AI at GSD®

Professor Graham Shapiro, GSD®’s founder, is Chairman of ARCET Global- the organisation behind the AI World Series, one of the largest independent AI awards programmes in the world.

That isn’t a ceremonial title. The AI World Series receives entries from organisations across dozens of countries, scored by independent judging panels drawn from the likes of AWS, Google, Palo Alto Networks and Twilio, against a scoring model endorsed by the University of Westminster and certified by the Customer Institute. The 2025 edition alone shortlisted finalists from four continents across nineteen categories. The next takes place in Dubai on 7 October 2026.

What that means in practice is straightforward: every year, our founder reads detailed, evidenced submissions from organisations describing exactly what they built with AI, what it cost, what it returned, and what went wrong. Not vendor decks. Independently scrutinised accounts, with judges pushing back on the numbers.

Very few people in the design industry have that vantage point. It has shaped how we advise clients.

AI readiness and strategy. An honest assessment of where AI will and won’t help. Often the most valuable output is the list of things not to do.

AI-enabled production. Faster concepting, variant generation, localisation and content operations, with human creative direction and sign-off on everything that ships. The efficiency goes into more exploration and more craft, not into cutting the thinking.

We don’t ship work that no human has judged. AI helps us explore more territory in less time, and it removes a great deal of tedium from production. It does not have taste, and it cannot take responsibility. Both of those remain ours.

We also take the data question seriously. GSD® holds ISO 27001 for information security and ISO 14001 for environmental management, both retained in 2026. Client material doesn’t go into tools that we haven’t assessed, and clients are told exactly what is used where.

Thirty years of building brands, websites and apps for organisations including Porsche, Samsung, Bentley, the NHS, Liverpool F.C. and the University of Leeds has taught us that most new technologies arrive with the same shape: a period of enormous noise, followed by a much quieter period in which the organisations that thought carefully quietly pull ahead.

AI is following that pattern precisely. The difference is that this time we’re also sitting on the judging side, watching the evidence come in.