How Living with Lolo Uses AI to Run Projects (2026)

Living with Lolo uses custom AI tools, built in-house and integrated with Airtable, to transcribe client calls, generate scoped design proposals automatically, and track procurement and freight shipments in real time. The system was built specifically for how a Scottsdale design-build firm actually works, not adapted from generic software made for a different kind of business.

Business of Home, the design industry’s leading trade publication, recently featured Living with Lolo principal designer Lauren Lerner in a piece on how firms are putting AI in interior design workflows to practical, unglamorous use: note-taking, proposals, and procurement. This post goes further than that feature. It walks through exactly how the tools work, what changed for the Living with Lolo team day to day, and why automating the administrative side of a project makes the client experience faster and more reliable, not more impersonal.

Why a Scottsdale Design-Build Firm Needed to Build Its Own AI System

Most interior design software is built for firms that only do design. Living with Lolo is different. We are a full-service interior design and licensed general contractor operating under one roof, which means a single project generates design scope, construction scope, vendor orders, freight tracking, and change orders simultaneously. None of the off-the-shelf design practice-management tools we tested handled that combination well. They were built for firms that hand off construction to someone else.

So Lauren Lerner built a proprietary system herself, rather than waiting for software vendors to catch up. It is not a side project. It runs the operational backbone of how Living with Lolo manages every client relationship in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Arcadia, and the greater Phoenix metro, from the first discovery call through the final punch list. The goal was never to replace judgment. It was to remove the hours of manual data entry that used to sit between a client conversation and a finished design proposal.

That distinction matters because a lot of firms describe themselves as using AI when what they really mean is a chatbot plugged into a generic website form. Living with Lolo’s system is purpose-built around the actual shape of a design-build project: a call happens, a scope gets discussed, a proposal needs to go out, materials get ordered, and freight needs to be tracked until install day. Each of those steps used to live in a different tool, which meant someone on the team was constantly re-entering the same information by hand. Connecting them into one workflow, rather than buying five separate apps that do not talk to each other, is the part most firms skip because it takes real time to build.

How Living with Lolo Transcribes Every Client Call Automatically

Every discovery call and design meeting at Living with Lolo happens on Google Meet, and every one of those calls generates a transcript automatically. That transcript gets fed into a proprietary system Lauren built on Lovable, a no-code AI app-building platform, which integrates directly with Airtable to handle tasks like creating estimates. “I’m able to capture all the information, and then I’m able to use AI to pull out their project scope and to create a beautifully branded proposal for them that automatically calculates our design fee,” Lauren told Business of Home. “That used to be a really manual process, and now it just happens immediately after the call. I can turn it around really quickly.”

That matters more than it sounds like it should. A new client meeting with an interior designer Scottsdale AZ homeowners actually trust to follow through will remember how quickly the first real document arrived, not just how polished the sales pitch was. Nothing from the call gets paraphrased from memory or buried in someone’s notebook. The scope the client described is the scope that shows up in the proposal, because it came directly from the transcript of what they said.

From Transcript to Proposal: How the Design Fee Gets Calculated Automatically

Once the AI tool pulls the project scope out of a call transcript, it routes that information into Airtable, where it triggers a branded proposal with the design fee calculated automatically based on the scope discussed. Before this system existed, someone on the Living with Lolo team had to manually re-key every detail from a call into a proposal template, then calculate the fee by hand and format the document before it went out. That could take days, especially during a busy season when three or four discovery calls happen in a single week.

What This Means for Timeline and Trust

Now a prospective client can have a scoped, priced proposal in their inbox within hours of hanging up the phone, not the following week. For a homeowner comparing design-build firms in Scottsdale, that turnaround is itself a signal. It tells them the firm they are considering runs a tight operation before the contract is even signed, which is exactly the impression Living with Lolo wants to make before a client ever sees a single fabric sample.

There is also a quieter benefit on the Living with Lolo side. Because the design fee is calculated directly from the scope captured on the call, there is far less room for the kind of pricing inconsistency that creeps in when fees get estimated from memory hours or days later. A project manager is not guessing at square footage or recalling which rooms the client mentioned wanting refreshed. The number in the proposal reflects what was actually discussed, which keeps the fee structure consistent from one Scottsdale client to the next.

Tracking Procurement, Freight, and Shipping Without Losing a Week to Spreadsheets

The second system Lauren built handles the other half of the operation: procurement. It keeps track of order emails, tracking numbers, and shipping updates for every item on every active project. “We use it to keep tabs on what freight really cost, if an item arrived damaged, and since AI knows our install date, it flags us if an ETA is beyond that date,” Lauren explained in the Business of Home feature. “It used to be very manual, right? Someone on our team was spending hours doing this, and we’ve been able to really cut down on that time. So it’s allowed us to grow our firm, and take on more projects and continue to deliver the same quality without having to necessarily add more team members.”

That last point is the one clients should care about most. Procurement is where luxury design projects quietly go sideways: a sofa arrives three weeks late, nobody notices until the install date is already blown, and the client finds out at the worst possible moment. Living with Lolo’s system flags an at-risk shipment the moment the estimated arrival date slips past the install date, which means the team can adjust the schedule or source an alternative long before a client ever has to hear “we’re still waiting on it.”

The same system also tracks freight cost and damage claims across every vendor, which sounds like a small thing until a project involves a dozen trade sources shipping into Scottsdale from across the country. Freight on oversized furniture is rarely a flat fee, and it is easy for actual shipping costs to drift from what was originally budgeted if nobody is watching closely. Having that data centralized means Living with Lolo can catch a damaged piece or an inflated freight charge early, while there is still time to file a claim or push back on a vendor, instead of discovering the discrepancy during final reconciliation.

What the Data Shows: AI Adoption Is Accelerating in Design and Small Business

Living with Lolo is not an outlier for using AI to run back-office operations. Generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in value annually across industries through productivity gains in functions like operations and customer management. (Source: McKinsey & Company, “The Economic Potential of Generative AI,” 2023.) Separately, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s small business research on AI adoption has found roughly four in ten small business owners now report using AI tools in their daily operations, a sharp jump from where adoption stood just a few years earlier.

National averages almost always understate what is happening at the high end of a market, and design-build is no exception. A national small business adopting AI for scheduling is a different proposition than a Scottsdale luxury firm managing six-figure procurement across multiple vendors on a single project, where a missed freight delay can cost real money and real trust. The stakes for getting proposals and procurement right are higher here than the national data captures, which is exactly why Lauren built a system specific to how Living with Lolo actually operates rather than adapting a generic tool.

Why This Matters for Living with Lolo Clients, Not Just Operations

It would be easy to file all of this under “internal process” and move on. That misses the point. Every one of these tools exists to make the client experience better, not just to make the back office more efficient. A faster, more accurate proposal means a client in Silverleaf or DC Ranch gets real numbers sooner instead of waiting on a generic placeholder estimate. A procurement system that flags late freight before the install date means a client in Paradise Valley or Arcadia does not find out about a delay the week their furniture was supposed to arrive.

Living with Lolo has been voted PHOENIX magazine’s Readers’ Choice winner for Interior Design four consecutive years, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026, and that kind of recognition is earned on delivery, not marketing. Running leaner on administration is what has allowed the firm to take on more Scottsdale-area projects without lowering the standard on any single one of them. Clients get the benefit twice: once in how quickly the proposal and scope come together, and again in how tightly the procurement schedule holds up through installation.

AI Handles the Paperwork. A Licensed Scottsdale Design-Build Team Still Runs the Job

None of this software replaces the actual work of design or construction, and it was never meant to. AI pulls scope out of a transcript and calculates a fee. It does not select finishes, resolve a structural conflict with a contractor, or stand in a client’s kitchen and tell them honestly whether an idea will work in their space. That is still Lauren Lerner’s job and the job of the Living with Lolo team, every time.

What the system does change is how much of a project manager’s week gets eaten by data entry instead of decisions. Living with Lolo holds an active Arizona ROC general contractor license, ROC #347577, which already sets the firm apart from design studios that have to coordinate with an outside contractor on every remodel. Pairing that license with proprietary AI tooling for the administrative side is why Living with Lolo can manage a full kitchen remodel or a bathroom renovation in Scottsdale under one contract, with one team accountable for the whole outcome, instead of a client managing two separate vendors who each blame the other when a timeline slips.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI at Living with Lolo in Scottsdale