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Cyncly CEO Anand Krishnan has a pragmatic view of AI. For kitchen and bathroom retailers, he says, it should mean doing more business, more efficiently, while taking care of the jobs designers would rather not do.

And his view carries weight given Cyncly’s scale. Behind familiar KBB software such as Winner Flex, Virtual Worlds and EQ Flex, it has more than 70,000 customers across 100-plus countries, including 3,000 in the UK.

But its ambitions go well beyond CAD. Krishnan wants to connect the entire customer journey, from those first thoughts about a new kitchen or bathroom through design, ordering, manufacturing and installation.

And technology, he believes, is fundamentally changing that journey.

“Traditionally, when we talk about the buyer journey, we start from the point when someone walks into a showroom,” he says. “But I think we all know that journey actually started long before that back when they were sitting in their living room on their phones or laptops.

“Gone are the days of waiting for someone to walk through the physical front door before saying ‘hello’ for the first time. The sale starts much earlier now.

“Imagine if you allowed them to pick up that phone, take a picture of that kitchen, throw it up on a website and have AI auto-design a bunch of initial ideas to play around with. You’ve now taken that little spark of an idea and fanned it into a little bit of a flame.”

Krishnan claims nearly 90% of consumers thinking about a refurbishment never reach a showroom. He believes technology can help retailers capture more of those who disappear along the way.

“The stages of the journey haven’t changed, but the key difference between past and present is that the information, the data, the buyer insight, the parts they like – all of that information now survives the handover between every stage. That’s fundamentally why what used to take weeks can now take days.”

But where does this leave the designer? For Krishnan, AI’s real benefit is taking away “grunt work”.

“When designers tell you that they spend a couple of hours just trying to get to a photorealistic render and converting a line drawing to a rendering, that can be done by AI.

“Generating initial design ideas and proposals can be done that way too but it won’t be the last mile, it’ll be the very first mile.”

What AI cannot replicate, he argues, is the judgement and trust behind a high-value sale.

“The customer comes in with a view, however they got to it. They’re relying on a designer to apply their judgement to the questions that only they can answer, and this matters even more as you move up the price ranges. Someone is making a big purchase and they rely on your expertise and trust to get to that transaction faster.”

Cyncly is investing heavily in AI, but Krishnan is wary of using the label simply because it is fashionable.

“There’s a lot of stuff about AI that does not do what it says on the tin yet. It’s promising, but isn’t ready and what we will not do is throw something untested in. When we think something is capable of real work in the real world, we will build it into our products in ways that make our customers able to do more.”

His vision is for more productive designers across the industry.

“These are the things that humans will always continue to do. They will just do it to a greater degree and hopefully spend their time on the things they most enjoy and offload some of the work that slows it down.”

To find out more about Cyncly go to cyncly.com

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Listen to the full interview with Anand Krishnan in a special episode of The kbbreview Podcast. Simply search ‘kbbreview’ wherever you get your podcasts.