New products.
AI people embrace.
We make it happen.

Grand Studio is a Chicago-raised digital strategy and experience consultancy. About 25 senior strategists, researchers, designers, and builders work in small teams. We are now remote-first with staff across the country.

Large firms typically staff many junior people on big teams, split across clients, with account managers between you and the work. Grand Studio works the other way: small teams of three to five experienced practitioners, close to full-time on your project, with no account managers.

The same people provide continuity from the first conversation to launch, so nothing gets lost in a handoff.

We start fast, work through collaboration and co-ownership methods instead of presentation after presentation, adapt as scope and timelines change, and tie every recommendation to your business priorities and outcomes.

Enterprise organizations, mid-sized companies, startups, and everyone in between. Most of our recent work serves other businesses and their employees, and we still design consumer experiences too.

Our domain expertise includes: financial services, insurance, healthcare, sports and entertainment, food and hospitality, energy, and manufacturing.

Six questions worth asking any firm you’re considering:

1. Who sells the work, and who does it? Some firms sell their senior team and then staff a more junior one. At Grand Studio, the people who sell the work are the people who deliver it, on small teams rich in senior talent.
2. Can they connect strategy to design in both directions? Strategy-led firms can lack the hands-on detail to turn a plan into working design, while production-led firms can build quickly without knowing why it matters to the business. We train our researchers and designers in management-consulting principles, so what they build ties back to business goals.
3. Can they change course with you? No project follows its plan exactly, and leaders sometimes change direction mid-project. Because the people doing the work also plan it, we adjust quickly and know what each change affects.
4. How do you work together? Polished decks have their place, and we make them when needed, but most of our work happens in shared whiteboards and working sessions with your team. We trade some deck polish for faster, more useful conversations and shared ownership.
5. Will they build your team’s capability, or their own retainer? Some firms keep their methods proprietary to stay on retainer, or move quickly to development to secure maintenance work and add-on offerings. We share our methods and tools freely, co-create with your team, and invest in strategy, research, and design only as far as the outcome needs, so your team can take over when ready.
6. Will the team stay, and will you enjoy working with them? We keep teams together. Some client relationships run for years with the same people, and our employee retention is 94%. You’ll spend a lot of time with your consultancy. We see ourselves as your partners, and our references can speak to what that is like.

We start by working out where AI shows promise and where it doesn’t, then design and build it so people can use it with ease. Our AI Experience practice looks at three things: whether AI fits how people already work, whether they come to rely on it, and whether it lasts past the pilot.

Usually for one of three reasons: the AI does not fit current workflows, people do not trust its capabilities or output, or no one owns adoption after the pilot stage.

Fixing that requires research into how people work with technology, an experience designed around the model, and testing with the people who will use it.

For a global MedTech manufacturer, we have supported the research and design of an AI product that simplifies complex quality workflows. It has grown from one workstream to eleven and 3,000+ users, with a projected $62M+ in cost savings by 2028 and 50–90% less task time, depending on the workflow.

For a Fortune 500 manufacturer, an AI service desk went from kickoff to MVP in 15 weeks and now resolves 36% of IT incidents with no human handoff.