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In the latest episode of From the Ground Up, Motif CEO Amar Hanspal sat down with Scot Sustad (Co-Founder and Head of Product, Bureau) and Fernando Canteli (Design Services Manager, Bureau). Bureau makes soundproof booths and modular workspace products for clients ranging from SpaceX and NASA to a one-person agency, with offices across Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Dallas, London, and three Australian cities. Fernando leads a design services team covering US, Canadian, Australian, and European time zones. Their job is sales enablement: floor plans, renders, and custom configurations that help clients visualize Bureau's product in their space before they buy.
TLDR: Scot's advice for companies still figuring out their AI stack: be selective. The technology is developing faster than most companies can adopt it. Chasing every new tool is its own kind of bottleneck.
Why general-purpose AI tools don't work for product visualization
Scot described a wall he keeps hitting with general image tools: "I can get most of what I want done in code or building an app. But when it comes down to I want a presentation and I need this booth looking like this, that's when I'm super frustrated. You aren't listening to me. Why is this so complicated?"
General AI image tools have no context for a specific product's dimensions. Scot put it simply: Motif "has a lot of context for our product and it uses dimensions very differently. It gives you the ability to prompt smarter."
Fernando described the moment he knew they'd found the right tool. When the Motif team walked him through the product on the intro call, his reaction was immediate: "I say to Scott, I think they are the correct ones, because they represent the same workflow that we are doing now manually."
The manual process—cleaning photos in Adobe, scaling in Blender, aligning layouts in AutoCAD—was exactly what Motif was built to replace. Now Bureau runs their entire visual workflow in Motif across standard, custom, and bespoke project types. Four tools replaced by one, and render times down from hours to 20 minutes.
How to think about the real cost of a design services team
Scot made a point that tends to get overlooked: “The design services team's time isn't free, even though it seems free to customers or to even our internal sales team. That request actually costs $300 internally.”
Bureau runs clear reports on how design services activity maps to closed deals, and they're constantly watching the numbers to make the function more efficient without sacrificing quality.
That discipline is what led them to evaluate Motif seriously in the first place and to walk away from a previous tool they'd spent months and tens of thousands of dollars onboarding. "We took the sunk cost bias and said, Motif does all of this, the monthly is going to be way less, and we can be up and running in two weeks." Fernando's team was productive within that window. "In one week or less, the training is done. It's a very friendly app."
Fernando on why the tool clicked operationally: "The client needs the quick impression. With Motif we can do one render or one layout in a couple of minutes." What used to take an hour for a standard render now takes 20 minutes. Multi-option presentations that used to run 24 hours have come down to a fraction of that.
How to actually get a team to adopt AI
Scot's approach to AI adoption across Bureau is part incentive, part filter. He runs a monthly $100 gift card award for the best value-driving AI use case on the team and uses it to surface what's actually working versus what's just interesting. His observation: "People want to go about it the way they have done it. Getting the jump into that different way of using the technology is really important. It can also be a huge time sink—people building stuff where you're like, ‘how much time did you spend building that in this very narrow use case?’"
His framing for how to evaluate where AI is worth investing: "The technology is developing so much faster than we can adopt. We have to be pretty selective about where it provides value for where we're at as a business currently."
Fernando's version of the same idea was more personal. Two years ago he was against AI entirely. "All the people say AI will replace us." What changed his mind was using it. On client projects, and on smaller things, like a prompt that generates his weekly recap for Scot every Friday. "It's just a simple prompt that can organize your life as well." His advice for anyone still skeptical: "If you combine it with the software you learned at university or through your work experience, AI is a fantastic partner."
What it looks like to build toward sales team self-service
The most forward-looking part of the conversation was about where Bureau is heading. Scot's goal: "To get Motif built out in such a way that a completely non-technical person, like all of our salespeople, knows the pathway to be able to create the simple versions—logging in, doing it live, switching it, sending updated renders back—without having to bother us."
He described the approach as being able to "tool the whole kit": build Bureau's specific workflows and product configurations inside Motif so that a salesperson has a guided, accurate path to a client-ready visual without needing to understand the design decisions underneath it. Fernando's version: "You can combine two pictures and it's done. Motif gives you three options and you select the best one."
Bureau is in the phase of getting the design services team fluent first and building the frameworks before opening it up to sales, getting the tool solid for the people who understand the product, then hand it to the people who are closest to the client.
From the Ground Up is Motif's webinar series exploring how technology is reshaping AEC practice. Watch the full Bureau episode on YouTube or explore Motif's AI rendering capabilities.
