I had two products ready to talk about in the same breath. One's a construction estimating service, no professional license needed. The other's an AI assisted architecture production service, and that one needs a licensed architect of record and carries real professional liability if it's done wrong.
I sold the estimating service to strangers right away. But I refused to deliver the architecture service to any outside client until my own building, 301 W Osborn, was fully produced and sealed through a proven process, and until a construction and licensing attorney signed off on the contract structure and the marketing language. Until both of those cleared, architecture inbound only got captured as a reservation with a small refundable deposit. Never delivered.
The legal standard for who can put their name on a stamped architectural drawing is a substance test, who actually exercised the professional judgment, not a paperwork test, who signed it. Treat it as paperwork and that's the textbook illegal shortcut, even with a real license attached. Using my own building as the proving ground put the risk on the person who owns the outcome, me, and it doubled as the sales proof once it actually worked.
An AI agent team built the Revit model for 301 W Osborn, caught and fixed its own errors along the way, and internally we're citing it as having saved roughly two hundred fifty thousand dollars against an outside architect. That figure's already cleared for marketing use.
Don't sell the version of your business that could get someone's license pulled until you've run it on your own risk first.
Limited authority and freedom: I drew a hard line at what only a licensed architect's own judgment can legally do, and I wasn't going to let a product pitch get ahead of that line.