Here's a funny thing about making drawings faster: the drawing isn't usually the thing you're waiting for.
You can have six facade options ready in an afternoon. And I mean six proper options, not the same idea from six slightly different angles. Six different directions that are developed enough to actually show someone and ask, "What do you think?" That's a huge change from where things were a few years ago. Work that might have taken a week can now take a morning. The speedup is real. There's no point pretending otherwise.
Then you send the six options to the client, and suddenly you've created six things they can have an opinion about.
She likes the massing on the second one. The windows on the fourth are closer to what she had in mind, but not quite. Could the balcony from the first one go onto the third? Her husband has now looked through all six and, naturally, likes the one you weren't particularly excited about. None of this is unreasonable. You gave her six options, so she's responding to six options. But what you thought was going to make the process quicker has just created a much bigger conversation.
And that's the bit I find interesting. We got very good at making the output faster. We didn't necessarily make the agreement faster.
Two options usually give you a choice. Six options give you combinations. Now you're not just asking, "Which one do you like?" You're asking what someone likes about each one, what can be borrowed from another, what needs changing, what needs explaining and whether the thing they liked on Tuesday is still the thing they like on Friday. The afternoon you saved on production can quite easily disappear into three more rounds of discussion.
And it doesn't stop at the client. Every extra drawing you produce is another thing that needs to be named, versioned, issued, explained and eventually tracked. If you've suddenly got four versions of a bathroom detail instead of one, that's four things floating around the project. Someone needs to know which one is current. Someone needs to make sure the consultant is working from the right one. Someone needs to answer the inevitable question six months later when a contractor sends you a screenshot of a drawing nobody remembers issuing. Faster production is great. But more production also means more stuff to coordinate.
This is why the usual conversation about speed can feel a little incomplete. The slowest part of a project has rarely been the bit where someone is actually drawing. Think about the last few projects that ran late. Was it because the architect needed another three weeks to finish the drawing? Maybe sometimes. But much more often, it was because the client needed three weeks to decide, the structural engineer went quiet, an approval got stuck somewhere, someone built from an old drawing, or two people were waiting for each other to answer a question. The drawing was done. The project just wasn't moving.
And that's where the maths gets a little less exciting. If drawing production takes up a fifth of the time a project takes from start to finish, and you cut that production time in half, you've saved a tenth of the overall time. That's still a useful gain. Obviously. Nobody is arguing that drawing faster is bad. But it isn't going to transform the whole project unless something else changes too. Otherwise, you've simply made one part of the process faster while the same bottleneck sits further down the line.
So the interesting question isn't really, "How much faster can we make the drawing?" It's, "What happens to everything that comes after the drawing?" If you can produce more options, can the client make decisions quickly enough to deal with them? If you can produce four variants before lunch, can the rest of the team keep track of which one is actually live? If revisions are happening faster, can the project keep up with the number of things now moving around it?
Because this isn't really an argument against any of these tools. Quite the opposite. Faster production is useful. The mistake is assuming that faster production automatically means a faster project. Sometimes it just means you've reached the next bottleneck sooner.
And that bottleneck is often coordination, which is probably the least glamorous part of the whole thing. Nobody gets excited about a beautifully organised drawing register. Nobody posts a video of a perfectly tracked decision. But if the information isn't clear, if nobody knows what was issued, if a decision is sitting with someone for two weeks, or if three people are working from three different versions, the project doesn't care how quickly the original drawing was produced.
There's a very simple way to see whether this is actually happening in your own practice. Pick a recent project and look at where the months went. Not the fee breakdown. The actual elapsed time. How long did you wait for decisions? How long were consultants waiting for each other? How much time went into production, and how much went into everything around it? Most studios haven't really looked at it this way. And the answer can be quite revealing. If drawing production turns out to be a relatively small part of the overall timeline, making it twice as fast isn't going to solve the thing that is actually making the project feel slow.
Projectsmate gives that faster production somewhere to land. You can see where the project is, what was issued, what came back and what is actually current, so the extra output doesn't just become extra versions for everyone to remember.
AI has made the drawing faster. That's a real gain. But a project still has to wait for someone to decide, someone to respond and everyone to work from the same thing. And none of those have ever been drawing problems.