters, and slides, time that came directly out of concept exploration.
Animation work was worse: motion that consultancies billed for, on their own schedule, sat outside the designer's control entirely.
Our solution
Designers chose it first
A few designers tried Vizcom on their own. The output spoke for itself, and adoption spread with no directive from above. By November 2025, Kohler deployed it enterprise-wide: the same handful of curious users had already become 50+ active designers across categories.
Today the team works from a single workflow that's generated 86k assets.
Production time becomes design time: Half of a senior designer's week went to renderings, posters, and slides. That share is now a fifth, and the difference goes to concept exploration.
Outsourced animation comes back in-house: Motion work that consultancies billed for, on their own schedule, is now a fifteen-minute step in the designer's own file.
Adoption that didn't need enforcing: A handful of curious designers became 50+ active users globally. Designers say they don't want to go back to KeyShot.
"We went from basically a handful of curious designers to 50-plus active users globally."Connor McManus, Senior Industrial Designer, Kohler
By scale, that's one workflow producing what used to require a full production pipeline: renderings, posters, slides, and motion work all from the same file.
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