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E8: What's really going on with Sustainability & AI in Construction
50 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Carlos & Jason discuss the Future of Construction Event in Melbourne.
Sustainability is a hot topic in construction, but what is actually being done to make the industry greener in practice, and where is the representation? Do vendors need to step up to help the transition to sustainable construction?
Why aren't contractors adopting AI? Scepticism around the quality of data that would fuel AI, the reputational risk to lead the charge on introducing AI-powered processes, and effort:value cost are all playing a role.
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode Eight
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everyone and welcome to episode eight of the OptiSight podcast where we chat all things construction and technology. My name is Carlos and I spend most of my days talking to construction teams about how they deliver projects. And I'm Jason and I help build software that construction teams use to deliver their projects.
Recap of Future Construction Event in Melbourne
00:00:15
Speaker
So today we thought we'd recap an event we were at last week which was the future construction event in Melbourne. Think saving couldn't actually do this in person. He's not the jet lag would have just killed me during it. So probably about the way
00:00:30
Speaker
It was nice of you to make the trek over to this side of the world, Carlos, from the UK. It was a shame that you had to do it for about four to five days before flying back. What time zone are you on right now? Yeah, back in the UK now, so back in my normal space. That was good to see that. Sorry? And your sleep pattern?
00:00:53
Speaker
Uh, yeah, adjusted back to the notes. Good to see that. Um, all those customers you talk about are actually real over there. So that's nice.
Sustainability: Frustrations and Focus
00:01:03
Speaker
Right. So the event itself, it's a couple of days. Um, just to give you a bit of context, it's most of the major contractors in Australia and sort of, I think 30 or 40 vendors. So there's a, there's a combination of talks.
00:01:18
Speaker
and then exhibition space so that the obviously senior individuals from these companies can talk to the vendors working in the space. Now, there was a big focus on sustainability, if I think back through several those talks over the two days, as expected.
00:01:34
Speaker
It was the typical frustration I found, which was lots of people talking about how important it is and how are these targets that they're trying to hit and may not hit, but no one was actually talking about how they're going to do it. There's always that lack of information about the doing side of things. So actually thinking about the vendors that were in the space, I thought I'd see what was actually going to help organizations achieve those targets.
Innovation Spotlight: AMP’s Mobile Battery Units
00:02:00
Speaker
Now the, by far sort of a standout one for me was a company called AMP. And they are, I believe they're based in Singapore and I'll try and explain their product to you. It's pretty cool. So if you imagine a shipping container, probably a third or half size, they've turned those into effectively mobile battery units. So a much smaller version of the Elon Musk style units that they've started shipping out. But, um, ultimately.
00:02:29
Speaker
If you've got diesel generators on site, not only is it noisy, it requires maintenance, refueling, but there's hardball fumes. It's running off diesel, which is obviously pumping out CO2 emissions. So it's something we want to avoid. So this mobile battery unit is lifted into site. Everything hooks up and uses electricity, which they source from sustainable sources. So pretty good idea. Have you seen anything like that so far? That's news to me.
00:02:57
Speaker
I had never. Obviously, in construction, it seems as though generators are the lifeblood of most projects. I think on the curve of efficient or sustainable production of energy, diesel generators are probably somewhere right down the bottom.
00:03:15
Speaker
Obviously, if we think back to most sites, we're talking about thousands of liters of fuel normally going into generators per week or per month or whatever, depending on the size of the project. That battery obviously runs out. What
Practicality of Battery Management On-Site
00:03:30
Speaker
happens when the battery runs out? I saw a pretty brief video online, which looks like there were a bunch of these mega blocks inside.
00:03:38
Speaker
I'm making an assumption here based on the video. It looks like, you know, um, if you jump on the line by, they've got the battery packs that they just whip off and stick on the next. I think you could just replace the batteries and you're constantly sort of charging those packs up. So it's never, it's not one battery that just dies and you're recharging it. It's a series of like, what looks like 50, a hundred batteries that are sort of kicking in when needed. And then you were charging the ones that are done. Do you reckon you recharge them or there's like a service provider that does it and comes and swaps it out and all that caper?
00:04:08
Speaker
That's a good question. I'd love to think it was the latter. It makes a lot more sense that it's not there at all late for the site to then be managing a set of batteries. I can imagine. I'm just imagining the guy riding to site on a Lime scooter with like 15 batteries stacked on top of it to get there and replace the batteries. Yeah, yeah, that would be shit. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it looks cool. There's only like 5 million revenue. So it's obviously got some traction.
00:04:38
Speaker
starting in Singapore and look like they're operational in Australia. So I'd imagine another massive benefit in Australia is it's a mobile battery unit. And I can't imagine where some of these jobs are. There's even a grid to tap into because they're pretty remote, right? Especially things like mining. Yeah. Yeah, that was a good one. Now, I'm going to say it ended there with decent looking vendors trying to tackle the sustainability space.
Noise and Dust Monitoring by SiteHive
00:05:06
Speaker
And I'll try not to rant here, but
00:05:08
Speaker
There were a couple in the environmental side, SiteHive and something called UB, or Ooby, it's U-B-Y, bit of a shit name. And they were all about sort of monitoring noise. Tell us what you really think. They were all about monitoring noise and dust and the usual sort of things. So they're not really tackling the sustainability sort of side of things, even though they reference it in the sort of Ethcom content. So yeah, not really in that space.
00:05:39
Speaker
Excuse my ignorance, but if a project is monitoring noise emission or other emissions in the way that you would class, like that company would help them with, does that not contribute towards a more sustainable
00:05:57
Speaker
Is that not also sustainability because it's contributing to less of a drain on the planet generally?
Redefining Sustainability in Construction
00:06:06
Speaker
This might be an exceptionally dumb question. Yeah, it's one of those things where people typically group these things into one bucket, so it's not
00:06:14
Speaker
like this obvious split that people think about when they think about these types of products, they're normally in the same department or group of people or the same targets. I had the exact same thought myself, so I did double check the definition of what it should mean. So from a sustainability point of view, it's the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain ecological balance. So that is about
00:06:39
Speaker
Obviously, reducing carbon, taking less out of the ground, less waste. So noise and dust is- That's the kind of facts you can get on this podcast. That's a website dictionary quotation. We should have had a special guest just from the dictionary company to tell us what the video was. So yeah, kind of a different bucket. Nothing groundbreaking. Sighthives seem to be the bigger one in that space, it seems, from some sort of loose content.
00:07:06
Speaker
What would you expect to see if I'm picking up what you're putting down? The point is that there are a couple of vendors assisting projects, be aware of them and comply with their environmental requirements.
00:07:22
Speaker
or obligations but maybe a lack of those assisting them drive more sustainable construction and a more sustainable industry.
Neglect of Low-Carbon Materials Discussion
00:07:33
Speaker
What type of things would you expect to see? Yeah so I think the big ones that sort of jumped out to me were materials so
00:07:43
Speaker
There's lots of stuff going on with low-carbon concrete, low-carbon steel, different methods of producing these materials and getting them to site. None of that was apparent to me at the event, and that seems like the easier, quicker wins that someone in a contractor can think, oh shit, we just need to switch material vendors and we can already tackle loads of these things rather than massively shifting how we actually deliver projects.
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, which is interesting, actually, just to pick up on that point, like, like, like, obviously, this was an event jointly hosted with the, the sort of industry body, the ACA, like a rock or a big presence there. And like a rock recently announced that they were swapping across, I think all projects in the world, they were swapping to low carbon concrete on
00:08:29
Speaker
I think on all their projects. And I don't think that came up, not in any of the conversations that I went to. This may be totally incorrect and I need to fact check it, but I swear I saw this recently. Yeah, obviously we didn't get to see it for talks. It could have been mentioned and we weren't there at the time, but it wasn't apparent in any content or material that we obviously saw.
00:08:53
Speaker
So yeah generally my takeaway is there is a massive gap between the drive and ambition from the leaders on stage and the vendors in the room so I'd like to think that next year there would be more companies potentially over from this side of this side of the world moving over there to help support this transition to more sustainable construction.
AI in Construction: Hype vs. Reality
00:09:13
Speaker
Jason? Well I guess it's
00:09:17
Speaker
My takeaway or the key trend that I saw watching the vendors at the event, listening to what people were talking about on stage, but also the conversations happening on like around the event is, is back around like the classic topic of AI.
00:09:32
Speaker
um at this event compared to previous they seem to be a higher proportion of ai branded or named um companies and they all seem to be in this space of i don't know if you call it pure ai but like this like ai insight type model whether it be ai for cost or for schedule or for whatever
00:09:56
Speaker
part of the dataset they're trying to run analysis on, but kind of like summarisation of some dataset in construction. But in talking to most of the contractors at the event,
00:10:12
Speaker
I got the sense that everyone was very intrigued by it. AI has always been something that everyone talks about at these events as the sexy, cool thing, but very few of them seem to be using it or knowing someone or knowing another company using it. In the contractor space, client side, it seems to be substantively different. And so it got me thinking, why is that? If people are so intrigued,
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, why is it that there isn't like a more clear adoption across contractors? And so I started thinking through the like classic reasons that you might think, you know, is it the construction slow to change, et cetera, et cetera.
00:10:54
Speaker
And so over that event, and we had a couple of different meetings around the event and I've been talking to people since. And there's like, there seem to be some, some common themes, right? First thing I took away was like, yeah, people are definitely intrigued. People are asking about it. People are asking me about it.
00:11:10
Speaker
You know, does this work? Have you seen people use it? Are other contractors using it? You know, we don't, our product is an AI, but they, out of interest, they ask. People seem to be generally skeptical of their data. So the common question or the common conversation goes something like, you know, AI can crunch the data, take schedule data, for example.
00:11:36
Speaker
Sure, we could see where things change, but like our schedule data isn't, hasn't got the cause in it. It's like a, it's a manipulated version of the output. The causes are really something that happened in design, something that happened on a site record. That's where the causal data is. And this is sort of just a record and, and, and people often think of their data as kind of shit that is, I kind of call like intentionally ambiguous, uh, when they report.
00:12:04
Speaker
I think people in construction are generally aware of shit out and have that view of their data. You mentioned they're conscious of data. One of the talks on stage, one of the, he was like the CTO or the CIO of one of the big contractors, he said, and they were talking about chat GPT for a minute and he went, but yeah, like it's, it's interesting what the output is, but there will be no one in our company putting any data into our model that's
00:12:33
Speaker
processing that over in the States. So they're very conscious of their data for sure. Do you think part of it is you might have these interested individuals, as we always do in these companies, but there's no drive or sort of initiatives from senior levels of the companies actually incorporated into
00:12:53
Speaker
targets or um well that yeah that's the thing so like i think the people that are interested have um have an interest and a skepticism that their data has the like obvious insight if they could like if the if the data was like um all the delays or something then people could kind of mentally connect off if we went across this we could get insight and so part of the problem then becomes those like let's call them champions if they
00:13:23
Speaker
want to push that internally, they've got to sort of pitch this internally and put some reputation on the line and say, we should try and do this. And if you combine that with the skepticism of their data, they're kind of on the fence as to whether they get an output that's usable. And I think one of the things that we talk about in like software design all the time is around time to value.
00:13:48
Speaker
So we try, like at Apex, we try super hard to deliver value in these like clear stages. So like a certain amount of value in a first minute, next amount of value in the first 10 minutes, get to these aha moments where people go, okay, I see how this makes sense and keep going. What are the problems that exist with AI?
00:14:08
Speaker
is maybe it's not time to value, but it's like effort to value. They need to convince people internally, uh, are we comfortable giving over this data? Uh, what are the like agreements in place? If we don't purchase and use this over the long term, we've got to collect all this data. We've got to like then decide if I even gave this over and we got some insight, how do we actually incorporate that into our business? So there's like a whole bunch of the output.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, so there's just a huge amount of hurdles to get over before you
Overcoming Skepticism Towards AI Adoption
00:14:40
Speaker
get any of the value. And so there's people really interested, but it's a massive lift for them to go from that interest to even the smallest pilot feels like a big lift because of, like you said, the view that we're not giving anyone our data.
00:15:01
Speaker
internally. And it's really hard without that to show an aha moment or like here's something that gives you the okay if we kept going down this path.
00:15:10
Speaker
we get this output. And yeah, I watched and listened to, and it was part of a range of conversations between different vendors and different contractors and contractors and contractors talking about it. And they all kind of want to try, but everyone's kind of hitting the same thing, which is like, yeah, we've got a lot of people to convince internally. Everyone has a lot of the similar concerns.
00:15:35
Speaker
I think you will say that the trying aspects, we were obviously at dinner with a vendor, which is the right name. And I think you asked the question, why don't you have a free version or a trial or something that people can just have a play with and see the output. And they seem very cautious about letting anyone do that. And I wonder if A, it's the amount of effort you actually need to put in to get to some sort of actionable results, or B, how actionable is the result?
00:16:03
Speaker
like uh don't know like this is your pain point it's like well what the hell do we do with that just add in some flow do you know what i mean so yeah i i i don't want to speculate because i because i don't know but um the stuff that i what i do know is it is a lift like it's it is an amount of work to do to get to like the first nugget of value and um and that makes it hard that makes it hard even
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of like institutional inertia that pushes against something that is kind of like a top down deployment or sale because you've got to get through this. Like we're giving away something that we might not get any value for. So I guess my takeaway was.
00:16:49
Speaker
that there's like a lot of interest and it does feel like business model or go to market innovation from these AI companies is like needed. There is an avenue that I can think of, which is if they can get enough of the clients measuring contractors tenders with this tool, contractors will start to adopt, you know, to know what the output is on their tender. That's one avenue. You'd like to assume they give the same output both times it's run, right?
00:17:18
Speaker
Well, if it's a probabilistic model, the problem, the answer is no. Like you put in, you put in chat GPT, the same question two hours apart, you're getting different answers. Yeah. The takeaway is that like either there's the like client path or there has to be some way from a business model perspective for these companies to try and get value at a lower level, at a small level. Um, so people can use that to show internally, this is what we could get.
00:17:44
Speaker
even if it's not their, like, there's got to be a way to show it. Otherwise, it's just this like, I don't know, Mexican standoff of who's going to do, you know, who's going first with the contractors. Yeah. And until we see some serious, like, case studies results from directly from using these types of services, which I haven't seen yet.
00:18:06
Speaker
It's all very theoretical to an extent. It must make it hard to actually adopt it, put actual caching into it, and expose your data. So it's a difficult spot to
Leadership Ambitions vs. Vendor Support for Sustainability
00:18:17
Speaker
be. Awesome. So we're going to have to try and wrap up fairly soon. We've been talking for some time now. So Carlos, after making the trek out to Australia for EFCON last week, what was your key takeaway? If I agree to any event in the UK, there are shitloads of decent startups fighting in each space.
00:18:36
Speaker
In Australia, there seems to be this huge drive and passion from senior leaders up on stage, but there was an underwhelming amount of vendors actually supporting this change. You could count on one hand the ones that really got you exciting. So for me and you, that's obviously super exciting to work in a space with this volume of mega projects that we see in Australia, but they really need a lot more to be able to actually deliver this change. What's your key sort of takeaway
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, for me, the key takeaway from EFCON this year was a clear difference in the way that the larger contractors and the people speaking on behalf of those larger contractors were talking.
From Theory to Practice: Adopting Technology Actively
00:19:18
Speaker
I guess in previous years or at other events, when we started out, Carlos, there were a lot of people talking about the promise of different technologies, pitching the ideas of artificial intelligence and big data and this software and that software.
00:19:31
Speaker
a lot felt like a hypothetical conversation about what it could do. The conversations from a lot of the leaders this year were talking about how best to deploy a type of software, what the typical pain points that they see in the business, how when they go through a pilot and get a great outcome, how to move the organization more quickly to moving everything over to that approach and not leaving the legacy stuff behind.
00:19:58
Speaker
conversations that really show that these are people that are actively doing the adoption of technology, not the people sort of pontificating about what it could do in the future. And that was, you know, after doing that for a number of years, that's quite a substantial change that I felt being in the room. And it was refreshing to see. They keep up bad rates. Yeah, we'll see same misimprovement over the next couple of years.
00:20:27
Speaker
Awesome. Right. Thanks Jason. That's all we have time for today. So as always, thank you very much for listening.