Jenna Gaidusek

As a kid, Jenna Gaidusek loved playing The Sims — an online game that involves building a virtual home — and cleaning her room every weekend. She explains that “cleaning” her room was really an excuse to routinely rearrange the furniture. It makes sense that as an adult Gaidusek has constructed an influential career at the threshold of technology and interior and spatial design. 

Gaidusek is the founder of AI for Interior Designers, an online platform that educates interior designers on using artificial intelligence tools in their work. Her guides, classes, templates, and podcasts cover everything from creating budgets with ChatGPT, to creating mood boards with DALL-E, to showcasing conceptual imagery with Midjourney, and much more. 

“It has been so rewarding because I get to travel everywhere,” she says. “I go out and I talk to ASID, and I am on panels at trade shows, so NKBA and KBIS in Las Vegas.”

Those acronyms stand for American Society of Interior Designers, National Kitchen and Bath Association, and the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show — just some of the major design associations and events that invite her as a speaker.

While Gaidusek’s interest in technology is longstanding — and was nurtured in Russell Sage College’s BFA in Interior + Spatial Design program — it wasn’t until a few years after she graduated that it became the centerpiece of her design career. 

Her first position out of Sage was with a furniture company. She managed multi-million dollar showrooms and started the company’s trade services arm (which sells to designers) but missed actual designing.  

In 2015, while living in New York City, she started Jenna Gaidusek Designs and used videoconferencing to provide flexible and customizable interior design services all over the United States and Canada. 

She also created a Facebook community called eDesign Tribe to connect with other online designers. As that community grew, she launched eDesign U with classes on topics from Photoshop and Canva to best practices for marketing an online business, and she created the custom rendering software called eDesign Platform. 

The project management platform Mydoma acquired her eDesign lines in 2022.

Now based in Charleston, South Carolina, Gaidusek continues to run Jenna Gaidusek Designs. In 2023, she created AI for Interior Designers to share the AI-specific practices that she taught herself as she looked for ways to run her design business more efficiently. 

For example, in one of her popular classes, she teaches how to use ChatGPT to create a design assistant. Her virtual design assistant takes her client onboarding questionnaire, notes and transcripts of initial meetings, images, and other files and automatically creates a client portal, with project outlines, budgets, timelines, and appropriate folders for organization (by room or product, for instance). That is just to start — her virtual design assistant pitches in with many more specialized tasks as well. 

“I love to educate,” she says, ”and see how designers are going to use the tools after they have the knowledge.”

Gaidusek grew up in Vermont and considered a few interior design programs for college. Russell Sage in Albany, New York, became her first choice after her campus visit, and she remains connected with her former professors.      

She’s even leading an AI training for Sage’s Art + Design faculty this summer, and looking forward to returning (virtually) to the college that helped her start a rewarding career.   

“I love what I do, and I wake up every day excited to do it.”