Episode Details

In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Nicole Chavas, President and COO of Greenprint Partners, and Hillary Thompson, Principal at MBH Architects, for a candid conversation about what they are learning as they turn AI experiments into meaningful business transformation.

Both Nicole and Hillary are senior leaders who are also personally building agents and redesigning workflows, which gives them a close-up view of not only what the technology can do, but what it reveals about their firms. Again and again, they have found that building with AI exposes the same underlying questions: What does good look like? Is this actually our standard, or just what we happen to do today? Is the knowledge documented clearly enough to use? And are we redesigning the work itself, or simply bolting AI onto an existing process?

One of the clearest lessons is that scalable transformation often means going smaller, slower, and together. Nicole describes initially trying to move quickly, work largely on her own, and use agents to redesign entire business processes at once. What she learned was that proposal development and project management are really collections of interconnected subprocesses, and that lasting change requires a different approach: involve the people doing the work, break the system into smaller pieces, focus on the highest-impact opportunities, define what good looks like, redesign each subprocess for an AI-enabled way of working, and then train the firm on the new process.

Hillary describes a parallel journey at MBH, where rapid prototyping with firm leaders through an “agent charrette” surfaced her leadership team’s dreams for AI-driven business transformation. Rapid prototyping then exposed the undocumented processes, conflicting standards, duplicated effort, and poor data quality standing in the way of their dreams. In that sense, AI serves as an organizational mirror because when agents struggle, they often teach you something about the business.

But process redesign is only part of the challenge. The other major constraint is change capacity. Nicole and Hillary are both operating in environments where the technology is improving faster than their organizations can realistically absorb change. They discuss experimenting with “good enough” solutions, following the energy of early adopters, sharing successful use cases between peers, building trust with skeptics, and giving leaders closer to day-to-day project work permission to control the pace of change.

The goal is to build a trusted core of people at their firms who can experiment, interpret what is changing, and act as a kind of shock absorber for the rest of the organization. This helps the firm move fast without forcing everyone to experience the full chaos of living at the bleeding edge of the AI frontier.

The throughline is that AI itself is not the point. It is an increasingly powerful catalyst for redesigning the business around the fundamentals AEC firms have always cared about: high-quality work teams are proud of, profitably run projects, happy clients, and engaged employees.

Guests

Nicole Chavas, President & COO, Greenprint Partners

Nicole is President & COO of Greenprint Partners, a Chicago-based urban planning, civil engineering and landscape architecture firm. In leading all aspects of firm operations, she brings a passion for rallying resources, talent and partnerships to scale sustainable infrastructure—a passion that has informed her approach to team leadership and company growth since 2014.

Nicole's love of learning is inherent in every initiative she leads. Whether it’s spearheading a proposal, accelerating adoption of a new knowledge management syst