What AI Can't Touch: Rhiannon Lee on Protecting Creativity in a World of Shortcuts

There's a version of the AI conversation that is almost entirely noise ... and then there's the one Rhiannon Lee has been having quietly inside her own business for nearly four years.

The founder of Oleander & Finch Interiors arrived in this episode carrying a story she rarely shares publicly. Her father, reflecting on her career, observed something she hadn't quite named herself: that the way she designs spaces ... the care, the safety, the sense of permanence she builds into every project ... might have everything to do with a childhood spent moving between schools and communities, never quite landing somewhere that felt like home. It's the kind of origin story that reframes everything. Design, in Rhiannon's hands, was never just about aesthetics. It was always about belonging.

That same instinct for protection threads through her approach to AI. While the design world has been busy chasing render generators and SketchUp shortcuts, Rhiannon has been making the opposite argument: keep AI far away from the work you actually love. The creativity, the conceptual leaps, the moment you pull two patterns together and just know ...that's yours.

What AI is genuinely useful for is the work designers never signed up to do: the inbox management, the SOP documentation, the 4am wake-ups about contracts that still don't exist. The 'Studio Build' course, which we're currently working through, is built on this logic. Document your business so thoroughly that you could hand it to a human or a robot and have either actually help you.

The conversation also lands somewhere that feels important for the industry right now: the idea that nobody is behind. Not even Rhiannon ... who woke up the morning of this recording to discover a new Claude model had launched overnight. The technology moves faster than any of us can absorb, and the people claiming otherwise have usually been using it for about eight weeks. What matters isn't mastery of the latest tool. It's understanding your business well enough to know where you actually need help.

It's a conversation full of hard-won clarity ... about the gap between learning to design and learning to run a business, about the ethics of feeding client data into AI tools without disclosure, and about what it actually means to protect your value as a creative in a world that keeps trying to automate it.

Listen here

Episode #08 Rhiannon Lee - 'Don't give AI the stuff you actually like doing'