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The Role of AI and Data in Sustainable Construction
73 Plays11 months ago
As our world shifts toward a greener future, the construction industry finds itself at a critical juncture. Exploring the essence of sustainable construction becomes imperative as we strive to pave the way for an eco-friendly era in the building trades.
That's why we've sat down with Ryan Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Shovels, a company employing data and AI to bridge the gap between homeowners and cleantech companies. Shovels dives into analyzing a whopping 100M building permits, facilitating climate tech companies in strategically targeting homeowners and building robust installer networks.
🕑 KEY MOMENTS
==================
➜ [00:04] We are now number 2 cleantech podcast by listens
➜ [01:53] Fnding good contractors and how Shovels AI is solving this problem by mining data from building permits
➜ [07:09] Ryan explains how Shovels AI provides data to climate tech companies so they can identify homeowners to target and find contractors to partner with
➜ [08:26]Trends in building electrification and how data helps climate companies market to the right homeowners
➜ [22:45] Ryan shares advice for clean tech startups on getting up to speed in the industry
📚 RESOURCES & LINKS
========================
- Shovels Website: https://www.shovels.ai/
- Shovels LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shovels/
- Ryan’s blog: https://rbucks.com
Climate Communities:
- https://mcjcollective.com
- https://workonclimate.org
👉 Interview with Ryan Buckley: https://npws.net/podcast/ai-sustainable-construction
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
========================
This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
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Transcript
Intro & Audience Acknowledgment
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Clean Your Perspective podcast. And guess what? We have recently found out that our podcast is the second best rated clean tech podcast on Google with more than 5k lessons per episode per month.
00:00:16
Speaker
Yeah, you've heard well, the numbers are amazing, so big shout out to you for supporting us and helping us to make the clean tech community more visible.
Guest Introduction: Ryan Buckley
00:00:27
Speaker
Now, if you're into laid-back conversations with experts from clean tech, biotech, natured tech and agri-tech space, where we chat about their game-changing businesses that are shaking up the world, stick around because today I've got a fantastic guest, his name is Ryan Buckley,
00:00:44
Speaker
He is the CEO and co-founder of Shovels AI, a company that is using AI and data to support sustainable construction. So it's going to be a good one. So kick back and enjoy.
What is Shovels AI's Role in Electrification?
00:01:06
Speaker
Hi, Ryan, and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Hi, I'm glad to be here. So for starters, can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a bit more about Shovels AI, the company that we're dedicating this episode to? Yeah, my name's Ryan Buckley. I'm the CEO and the co-founder of Shovels. And we are solving an important problem in the building electrification trades or the green trades.
00:01:36
Speaker
We are helping climate tech companies identify homeowners to target for their electrification products. And we're also helping them identify the right contractors to do the installations. So can you tell us a bit more about the issues that you had, well, the issues with the construction industry and why did you want to start your company? Yeah. It's hard to identify a good contractor.
00:02:06
Speaker
There is no LinkedIn for contractors. You don't find in the Yellow Pages some aggregate directory. A lot of people today are using Yelp to identify contractors.
00:02:22
Speaker
Or they go to one of these marketplaces where there is sometimes awkward or adverse financial incentives. The marketplace will only give you the contractors that they have a financial relationship with. So getting an unbiased ideal recommendation for a contractor just doesn't really exist right now. And we're trying to solve that by
Data Mining for Climate Tech Companies
00:02:52
Speaker
mining this data from the building permits, which exist at city and county levels all over the country. So we take that data. There's usually there's a contractor associated with that permit, not always, but majority of the time it's there.
00:03:10
Speaker
And it's a really interesting data science problem to extract that data, associate it with the permit, deduplicate it, and then make it usable and accessible to both the people and to companies. So we are a B2B company. We're a data provider, which means we're selling this data to other companies so that they can build applications that might be more consumer-facing.
00:03:37
Speaker
And we're targeting specifically right now climate companies because they have urgency. They are willing and able to work with data, specifically with APIs. I can describe later what that means. And there's also a lot of money.
00:03:56
Speaker
being invested in these companies right now. So they have, they have the budget and they really need this information that we're providing. So my next question for you is kind of logical. So how do you use data to make construction more environmentally friendly? Climate tech companies are building all sorts of interesting stuff. We're talking to companies that graduated from Y Combinator that are building their own heat pump systems. It's really exciting. So some hardware.
00:04:26
Speaker
Startups coming up some new battery companies coming up. Of course, the solar industry has been around for decades That's a pretty mature industry, but there's this emerging opportunity to build virtual power plants and communities which in a nutshell and I'm no expert in VPPs, but from what I understand it is the idea that
00:04:56
Speaker
latent or stored energy in the batteries and like car batteries and wall batteries inside people's homes can be used to like smooth out or sort of offset fluctuations in the grid so that
00:05:15
Speaker
electrical utilities won't need to fire up less efficient gas or even oil powered or coal powered power plants. So the future of energy usage in the country will involve battery storage at this really macro distributed level. And that's going to require software.
00:05:43
Speaker
what I'm seeing is a lot of climate tech companies building the software to allow that type of energy transfer to happen. So it's kind of a long windup to answer your question. But it is sort of complicated, but it's interesting. In order for these climate tech companies to know who to target to get their software installed,
00:06:10
Speaker
They need to know who has an EV charger, therefore they have an electric vehicle, and who has a battery. And that data exists in the building permits. So we provide that to them. Sometimes those same climate tech companies, instead of going direct to the homeowners, they'll use the contractors as a marketing channel. They go to the contractors, and then they can say, hey,
00:06:38
Speaker
Here's a pamphlet, tell that homeowner you just installed that battery in their house, tell them now to install our software. So we provide them with both bits of information, the homeowners as well as the contractors. So you were sort of a shortcut. Exactly, yeah. We're kind of like a lead generation service.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah, like a list builder, but very specific to climate companies.
Trends in Building Electrification
00:07:10
Speaker
And do you have an example that you could share of how some of your clients use your data to promote sustainability in construction? Yeah. So along those lines, there's a company called Flip Energy. We sold a bunch of data on EV
00:07:33
Speaker
It was EV charging to him. And he's building software on top of EV chargers. And he's doing a direct mail campaign. So actually sending postcards to people at those addresses who have EV chargers in order to get them to contact him about installing software on the EV chargers.
00:08:03
Speaker
So that's one example of how this data is useful. And do you do something to make homes and buildings more sustainable? And I would like to know, from your experience with data, what people do actually to make their homes more sustainable? Yeah. So we are seeing a lot of activity around different types of building electrification.
00:08:34
Speaker
So you see solar panels installed. We see heat pump HVAC systems installed, mostly air source heat pump HVAC, wall batteries, EV chargers, and even induction stoves. We'll see that type of data as well. Really nice. Did you see it growing? Yeah.
00:09:02
Speaker
The number of installs across the country is growing, and so are the number of contractors doing these installs. We see that the number of permits per contractor is growing, the total number of contractors is growing. We even did an analysis showing that the number of contractors whose service area, in other words, their permits,
00:09:32
Speaker
Um, move beyond just one jurisdiction. So they're like in multiple permitting jurisdictions. That group, uh, is also growing. So there's like, there's more new contractors coming into the market. The existing ones are expanding their service area and they're all doing a lot more permits.
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'm asking this because on your website, I read that you have historical construction data that goes back to decades. So how can analyzing this sort of data help us understanding trends related to sustainability, environmental practices?
Academic Use of Shovels AI Data
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah. So we are, we're also working with some academics. There are actually two people, two researchers at UC Berkeley, one at the Lawrence Livermore lab,
00:10:25
Speaker
Another one in, I believe she's in actually the architecture, or no, she was called to Natural Resources at Berkeley. They're both interested in looking at how homeowners are adapting to new regulations
00:10:46
Speaker
and differences in energy pricing and the new Inflation Reduction Act incentives. So people will be watching this really, really closely in the coming year as literally hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be released by the federal government in order to incentivize more building electrification programs, both residential and commercial, but I think
00:11:18
Speaker
bulk of the volume is going to be at the residential level. I wanted to ask you, you're quite a unique company. How do you advertise yourself and how do you present what you're doing because it's fairly new? How do you make people understand what you're doing?
Engagement through LinkedIn
00:11:42
Speaker
It's real work.
00:11:48
Speaker
I've found that LinkedIn has been great. I'm pretty sure that's how we connected, right? It was on LinkedIn. So posting some of our more interesting findings. I try to do that at least every week because we're constantly pulling new data for our customers and even just prospects that come in. It becomes a nice virtuous cycle where someone will come in with an interesting question and
00:12:18
Speaker
Often, it's a data extraction that we haven't done before, like a different way of looking at our data. And because it's just a sample I'm giving to them, I will take that same sample, maybe expand it a little bit, put a chart on it, and post it to LinkedIn and say something about it. Because it is interesting. It's interesting to me. For example, this was a...
00:12:47
Speaker
customer who came in, well, I guess they're a prospect, they haven't paid us yet, but they were really interested in contractors that have a specific license in California. This is an electrical license called, or it's labeled a C10 electrical license in California. And they were curious how many C10 contractors have active, have had permits in California in the last six months.
00:13:16
Speaker
So what's the total number, the unique set of contractors that have done a permit that have this one specific license? And we're able to get that from them. And I'd never actually even looked at this field, so we have it. It's in the data, but we don't really parse it. We don't include it in the API. So that's actually what's really fun about this is the breadth and the richness of
00:13:43
Speaker
building permit data when you combine it with state license, like contractor license level data, which has all of these certifications and state level approvals. You really build this unique intersection, which I think we may be the first ones to really look at this.
00:14:08
Speaker
combination of data permits and state level certifications for contractors. That's a new view into the building traits. And how do people from climate space react to what you're doing? Fortunately, it's been very, very positive. So like I said, I
00:14:32
Speaker
Well, I guess I didn't really give the background of shovels just yet, but we always did intend to support climate technology and climate startups. When I went through the process of electrifying my house here in the Bay Area in San Francisco, it was a challenging process. We got lucky. We hired a really good contractor, but I have neighbors who were not
00:15:01
Speaker
so lucky. And that's what originally got me interested in this data set, because I was actually looking for another company to build and another problem to think about. So this one kind of fell into my lap. And building permits as the solution took a little while to dig that out, but sort of had the problem and then eventually found an interesting solution for it. Fortunately,
00:15:31
Speaker
climate companies, they have this same problem. It's like the exact same problem that I had these companies have because building electrification, it requires a licensed contractor to do the installation. I don't think that's going to change. I think what will change is more jurisdictions are
00:15:59
Speaker
thinking about streamlining the permitting process so that it goes faster. But they're not going to get rid of the permits altogether. So there will always be a need to hire a contractor to electrify your home. That's not going to go away. And that's a real problem for building electrification companies and startups, because they want to make a good recommendation. A bad contractor and a bad installation
00:16:29
Speaker
can do a lot of damage, not just for that one homeowner, but then all of their family and friends who they go on to complain about this whole experience too. So it becomes this negative viral loop. Yeah, exactly. And the unfortunate thing is if you buy a heat pump and you have a bad install, the heat pump doesn't work very well. You're going to blame the heat pump. You're not going to blame the installer.
00:16:59
Speaker
And the fact is, just with climate changing the way it is and the gas consumption in most homes, we need homeowners to make this switch. And that's why the Inflation Reduction Act is putting so many resources into incentivizing homeowners to do this. It's going to be hard enough.
00:17:25
Speaker
as it is on a good day. But if people are getting the wrong impression about heat pumps, it's going to be a lot harder. So I kind of think of us as like the safety rails in that process, a trusted partner for climate tech companies that are building the technology to make this all work. And they need to have good contractor recommendations. So that's a void that
00:17:54
Speaker
we're filling, and since you asked, it doesn't take much to get them excited and interested in talking to us about our data.
Shovels AI's Focus on Data Quality
00:18:06
Speaker
And how do you plan to develop your company? Do you have some new products or new features that you are going to launch? We are focusing on data quality. I think that's going to be our strategic differentiator
00:18:23
Speaker
We want to get the quality right before we start building user interfaces and other types of user experiences. For now, we deliver CSV files, and we have an API that allows climate companies to programmatically access our data in any kind of scripting language. A couple of things that we're really excited about, though. We've partnered with another contact
00:18:52
Speaker
data company that will dramatically improve our coverage for contact information for homeowners and for contractors. This company will also allow us to run ad campaigns. So these are to tap into ad networks and target people based on their permit activity.
00:19:17
Speaker
So if you wanted to run an ad campaign for every person who's installed solar in the last couple of years, or installed solar ever, or any person who's any homeowner that has installed an ADU, we can run those ad campaigns now. And that's really exciting. So we're going to do that, which will also be really helpful for climate companies.
00:19:41
Speaker
And then as the states get infrastructure set up for the Inflation Reduction Act incentives, they are going to be releasing lists of approved contractors, because it's mostly going to be contractors applying for these rebates. We're gathering that information. We're incorporating that into shovels as well. This is a request from our climate customers.
00:20:09
Speaker
And as far as I know, we're going to be the only game in town as far as that kind of overlap between the Inflation Reduction Act, electrification rebate incentives, and building contractor databases. We're going to own that intersection and be the best at that. So we're excited about all of that. That's a good space for me.
Data Lakes and Tech Adoption
00:20:38
Speaker
So are you maybe excited about some emerging technologies that are going to happen in the next five years, let's say, and how are you going to impact the construction industry? Yeah. So on the data side, we're very curious about the phenomenon of data lakes. There's snowflake, data bricks.
00:21:06
Speaker
Census, this whole reverse ETL data flow system that will help enterprise customers specifically. I'm not sure how this will work with smaller climate tech companies, but we are sitting on hundreds of millions of records, and we want to make it easy for our customers to push that information into their Salesforce, into their HubSpot,
00:21:37
Speaker
like wherever they want it to go, and not have to build a custom integration every time. So as these data lake companies get more mainstream, or they call them data activation companies, we're watching that space really closely. And I'm just starting to get familiar with Snowflake. It seems to be a pretty awesome ecosystem.
00:22:07
Speaker
at will trickle down to construction tech companies and property technology companies. Traditionally, we've been laggards in tech adoption and utilizing the best data technologies. So we want to be on the forefront of that and help our customers
00:22:37
Speaker
use these new data products. So my last question for you will be, what advice would you give to other tech startups like yours that are getting started today and want to get involved with the clean tech industry?
Resource Recommendations for Startups
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I suggest the best way to get started today is read
00:23:07
Speaker
three books and join two Slack communities. So the three books, these were really, really helpful for me just to understand the scope of the problem and get a really good idea of the various niche opportunities that exist. So one of them is how to avoid a climate disaster by Bill Gates. The other one is speed and scale by John Dewar.
00:23:34
Speaker
And the third one is Electrify Everything by Saul Griffith. And there's a lot of overlap between those three books, but they each present different perspectives. Bill Gates, like very kind of a global focus now. He's got his Bill Gates, the Melinda Gates Foundation hat on. John Dewar is really successful, old school venture capitalist, has always been interested in climate and leading Kleiner Perkins in that direction. And then Saul Griffith is this,
00:24:05
Speaker
He's kind of a genius inventor and wrote a really, really compelling, really good, very positive book on electrification. And I thought he addresses a lot of the really fair labor displacement kind of concerns, but also comes at it really from a physics, kind of a physicist's perspective, which I really appreciated.
00:24:34
Speaker
So anyway, those three books. And then two Slack communities. Work on Climate is one Slack community. Awesome. Really, really supportive. Tons of activity. And then My Climate Journey, where you do have to apply. I think there's a $10 fee to join My Climate Journey. But both of them have been instrumental. And even if you're just there to work, to see what people are talking about, I just can't think of a better way to get informed both
00:25:04
Speaker
to answer both of your questions actually in terms of starting a company, but also getting involved and just kind of becoming more knowledgeable about what's happening in climate tech.
00:25:15
Speaker
Well, thank you. I had to check this while I've read the first one, but the other two I haven't. So they seem like really interesting things to read. I mean, thank you for the Slack channels. Maybe we can link them in the description of our episodes so that people could easily join. And well, it's nothing than lurk, like you said. And where can people find you online and follow channels?
00:25:39
Speaker
I, um, so shovels is shovels.ai www.shovels.ai. I am pretty much everywhere online under the username rbucks, r-b-u-c-k-s. And, uh, my personal blog is rbucks.com. And I write a lot about entrepreneurship, local politics, um, stuff like that. So those are the best places to find me.
00:26:14
Speaker
As always, at the end of each Green Your Perspective episode, I am here to politely remind you to subscribe to our channel on Zancaster, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple Podcast, or wherever you stream your podcasts because your support means the world to us and the divisibility of the clean tech community.
00:26:33
Speaker
This episode is proudly sponsored by New Perspective, a necklace trend marketing agency working with clean tech clients only. If you want to be a sponsor of this podcast, please check out the info in the description of this episode and find all our contact information. So that will be that for this episode and until next time, have fun and see you in two weeks.