Artefact: Choosing a new office by changing the design live with laiout

Artefact chose laiout because the real bottleneck in choosing a new office was never design judgement, it was getting from a static floor plan to something the whole leadership team could react to together. A PDF floor plan meant one person interpreting a layout and describing it secondhand to everyone else, then waiting days or weeks for a designer to turn feedback into a new drawing. laiout removed that gap entirely. The agent brought the building's floor plates preloaded into laiout on an iPad, so as the leadership team walked the space, they could add meeting rooms, open up collaboration areas and test different headcount scenarios together, watching the layout update in real time. That mattered more than usual for this particular building, a former incubator broken into many small offices, which was the hardest floor plate on the shortlist for the team to picture as a single working space. Static drawings had failed to convey how the space could come together. Seeing it reshape live, with everyone in the room reacting at once, gave the leadership team the shared understanding a document never could. For a sector where most technology requires heavy data migration and long onboarding before it delivers value, laiout stood out for solving one specific, high friction problem immediately, with nothing to set up and no legacy data required.

Every office search meant collecting floor plans from multiple agents in inconsistent formats, then trying to get a leadership team to agree on a direction from static PDFs alone. Each round of changes, more meeting rooms, more open space, a different desk to headcount ratio, meant sending markups back to an interior designer and waiting for a revised drawing. That cycle typically took four to eight weeks, and by the time everyone was aligned, the opportunity had often passed, either the agent's patience or the landlord's.

Manual markups on static PDF floor plans, circulated between the leadership team and an outside interior designer. Each round of feedback meant sending changes back and waiting days or weeks for a revised drawing, with no way to test a layout live or see the impact of a change in the room.

Before laiout, choosing a new office at Artefact typically took four to eight weeks from first viewing to a decision the leadership team could act on. Each floor plan came back from an agent as a static image, someone then interpreted it, marked up changes, and sent it to an interior designer, who returned a revised drawing days or weeks later for the team to react to again. That cycle repeated every time a requirement changed, more meeting rooms, a different desk to headcount ratio, more open collaboration space, and each round risked the deal, either the agent's patience ran out, or the landlord moved on to another tenant. Using laiout compressed that entire cycle into a single site visit. With the building's floor plates preloaded, the leadership team adjusted the layout together in real time while walking the space, testing headcount scenarios and room configurations as a group rather than reviewing decisions made on their behalf after the fact. What would normally have needed several rounds of drafting and re-drafting over multiple weeks was resolved in one meeting, with every stakeholder aligned before they left the building. The clearest business impact was on the decision itself. The building Artefact ultimately chose was the most architecturally complex option on its shortlist, a former incubator broken into many small offices that the leadership team had struggled to picture as usable space from drawings alone. Seeing the layout reshape live gave them the confidence to commit to it, a decision that a slower, document based process likely would not have produced in time.

Chris de Gruben, Head of AI in Property, Artefact: "We went for the office we did because of the ease of changing the layout live, with the whole leadership team in the room."

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