WOWOW FaucetsIn the consumer industry, it is often said that the next force to eliminate companies will not be peers, but AI.
As technology and AI dominate today’s global conversation, major brands are pinning their hopes on AI for breakthroughs, yet most still prioritize empowering internal work efficiency rather than the business operation itself.
Roca, the century-old bathroom giant, is using AI design as its breakthrough point to reimagine high-end bathroom living.
Recently, Roca has entered into a deep collaboration with AI design education expert “Uncle Jiqi” to launch the bathroom industry’s first AI practical training system, targeting the key link that determines business performance—design productivity.
What do consumers pursue in design?
Probably the ability to contain every imagination of high-end living.
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Empowerment Without Overstepping, Guarding the Professional Boundaries of Design
Looking back at the current retail consumer market, two trends are particularly evident: First, consumer stratification is intensifying. High-end consumer groups continue to elevate their demand for “aesthetic experience,” with over 40% of consumer decisions driven primarily by emotional experience. Standardized, template-based designs can no longer satisfy their expectations for tone and aesthetics.
Second, store design capability is becoming the “decisive factor” in brand competition. As digital penetration in the retail industry continues to deepen, new technologies such as AI are moving from online marketing down to offline terminals, becoming key levers for stores to reduce costs, boost efficiency, and enhance experience. Design capability is precisely a critical breakthrough point in experience that is easily overlooked.
This is particularly pronounced in the bathroom market. As a typical “experience-heavy” retail category, the design capability of bathroom terminals directly affects consumer decision-making efficiency and brand perception.
In the past, most brands’ consumer solutions relied heavily on senior design talent, and design capabilities across the country varied widely—a problem especially prominent in third-tier and lower cities. Traditional interior design software addressed the basic needs of some segments through template-based solutions, but it could not satisfy higher-standard consumer groups. Now, AI can help designers more efficiently reshape new living experiences.
The Roca AI practical training system is a systemic upgrade solution that includes AI design training courses and accompanying tools.
For partner designers, Roca will provide free exclusive access to the AI practical training system. Any designer partnered with Roca can unlock all the system’s core features without paying any additional fees. Roca aims to free designers from tedious tasks beyond drafting, allowing them to focus on core tasks such as creative ideation and uncovering client needs.
The lightweight mini-program aimed at dealers and ordinary consumers focuses on the core needs of brand dealers and everyday users. Simply upload a real-scene photo from your phone, select your favorite Roca products, and a complete rendering—including soft furnishings—is automatically generated. No professional design knowledge is required, and no long wait is needed.
Roca stated that this AI practical training system will center on design and aesthetics, providing all of Roca’s national partners with systemic capabilities that deliver long-term and stable solutions.
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Behind the Technology: Roca’s Aesthetic Commitment and Technological Equity
Beyond the professional tools, this mini-program chose a lighter, more accessible path. It requires no design knowledge from users, nor does it alter people’s existing decision-making habits—it simply compresses complex spatial imagination into a few clicks and a brief wait.
This customized mini-program brings aesthetic and technological equity precisely into the realm and interface of mass usage. On one hand, it removes the design threshold for dealers; on the other, it makes the ideal life envisioned by ordinary people effortlessly attainable.
Whether professional tools or a lightweight mini-program, both share the same underlying capability system.
As a global brand focused on high-net-worth clientele and committed to the core of “aesthetics and experience,” design has always been Roca’s language for communicating with high-end consumers worldwide. For Roca, design conveys both user needs and product vision—it is how the brand communicates and, through this, shapes its entire business strategy.
For this reason, although design appears simple, it contains deep-rooted barriers. The collaboration between Roca and Uncle Jiqi precisely aligns with the retail terminal’s transformation direction of “professionalization, digitalization, and experience-centricity.”
From a retail consumer perspective, the ultimate purpose of this capability is to make design more attuned to people and to life. This is the enduring brand presence Roca has established over a century through design—a power that the times cannot erode.
This is especially critical in today’s experience-driven consumption era. Consumer patience is being continuously diluted by an abundance of choices, and a fast, professional response is itself a core experience.Achieving such efficient response is inseparable from AI’s deep empowerment, which also holds the key code to future corporate competition.
Deploying AI requires vast amounts of data, deep industry knowledge, and the seamless coordination of internal organizational processes. Future competition will ultimately be a contest of how deeply AI capabilities can be fused with industry expertise.
Roca is putting this fusion into practice.
The AI system is built-in with Roca’s vast global proprietary design assets, encompassing the brand’s full product line models, classic design elements from multiple countries, and complete solutions—fundamentally resolving the issue of asset homogenization found in generic AI tools. Meanwhile, Roca’s globally renowned top design talent will also participate in this project, deeply embedding their design philosophy, industry experience, and on-site construction expertise into the system’s algorithms and material library, ensuring every solution can meet all imaginations of “combining aesthetics with practicality.”
Eagerly anticipated, from June 26–29, Roca will be at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, booth KBC W1B03, where it will officially launch this AI practical training system. Stay tuned.
Originally published in WeChat by 厨卫资讯 on 2026-05-14. Translated and edited for English-language readers.