In a recent episode of the "10 out of 10" podcast, host Mark Schumacher sat down with Raffi, co-founder of Palazzo.ai, to cut through the noise surrounding Artificial Intelligence for business leaders. While many consultants point to a "lack of clear strategy" as a primary reason for AI failures, Raffi offered a refreshingly direct and counter-intuitive perspective: stop strategizing and start doing.

Here are the key insights from their discussion on how home furnishings leaders can successfully integrate AI into their operations.

The Myth of the "AI Strategy"

Schumacher began by listing three commonly cited reasons for AI implementation failures: a lack of clear strategy, integration issues, and a shortage of talent. Raffi immediately challenged the first point, dismissing the need for a grand, holistic strategy as "management consulting pablum".

Instead of getting paralyzed by planning, he advises businesses to "just start tackling problems with AI". He argues that a company doesn't need a publicly declared policy; it just needs to react to problems as they arise and apply AI in ways that make sense in the moment. The strategy, if any, should be about empowering people within the company to use these new tools.

Protecting Your Brand: AI as a Team Member

A common fear among businesses is that using AI for customer-facing content will dilute their brand identity, resulting in generic outputs. Raffi confirms this is a valid concern, particularly for customer service and marketing content like lifestyle imagery. However, the solution lies not in avoiding AI, but in how you use it.

Raffi’s core message is that AI will give you generic results if you give it generic inputs. To get on-brand results, you must treat the AI as you would a human employee. This means:

• Provide a Brand Book: Just as you give your marketing team a brand book to ensure consistency, you should provide the same guidelines to your AI. Palazzo, Raffi's company, builds this principle into its platform, allowing clients to tailor the AI assistant’s "brand voice" and "look and feel".

• Engage in Dialogue: Achieving the right look or tone is a process of back-and-forth communication. The goal is to reach a "shared or mutual understanding" with the AI, much like you would to get the same image from your head into an employee's head. You show it an image, it returns an idea, you provide feedback, and through a few turns, you arrive at the desired outcome.

  
  

The In-House Imperative and the Rise of the Generalist

To effectively guide AI, Raffi argues that expertise cannot be fully outsourced. The single most important strategic decision a company can make is to cultivate in-house talent familiar with AI. He encourages executives at all levels to get hands-on with tools like ChatGPT, not just to use them in their daily work, but to become fluent in the language and concepts of AI.

This leads to another key insight: AI is ushering in "the age of the generalist". In the past, the market compensated deep specialists. Now, AI can perform many specialized tasks, from photography to copywriting to video creation. The value shifts to individuals who have enough knowledge across various fields to properly prompt and direct the AI to achieve high-quality, on-brand results.

The Key is Continuous Interaction

Ultimately, the conversation circled back to one central theme, which Schumacher summarized at the end: AI is not a "set it and forget it" tool. Success requires a plan for continual interaction.

Raffi likens interacting with a large language model to training an "incredibly intelligent junior employee". It’s brilliant, but it doesn't know the specific details of what you need—until you teach it. By providing feedback and corrections, the AI will remember and improve, giving you what you need going forward.

For furniture retailers and manufacturers, this interactive approach is already a reality. Tools like Palazzo's AI-powered visualization platform are designed to be integrated into a company's workflow, helping customers visualize products in their own space and increasing purchase confidence. This demonstrates how AI, when treated as a collaborative partner rather than a simple tool, can solve real-world business problems like reducing returns and shortening sales cycles.

Ready to see how Palazzo can help your business put these ideas into action? Book a meeting today.