Industry’s First AI Workshop: Roca Reimagines Every Possibility of High-End Living

For the consumer industry, it is often said that the next company to be eliminated will not be defeated by its peers, but by AI.

In today’s world, where technology and AI are passionately discussed globally, major brands are placing their hopes on AI for breakthroughs. However, at present, most of them first consider empowering internal work efficiency rather than the operational aspects.

Roca, the century-old bathroom giant, is using AI design as a breakthrough point to reimagine high-end bathroom living.

Just recently, Roca reached a deep collaboration with AI design education expert Uncle Kiki, launching the bathroom industry’s first AI training system, pointing to the key operational driver—design productivity.

What do consumers seek in design?

Probably the ability to embody every possibility of high-end living.

01

Empower Without Overstepping, Safeguarding the Professional Boundaries of Design

Reviewing the current retail consumer market, two trends are particularly evident: first, consumer stratification is intensifying. The high-end consumer group’s demand for “aesthetic experience” continues to escalate, with over 40% of consumption decisions being driven by emotional experience. Standardized, templated design can no longer meet their expectations for tone and aesthetics.

Second, store design capability is becoming the “deciding factor” of brand competition. As digital penetration in the retail industry continues to strengthen, new technologies such as AI are descending from online marketing to offline terminals, becoming key leverage for stores to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and enhance experience. Design capability is precisely an easily overlooked yet critically important breakthrough in this experience.

This is particularly evident in the bathroom market. As a typical “experience-heavy” retail category, the design capability of bathroom terminals directly affects consumers’ decision-making efficiency and brand perception.

In the past, most brands’ consumer solutions relied heavily on senior design talent, with design capabilities varying greatly across the country, particularly so in third-tier and lower cities. Traditional interior design software solved the basic needs of some groups through templated solutions, but it has been difficult to satisfy consumers with higher standards. Now, AI can help designers more efficiently reshape new life experiences.

The Roca AI Training System is a systematic enhancement solution that includes AI design training courses and supporting tools.

For partner designers, Roca will provide exclusive access to the AI training system free of charge. As long as they are designers partnering with Roca, they can unlock all the core functions of the system without paying any additional fees. Roca hopes to help designers free themselves from tedious tasks beyond drawing, allowing them to focus on core tasks such as creative conception and needs discovery.

Meanwhile, the lightweight mini-program designed for dealers and ordinary consumers focuses on the core needs of brand dealers and ordinary consumers. Users simply need to upload a real-life scene from their mobile phone and select their preferred Roca products to automatically generate a complete rendering that includes soft furnishings, requiring no professional design knowledge and no lengthy wait.

Roca states that the AI training system will center on design and aesthetics, providing all Roca partners across the country with systematic capabilities that deliver long-term and stable solutions.

02

Behind the Technology: Roca’s Aesthetic Commitment and Democratization of Technology

Beyond professional tools, this mini-program chose a lighter, more accessible path. It does not require users to know any design knowledge, nor does it change people’s original decision-making habits—it simply compresses complex spatial conceptions into a few clicks and a brief wait.

This custom mini-program precisely brings aesthetic and technological democratization into the scope and interface used by the general public. On one hand, it removes the design threshold for dealers; on the other, it makes the ideal life envisioned by ordinary people effortless to achieve.

Whether professional tools or lightweight mini-programs, they share the same underlying capability system.

As a global brand focused on high-net-worth customers and committed to the core values of “aesthetics and experience,” design has always been the language through which Roca communicates with global high-end consumers. For Roca, design conveys both users’ needs and product visions, communicating in this way to influence the entire commercial strategy.

It is precisely for this reason that design, while seemingly simple, actually contains profound barriers. Roca’s collaboration with Uncle Kiki perfectly aligns with the transformation direction of retail terminals toward “specialization, digitalization, and experientialization.”

From a retail consumption perspective, the ultimate purpose of this capability is to make design more attuned to people and to life. This is also the enduring brand visibility that Roca has established over a century through design, unaffected by the passage of time.

This is particularly crucial in today’s experience-driven consumption era. After all, consumers’ patience is being increasingly diluted by diversified choices, and rapid, professional responses themselves constitute a core experience.Achieving such efficient responses is inseparable from the deep empowerment of AI, behind which lies the secret code for future enterprise competition.

The implementation of AI requires massive data to feed it, deep accumulation of industry knowledge, and even more so, organizational coordination within enterprises. The competition of the future will ultimately be a contest of the deep integration of AI capabilities and industry knowledge.

Roca is putting this integration into practice.

The AI system has Roca’s massive proprietary design materials built in globally, encompassing the full range of brand product models, classic design elements from multiple countries, and various solutions, fundamentally resolving the issue of homogenized materials in ordinary AI tools. At the same time, Roca’s top design forces covering the globe will also participate in this project, deeply integrating their design philosophies, industry experience, and construction implementation experience into the system’s algorithms and material library, ensuring that every solution can fulfill all imaginations of “combining aesthetics and practicality.”

What’s worth anticipating is that from June 26-29, Roca will be at KBC W1B03 at the Shanghai New International Expo Center, where this AI training system will be officially launched. Let’s wait and see.

Originally published in WeChat by 厨卫资讯 on 2026-05-14. Translated and edited for English-language readers.