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.
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.
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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