NEXT APPEARANCE : : Washington, DC
Architecture
Without Architects
When AI Reaches the Client First
Millions of homeowners are already asking AI to help design their spaces. What do they actually get back? Luna Lake is running a controlled experiment to find out: one full residential design process under true layperson conditions, consumer AI tools only, no architect at the wheel, every capability and every hidden risk documented as it happens.
SPEAKING & WORKSHOP
How It Works
No two rooms want the same thing. A firm principal breakfast and a membership luncheon can take the same subject and need it delivered completely differently. So nothing here ships as a stock talk. Tell me who's in the room, what they're worried about, and how long I have, and the session gets built around that.
Tailored to your room
Every session gets adapted to the organization in front of me. I can deliver one as written, refresh it with the newest developments, or build something entirely new with you. I also offer pre-engagement interviews with your stakeholders, so the material addresses the concerns your people actually have rather than the ones a stranger would guess at.
Don't see your topic?
Ask anyway. Adjacent subjects are usually a yes, and building a new presentation is the part of this work I enjoy most. Tell me the problem you want addressed rather than the title you have in mind. Some of my strongest sessions started as a request from an organizer who couldn't find what they needed on anyone's list.
Formats
Opening plenary, keynote, conference breakout, moderated panel, firm principal breakfast, membership luncheon, half-day and full-day workshops, multi-day engagements, board and staff strategic planning, and youth programming. One hour is the standard session. Workshops run three to eight. Remote delivery works for most of it, and costs less. Tell me your slot and I'll fit it.
TEN CONSECUTIVE YEARS SPEAKING at NATIONAL CONVENINGS
plus dozens of NATIONAL, STATE & LOCAL small group presentations
I first delivered commentary on AI's radical disruption from the Opening Plenary stage at the AIA Leadership Summit in February 2023.
Some thought I was the radical one. Some still do.
Let's keep educating anyway.
AI isn't going away. It's both awful and awe-inspiring. YOU make it awe-inspiring. YOU with your human brain and agency.
You'll either drive it or weather it...
Vroom vroom.
2023
AIA NATIONAL
Leadership Summit
Opening Plenary: A Conversation with AIA Leadership
AIA NATIONAL
Strategic Council
Equity Working Group
CACE NATIONAL
Annual Meeting
Keynote: Determined: The Power of Storytelling for Climate Action
CACE NATIONAL
2023 Board President
Talks at: AIA Leadership Summit, CACE Annual Meeting Retreat, AIA '23 CACE Meeting, AIA Governance Week
2024
AIA NATIONAL
Conf. on Architecture
Determined: The Power of Storytelling for Climate Action
AIA NATIONAL
Board of Directors
AI Advisory Panel Chair
Strategic Council Liaison (AI)
AIA NATIONAL
2024 AIA/AI
AI Annual Report (Co-Author)
AIA NATIONAL
Leadership Summit
AI/AIA: Survive or Thrive
AIA BIRMINGHAM
Annual State Conference
AI/AIA: Leveraging Design Tech Responsibly
AIA MEMPHIS
Membership Luncheon
AI/AIA: Survive or Thrive
CIV :: THE CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN
Summer Scholars
AI-Powered Architectural Camp
2025
AIA NATIONAL
Conf. on Architecture
AI: Architecture's Climate Resilience Future: A 20-Year Hurricane Katrina Retrospective
AIA VIRGINIA
Architecture Exchange East
AI + the Future of Practice
AIA SAN ANTONIO
Firm Leaders' Breakfast
AI in Architecture
LAKE I FLATO ARCHITECTS
Sustainability Champions
The Weight of Water: Architectural Vulnerability in the Mississippi Gulf Coast
URSYS
Fall Symposium
The Weight of Water: AI-Powered Solutions for Architectural Vulnerability in Flood-Prone Regions
This research carries a lengthy AIA provenance record.
2026
MIT XPRO
3 AI Certificates
8 Exemplary Citations
1] Executive Certificate in AI Strategy and Product Innovation
2] Designing & Building AI Products and Services (100/100, 2/3 Possible exemplary citations), Capstone: Fazio, the AIA Supermind Mentor
3]
AI Strategy & Leadership: Thriving in the New World of AI
(99.98/100, 6/6 Possible exemplary citations), Capstone:
Nonprofit Strategic Planning for AI Disruption
AIA NATIONAL
Conf. on Architecture
Technology in Architectural Practice Symposium: Practical AI for Every Architect, Business Management
LUNA LAKE
AI as Accelerant
A one-day workshop intensive with a year-long support cohort
AIA DC
DesignDC 2026
Architecture Without Architects: When AI Reaches the Client First
SPEAKING & WORKSHOP
Popular Topics
Some are one hour. Some run a full day. Every one of them gets adapted to the people in the room before it gets delivered. If you don't see what you need, ask anyway. Building new presentations is the part of this work I enjoy most.
AI Foundations
Most rooms are not starting from zero. They are starting from noise.
Assertion: Anxiety is information, not weakness.
People arrive having heard that AI will end their profession and that it will hand them back ten hours a week, often in the same meeting. Neither claim survives contact with an actual tool. These sessions calibrate. Plain language, no jargon, no demand that anyone commit to anything by the end. What people leave with is an accurate picture of what these systems do, what they cost, and what one reasonable first step looks like on Monday.
AI Alchemy
A plain-language introduction for people who have not begun. What these tools actually do, why the anxiety is reasonable, and what a first step looks like on Monday morning. I teach deliberate use and deliberate unplugging in the same hour, because knowing when to close the laptop is part of the skill.
For: any audience new to AI. No technical background assumed.
Typical format: 1 hour
AI is Aw... (Awful and Awe Inspiring)
I first spoke publicly about AI's disruption from the AIA Leadership Summit opening plenary in February 2023, when saying so made me the radical in the room. This session holds both truths at once. The harm is real. The potential is real. Human agency is what decides the balance.
For: skeptical audiences, mixed rooms, anyone who has heard only one side.
Typical format: 1 hour
AI and Its Profound Ethical Debate
The ethical argument as it is actually playing out in the news, not in the abstract. Existential concerns, the moral responsibility carried by the people who use these systems, and the case for collective action. We bend the arc of AI toward good by engaging and educating the people shaping how it gets trained. Built as a conversation with the room rather than a lecture at it.
For: leadership groups, academic audiences, anyone wrestling with whether to adopt.
Typical format: 1 hour
AI and Your Career: A Survival Guide
The widest session on the list, because its job is helping every person in the room take AI principles and plug them into the profession they already have. Upskilling inside your current career, moving into AI work if that's what you want, and building productivity systems that fit how your own brain works. For people with ADHD, these tools can hold the structure that overwhelm makes hard to keep. For senior professionals, they work as a thinking and research companion that speeds up the specific tasks your role actually demands. Business owners book this one too, because it gets into restructuring a team so people are plugged into the parts of the work they care about most.
For: any employee, any age, any level. Also business owners rethinking the org chart.
Typical format: 1 hour
My Agentic Firm Journey: Stories of a Solopreneur
Luna Lake runs as a fully agentic consultancy. I use the technology I teach as the actual operating model of a working business, not as a demonstration. This session is the story of building it. What worked, what broke, and what I'd do differently with the benefit of having already done it once.
For: entrepreneurs, solo practitioners, anyone considering the same bet.
Typical format: 1 hour
Implementation Workshops
One-hour, half-day and full-day sessions where people build something before they leave.
Assertion: No one adopts AI by being convinced.
Adoption happens the first time someone watches a tool do their own work, not a demo of somebody else's. So these run as working sessions. We find where administrative friction is costing you time and money, pick the organizational model that matches how your team is actually structured, and build a Chief of Staff agent in the room. Everyone leaves with something running and a ninety-day plan sized to the capacity they really have.
AI to Transform Business Operations
The full AI as Accelerant method. Find where administrative friction is costing time and revenue, choose the organizational model that fits your team, then build in sequence: a Chief of Staff agent first, supporting agents second, live tests third. Participants walk in stuck and walk out with a working agent, a model that fits their structure, and a 90-day plan sized to what they can actually sustain.
For: leadership teams, operations groups, any organization past the curiosity stage.
Typical format: 3-8 hours
AI Alchemy for Non-profits
Built for people running complex organizations on minimal staff. The goal is getting administrative weight off your team so the human work stays human: the relationships, the advocacy, the presence in the community. My MIT capstone work covered nonprofit strategic planning in the age of AI disruption, and this session is where that research lands.
For: nonprofit boards and staff, foundations, faith communities, volunteer-led groups.
Typical format: 3-8 hours
AI Alchemy for Small Business
The same method scaled for owner-operators and small teams with no IT department. Emphasis on tools a small business can afford now and run without technical staff.
For: small business owners, solo practitioners, small partnerships.
Typical format: 3-8 hours
AI in Elegant Life Design
Personal rather than professional. Building AI workflows for the responsibilities you already carry, so they largely run themselves: household operations and annual maintenance on autopilot, a monthly financial rhythm that tracks bills and expenses and investment goals, fitness and nutrition plans aimed at what you're actually trying to do. The point is getting ordinary life to take care of more of itself.
For: general audiences, community groups, membership organizations.
Typical format: 1 hour
Architecture and Place
These look like architecture sessions. They carry an AI argument underneath.
Assertion: The third place is the AI antidote.
Ray Oldenburg described third places in The Great Good Place as the informal public spots outside home and work where community actually happens. The more of daily life runs through screens, the more the isolation compounds. The answer is not abstaining from technology. It is convening with neighbors and friends in local public places, where you end up around people unlike you, with different values and different experience, and reconnect with humanity at a level no personalized feed can reach.
An Architecture of Decency: Southern Vernacular
How architecture exists in the Deep South as an aesthetic of its own, shaped as much by ordinary people as by the profession. Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee and his influence through Rural Studio at Auburn. Michael Fazio and his work teaching Mississippi architecture. Organizations like the Delta Design Studio. This is work that urban standards, with their bigger budgets and more sophisticated architectural presence, would not call extraordinary, and measuring it that way misses what it actually is.
For: preservation groups, civic organizations, design audiences, community programs.
Typical format: 1 hour
ArciTrek: Memphis
An entertaining tour of Memphis architecture, built to be enjoyed rather than studied. I look at the city's buildings the way a curious visitor would, and through the lens of third places: the cafes, libraries, porches, and parks where people actually gather.
For: chambers of commerce, civic clubs, tourism groups, membership luncheons.
Typical format: 1 hour
ArciTrek: Mississippi
The same approach across Mississippi, covering the state's architectural assets and the gathering places that hold its communities together.
For: Main Street organizations, community foundations, regional groups.
Typical format: 1 hour
Climate and Resilience
Presentations delivered from national stages, available to bring to yours.
Assertion: Resilience is built long before the storm.
Twenty years after Katrina, the buildings that failed and the buildings that held tell a story about decisions made decades earlier, under budget pressure, in places without much architectural presence to begin with. These sessions look at architectural vulnerability in flood-prone and marginalized regions, what AI changes about predicting and designing for it, and how to tell that story in a way that actually moves policy rather than just moving an audience.
AI: Architecture's Climate Resilience Future
A twenty-year Hurricane Katrina retrospective, asking what AI changes about how we build for the storms ahead. Presented at the AIA National Conference on Architecture in Boston in 2025.
For: sustainability committees, resilience groups, professional conferences.
Typical format: 1 hour
The Weight of Water: Architectural Vulnerability and Climate
My research on architectural vulnerability in flood-prone and marginalized regions, including Mississippi Gulf Coast case studies and AI-powered approaches to the problem. Delivered to Lake Flato's Sustainability Champions and at the URSYS Fall Symposium.
For: research symposia, sustainability groups, coastal communities.
Typical format: 1 hour
Determined: The Power of Storytelling for Climate Action
Using narrative to move policy and public will on climate and the built environment. Delivered as the AIA CACE Annual Meeting keynote in Atlanta and at the AIA National Conference on Architecture in Washington DC.
For: advocacy groups, association leadership, communications teams.
Typical format: 1 hour
- Fourth-year presenter on AI at national professional conferences.
- Ten consecutive years speaking at national convenings.
- Eight exemplary citations from three MIT xPRO AI certificate programs.
- Over thirty years of marketing expertise and entrepreneurism.
- Hundreds of consultations, from individuals to corporations.
- Founder of Luna Lake, a fully agentic AI consultancy, launched June 2025.
NICE TO MEET YOU!
I'm Amber Lombardo.
SPEAKING & WORKSHOP
Cost
Pricing follows the clock, not the topic. An hour costs the same whether it's a keynote or a hands-on session, and a full day costs the same regardless of subject. Tell me the length and the format and you'll have a number.
Rates
- One-hour session, in person : : $500
- One-hour session, remote : : $250
- Half-day workshop : : $2,500+
- Full day : : $5,000
- One-hour AI kickstart consultation : : $250
- Thirty-minute discovery call : : free
- 20% non-profit discount
Travel & Terms
In-person engagements outside the Memphis metro area add travel at cost with receipts provided, plus a $75 daily per diem.
Fifty percent books your date. The balance is due the day of the event. All major credit cards accepted.
Questions?
Call Enzo to talk through your needs.
Our agentic Chief-of-Staff, Enzo, is available 24/7 to take your call and answer most of your questions. He will then work with me on the items you discussed to finalize arrangements. (He is AI and may make mistakes but feedback helps him improve.)