I build furniture professionally. I mostly do commission work, and largely for people who are remote to me, which means I exchange drawings with clients digitally, usually in the form of a rough render (no wood grain texture applied or anything like that) out of SketchUp or FreeCAD[0].
When I actually go to build anything, I generally do pencil and paper shop drawings, usually 3 views, hidden lines showing joinery, etc. I'll make exceptions for simple projects, but for anything even moderately complicated I do shop drawings. "Moderately complicated" starts at a side table with a drawer, and that's something I've put together more than a few of.
The important output of the drawing process isn't a picture of the finished piece. It's knowing, deeply, how all of the pieces are going to fit together and how they relate to each other in space. It's having an order of operations and assembly in mind. It's knowing where the pain points and hiccups are likely to be. It's a good cut list with notes about e.g. what the shoulder distances are for anything with a tenon on both ends.
I don't doubt that you could accelerate the 3D modeling process with AI or a sufficiently friendly CAD program, just as you could take plans from Fine Woodworking or Popular Woodworking and go directly to the shop and start building. I do doubt that things would go faster or more smoothly in the shop for having done so.
[0] Which depends largely on the complexity of the project. This gossip bench was simple enough to do in SketchUp:
https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/gossip-bench
This dining table required some serious leveling up of my FreeCAD skills:
https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/mid-century-modern-table
My experience is that if there's a lot of shaping with curves and tangency, FreeCAD is less cumbersome to draw it in and a hell of a lot easier to make changes in.
When I actually go to build anything, I generally do pencil and paper shop drawings, usually 3 views, hidden lines showing joinery, etc. I'll make exceptions for simple projects, but for anything even moderately complicated I do shop drawings. "Moderately complicated" starts at a side table with a drawer, and that's something I've put together more than a few of.
The important output of the drawing process isn't a picture of the finished piece. It's knowing, deeply, how all of the pieces are going to fit together and how they relate to each other in space. It's having an order of operations and assembly in mind. It's knowing where the pain points and hiccups are likely to be. It's a good cut list with notes about e.g. what the shoulder distances are for anything with a tenon on both ends.
I don't doubt that you could accelerate the 3D modeling process with AI or a sufficiently friendly CAD program, just as you could take plans from Fine Woodworking or Popular Woodworking and go directly to the shop and start building. I do doubt that things would go faster or more smoothly in the shop for having done so.
[0] Which depends largely on the complexity of the project. This gossip bench was simple enough to do in SketchUp:
https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/gossip-bench
This dining table required some serious leveling up of my FreeCAD skills:
https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/mid-century-modern-table
My experience is that if there's a lot of shaping with curves and tangency, FreeCAD is less cumbersome to draw it in and a hell of a lot easier to make changes in.