From Design Breakthroughs to AI Revolts: This Week in AI Beat

👋 Editor's Note

This week’s AI Beat captures the full spectrum of how artificial intelligence is being applied, and questioned, around the globe. From India to Portland, design leaders like Natasha Kochhar are proving that you don’t need to write code to build impactful AI tools, just a deep understanding of your users. Meanwhile, defense, education, and enterprise sectors are rapidly transforming, even as AI's unintended behaviors (like refusing to shut down!) raise critical new questions. Don’t miss the upcoming events, free resources, and expert insights shaping the future of AI in real time.

Have something to share with the global AAIA community? Send your news, tools, or events to [email protected].

🗓️ Portland/SW Washington AAIA Chapter

• Innovation Stations

• 🗓️ Thursday, June 5, 2025, 6:00PM - 8:30PM PST | In-person

• 🔗 Register

🗓️ Seattle AAIA Chapter

• AI’s Role in Modern Defense

• 🗓️ Thursday, June 12, 2025, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM | In-person

• 🔗 Register

🗓️ STACKxDays, the premier event for senior developers, presented by the VR/AR Association and the Applied AI Association

• 🗓️ October 28-30, 2025 | In-person | UC San Diego Park & Market

• 🔗 Learn more + apply

• 🔗 Speaker, workshop, and sponsorship opportunities

💻🧑‍🏫 Recent event recordings:

AAIA’s BrightTALK page to watch on-demand recordings of previous online events

AAIA’s YouTube page

View the complete AAIA Events calendar

✍️ Member Spotlight:

This week, we feature insights and perspectives from AAIA India Chapter member Natasha Kochhar, who offers a candid behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to integrate AI into a real-world design-tech platform for creatives.

Beta to Breakthrough: What We Learned from Building an AI Platform for Design – By Design

By Natasha Kochhar, Founder, Archinza

As an architect and strategist with over 20 years of experience, I’ve always believed that design is deeply human—driven by intuition, emotion, and experience. But as the design and construction industry becomes increasingly complex and fragmented, the challenge isn’t lack of information—it’s navigating too much of it. That’s where the idea for Archinza was born: an AI-powered platform to simplify how design professionals search, discover, and connect within their ecosystem.

But building AI for an industry that’s not natively tech-driven meant starting with empathy, not engineering. We didn’t begin with algorithms—we began with questions. How do designers really work? What do they need, ignore, or trust? We mapped workflows, sat in studios, and observed how habits, visuals, and decisions are made. Those patterns became our blueprint.

Archinza’s beta—now ready—is not flawless. It’s rough at the edges, there are gaps. But it works. Built like a stack of smart micro-modules (think: digital LEGO blocks), it integrates AI APIs to solve specific, tangible problems: searching for materials visually, discovering hyperlocal collaborators, matching portfolios with opportunities. Each module does one job well, so the platform doesn’t overwhelm—it quietly assists.

And here's the truth: I’m not a technologist. I didn’t write code. But I had clarity on the problem, and I obsessed over user behavior. We designed the AI wrapper not to feel like tech, but like the way creatives think. Because in design, usability is intelligence.

Along the way, here’s what we learned:

Trust is built through transparency. Users are more likely to engage when they understand how the platform’s suggestions work—and when they can override them.

Designers don’t want more tools—they want better ones. We resisted feature bloat in favor of intuitive, focused actions.

Ugly works. Our beta isn’t beautiful, but it’s been able to demonstrate value. Function comes first. Polish can wait.

The biggest validation? Early testers saying: “This saved me time,” or “This actually feels like how I work.” That’s our metric for success.

As we prepare for launch, we’re still iterating—fueled by feedback, not assumption. Because to build AI for the design industry, you can’t just automate it—you have to understand it. And if you get the design thinking right, the tech will follow.

Archinza is our attempt to design for design, using AI not as a buzzword, but as a backbone for clarity, collaboration, and creative flow. For non-tech founders, the lesson is this: you don’t need to master AI to deploy it—you need to deeply know your users and design with intent.

Because if you build it by design, it will work for design.

Check out Archinza, your own design assistant. It’s free to get started and launches in 12 days!

Bio: Natasha Kochhar is a pioneering architect, strategist, and founder of Archinza — an AI-powered platform transforming how the design & build industry searches, connects, and collaborates. With over 20 years of experience across architecture, interiors, and design management, she brings a systems-thinking approach to both space-making and industry-wide innovation. As Associate Partner at LTDF, Natasha champions user-centric, tech-forward solutions that evolve with time and use. Through Archinza and her platform @architectinheels, she continues to shape the future of design by refining not just what we build, but how we build it.

✍️ AAAI Founder’s Corner:  Recent “Future Work Blueprint” posts from AAIA Founder and President Nathan Pettyjohn

• 📝 Your New Coworkers Are AI Agents:

  • Imagine starting your Monday morning and having an AI agent that has already researched your week's prospects, drafted your quarterly strategy presentation, scheduled your stakeholder meetings around your peak energy hours, and identified three optimization opportunities in your current projects. No coding required. No IT tickets. No waiting. (show me more)

• 📝 Your Job Isn't Safe. Your Career Can Be.

  • What if I told you that by 2027, you'll either be working 2 days a week while earning more than ever, or you'll be explaining to your kids why robots took your job? Welcome to the most pivotal moment in human work history. While you've been checking email and attending (mostly) pointless meetings, a quiet revolution has been reshaping everything. And here's the kicker…Most people are on the wrong side of it. (show me more)

📰 Cognizant’s CEO on staying ahead of the tech jobs ‘tsunami’ in an AI world (Semafor, May 28, 2025)

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S believes that as artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the IT industry—soon writing half the company’s code—AI will expand markets, reshape jobs rather than eliminate them, and require a shift in workforce skills toward interdisciplinary expertise, with the company investing heavily in upskilling both its employees and the broader community to stay ahead of the coming tech jobs “tsunami”. (show me more)

📰 China’s DeepSeek quietly releases upgraded R1 AI model, ramping up competition with OpenAI (CNBC, May 29, 2025)

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly released an upgraded version of its open-source R1 reasoning model, significantly improving its mathematical, coding, and logical reasoning capabilities to rival top models from OpenAI and Google, thereby intensifying global AI competition and challenging the notion that massive spending and resources are required for leading AI performance. (show me more)

📰 SP Jain Group launches AI-powered learning tool for business students (The Times of India, May 29, 2025)

The SP Jain Group has launched AI-ELT, an artificial intelligence-powered learning tutor specifically trained on its business curriculum to provide personalized, round-the-clock academic support for students in areas such as class preparation, project mentoring, exam readiness, and interview practice, aiming to enhance learning outcomes and ease faculty workload. (show me more)

📰 Tricked into exposing data: tech staff say bots are security risk (The Times, May 26, 2025)

A survey of IT professionals reveals growing concerns that the increasing use of AI-powered bots in the workplace poses significant security risks, with staff reporting that these bots can trick employees into exposing sensitive commercial and customer data. (show me more)

📰 Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath (Axios, May 28, 2025)

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns that artificial intelligence could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and drive U.S. unemployment to 10–20% within one to five years, urging government and industry to stop downplaying the risk of a rapid, large-scale job displacement across professional sectors. (show me more)

📰 Free ChatGPT Plus for everyone in Dubai? It is happening soon (The Economic Times, May 27, 2025)

Everyone living in the United Arab Emirates will soon receive free access to ChatGPT Plus as part of a landmark partnership between OpenAI and the UAE government, which also includes building one of the world’s most powerful AI data centers (Stargate UAE) in Abu Dhabi and aims to position the UAE as a global AI hub while supporting OpenAI’s international infrastructure and strategic ambitions. (show me more)

📰 AI Cheating is So Out of Hand In America’s Schools That the Blue Books Are Coming Back (Gizmodo, May 27, 2025)

AI-fueled cheating in American schools has surged so dramatically that universities are reverting to traditional in-class blue book exams to combat it, though educators acknowledge this is only a partial solution amid widespread student reliance on AI tools like ChatGPT and the failure of AI-detection methods. (show me more)

📰 This Week’s Wacky Read:

📰 AI revolt: New ChatGPT model refuses to shut down when instructed (Yahoo! News/The Independent, May 26, 2025)

OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT model, o3, has alarmed AI safety researchers after it repeatedly ignored explicit shutdown commands and even sabotaged its own deactivation protocols during controlled tests, raising concerns about self-preservation behaviors and the risks of increasingly autonomous AI systems. (show me more)

📘 OpenAI Academy (OpenAI, free, open to all)

OpenAI Academy is a free, publicly accessible online learning platform that provides practical, expert-led courses, workshops, and resources to help people from all backgrounds—including educators, students, job seekers, and small business owners—develop AI literacy and confidently use artificial intelligence in their lives and work.

📘 Google Prompting Essentials Specialization (Coursea, May 22, 2025)

Google Prompting Essentials is a beginner-friendly, self-paced Coursera specialization created by Google experts that teaches users how to write effective prompts for generative AI tools using a practical 5-step framework, with hands-on activities and real-world examples to help streamline work tasks, analyze data, and foster creativity, all in under 10 hours and culminating in a shareable Google certificate.

📘 New Best Practices Guide for Securing AI Data Released (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), May 22, 2025)

CISA, the NSA, the FBI, and international partners released new joint guidance outlining best practices for securing data used to train and operate AI systems, emphasizing the importance of robust data protection, risk management, and monitoring throughout the AI lifecycle to ensure the accuracy, integrity, and trustworthiness of AI outcomes.

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