224: 'Everything Is Going to Change', with Martyn Day

224: 'Everything Is Going to Change', with Martyn Day

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Martyn Day back to the podcast for what you might Expect, another marathon conversation. Martyn is a co-founder and director of X3DMedia, which publishes AEC Magazine and Develop3D. Two of the most respected trade publications covering architecture, engineering, and construction technology along with manufacturing.

He's also the host of NXT BLD and NXT DEV conferences, and he's been at this for 37 years, building a reputation for saying the things most people in the industry are thinking, but won't say out loud.

He's sharp, blunt, and genuinely curious about where all of this is heading, which makes him exactly the kind of guest I want to have on right now to talk about the state of the AEC industry and the tech that is shaping it. In this episode, we cover a lot of ground. We get into engineering automation tools that can generate a full MEP layout overnight.

AI written software that's already threatening CDEs and clash detection products and the rise of open SDKs that are dismantling the moats that big vendors have spent decades building. We talk about what happens to Autodesk's business model when we hit peak named user licensing. Why firms need to take their data seriously before someone else does it for them, and what it means when a company like Palantir decides AEC is worth owning.

What we're all feeling that this conversation makes clear is the sheer simultaneity of it all. It's not one wave coming. It's a dozen waves at once, and Martyn compares it to watching an asteroid approach. The technologies are arriving faster than institutions, firms, or software vendors can adapt. The AIA's plan, the architecture firm's billable hour, the traditional software subscription model, they're all in the crosshairs at the same time from different directions. And yet Martyn isn't just sounding the alarm. He maps out where the real opportunity is. Firms that own their data, train on it and build bespoke tools with open SDKs are gonna have advantages the big vendors can't replicate. The people in a firm who can break down a problem clearly enough for an AI to solve it are going to be worth their weight in gold or as Martyn says, gold dust. He told me he's excited by the technology and worried about humans in equal measure. I feel the same way.

As usual, there's an extensive amount of information in the show notes, so please be sure to check that out. You can find them directly in your podcast app if you're a paid supporter of TRXL+. That's just one of the perks. And if you're a free member, you can find them over at the website, which is of course TRXL.co.

So without further ado, I bring you my wide ranging conversation about the state of AEC Tech with Martyn Day.

Martyn Day: I've been doing this for 37 years, I think now

feels like the most incredible time in terms

of development and idea. Yeah.

I think it's very hard. It's very hard to be a software supplier. It's very hard to be a customer.

Um, uh, it's really hard to be a journalist

'cause you can't keep up.

I write something and

then someone releases a new LLM on Monday and

Evan Troxel: It's great for you Martyn. It's great for you

Martyn Day: I have to write

quicker. That's my problem. But I

Evan Troxel: never ending content

stream. You just have to pick what to write about. Uh, yeah.

Martyn Day: Alright. I should

Evan Troxel: Well, I think that's the intro to the show right there. I mean, that little quick history lesson. So you've been on the show before. I didn't look up when it

feels like maybe three years ago I broke that long conversation up into three parts.

I don't think I'm gonna do that this time. I'm gonna try to keep you on track.

I've got six topics that I want to talk about with you today.

Martyn Day: For thi for this, for this, I actually wrote

some notes because it is kinda like, oh, I gotta,

I, I'm so spread out. I feel like I'm so spread out in my little research topics that,

uh, I, I, I am, I'm losing track and they all interact with each other, but it's, uh, it's definitely,

Evan Troxel: Oh, interesting. Well, well, let's start, let's just start with a meta, uh, conversation

about that. How do you keep track of the things

that you want to write about and kind of how, how do those, how do you control or make that, that connection between them? Like how do you keep that story straight across those

Martyn Day: Uh, I'm a non-linear

thinker, so I'm quite adept to taking lots of inputs and then suddenly something, it might be in

my sleep, but then I'll kind of wake up and go, oh, and then I'll go off and then

connect two things together, and

Evan Troxel: Oh, you sound like an architect. Yeah.

Martyn Day: I, I think I'm, I think it's A-D-H-D-I dunno if that actually, but it's, it's.

Uh,

Evan Troxel: There you go.

Martyn Day: my sister, my sister's a school teacher, and she, um, she's given me a late diagnosis, uh, at the age of 50. So, um,

uh, I, I take in lots of signals. I looked for

signals. Uh, in fact, one of the first agents I

wrote was to go out and scrape every week,

uh, forums,

uh, uh, industry websites, um, I don't know to do it LinkedIn.

'cause it's, they, they're A bit weird about it. But, and every week it kind of throws

up, uh, it'll throw up

some things and some it, it knows me. So it will then say, Hey, you wrote about this, this, and

this. This actually impacts that. So I've now got a little friend that kind of helps me. But before I was

kind of, um, uh, just talking to people.

I talk to people all the time.

Talk to the BIM two point I guys all the time. Um, I talk to,

um, if something is,

is particularly interesting, then I'll, I'll chase them down on LinkedIn and start having conversations. So, um,

things like Consigli getting bought

for like a huge amount of money. Oh my God. I'm getting people contacting me, going, oh my God, so much money.

Consigli. Wow. And then they give me bits of information and then I'll

then I'll see Andrew goes and gets

20 million for a startup

and I speak to them. And then so, so suddenly I've got Augmenter who obviously I've been talking to for a long time,

Andrew, who are new. I

do a search and say what else is out there?

Come across company called hvac.

The one of the guy does, this guy does a, a crazy, Um.

Video on LinkedIn. I message him. Really lovely guys. Have a really good chat with them.

I'm doing NXT BLD. I say, why don't you come over? Hey Andrea, come and speak.

Hey, augmenta, come and speak. And then someone else says, Hey, have you seen that company?

So I'll go and look at

Branch 3D and I'll talk to, uh, those

guys, and then suddenly I invite them to NXT BLD. And we've got all of them there. So,

uh, we can have a really interesting conversation about where engineering is

going. And once I start looking into that, that then makes me think

all of these plan of works that the a i A has

and Reba has that, that's so old compared to what's coming because these guys are gonna be nailing a engineering solution either overnight or in real

time.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. The

Martyn Day: does that

Evan Troxel: pace.

The pace of development of those frameworks that you're talking about is, I mean, in, in

the, you compare it to what's happening right now in, in

software development, mostly around ai. Right. It's, uh, like it's, you can't compare them. And so how

you're, you're right. Like those, those look like sinking ships.

Not even

just slow ships passing in the

night.

Martyn Day: augmenta has taken a long time to get to

where it is. And like there's the whole kind of thing. Is it ai,

is it generative? I don't really

care anymore.

It's just, it's, it's, it's generative mainly. But AI is playing an increasingly role, a bigger role in it.

But Augmenta are only

focusing on one country.

Country. The USA, they focused on one thing, which was electrical, and

they spent a load of money and time getting that right. And now they're focusing on MEP, which

was always their intention. And I saw a demo of that in December and it blew me away. And

they said, you know, this is 12

months before we got shipping product, but they're already throwing a Revit file.

You get

a MEP built into the Revit file. Um,

and

Evan Troxel: that, yeah, so that shipping, that shipping product

is not going to be a, a bare bones basic product. It

is

Martyn Day: No, It's going to do your

building and it will do electrical and I mean piece simultaneously. So you'll, you'll, you'll

chuck it in for solve seven

hours later you'll get both done. And then after that, they're gonna do

structural. And then, um, uh,

you look at,

uh, what, um,

Lucas EPP is doing with structure

craft stroke branch 3D. He's got a real time FEA

solver. So an architect moves the floor plate. That floor plate will automatically recalculate

the, uh, FEA analysis and then it will repositions the

structural elements. So you have an immediate response to an architectural movement. And at the moment, that's not really geared, that industry's not

geared up for that.

It's not geared up to connect those people constantly unless you're in a multi, uh, multidisciplinary firm where you have really tightly

integrated folks. So, so just looking at this,

this, this engineering

conundrum that's gonna hit the market. I mean, this stuff's I think,

I think branch three D's already shipping. Um, but obviously this is going to expand out over the next 12 to

18 months. And you are going to see engineering become a lot more automated, a lot quicker to get, to get your feedback.

Um, and

what the hell's that gonna do to the market? You got, you

might have an architect still spending 18 months designing a building, but the engineering is gonna be almost like press a button.

Here

it comes. You're gonna need

somebody to sue. So

there's gonna be

Evan Troxel: I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through my, through my topics in reverse

order based on what you're talking about, because that's, that's this, this kind of solver based

stuff that we're seeing, right? It's like the architect put, I don't even know how to frame this anymore, because it is changing so drastically.

And, and so it really kind of, it, it revolves around the business

model of architecture. Billing money for

Martyn Day: Oh, it destroys the architecture

business model. They have to

Evan Troxel: So let's, let's start there. Yeah. So, so, and, and, and many people say that we have to rethink it, but like, what, what do you, so, so you're painting a picture of why, and so, I mean, there's the, there's the why, but there's also the how or the what, like how, what does it look like?

And

this, what's, what's, really interesting to me is that it gets, it actually gets back to the value

of architectural design. It doesn't,

it doesn't rely on the commoditization of this is how long it takes to do drawings,

and drawings are the output. It really points back, I think, points back to the idea of where the value lies in architecture.

I would love to hear what you think

about that,

Martyn Day: first thing, the industry's being attacked from many different places. It's not being attacked by

one thing. It's going, it's being attacked by automation, uh, in the traditional workflows that we have.

But then you've got, um, uh, solver, which is,

above automation Solver is, is kinda like, here's the MEP for the building that you designed.

That's really bad. And

I had to put all this MEP, the, the software said you had to put all this

MEP in because you, you, you, you, the heat load on this building's crazy. So you've got that, you've got companies like, uh, Palantir

coming in. Holy crap. I mean, I'm, for me,

I, I, I can't stand

the company. I find

them.

Despicable, but they've got an AC

division and that AC

division isn't, doesn't care about. And

all of the traditional software have got like locks on

people. Moat, they're called moats in is, is the kind of common thing. But, um, yeah, RVT is a lock. You know, ACC

is a lock. uh,

uh, DGN is a lock. All these kind of formats, which kind of stop you from having ultimate freedom with your data and Pa Palantir is just

gonna go to a Skanska, '

embed themselves in a Skanska.

They will own the layer between everything downstream and their

business processes. They will

learn

everything that happens in a Skanska project. Uh, everyone else suddenly just becomes piping to send information to the penalty system. And, uh, Skanska will be incredibly inefficient. What happens to construction

managers when you have an AI

layer that's removing risk, that's automatically removing risk and it's automatically planting the planning.

Yeah, proactively looking ahead, oh,

Evan Troxel: Like open claw. Open claw for construction.

Yes.

Martyn Day: It's like

GPS it, it, it'll be looking

forward. And so suddenly, where does that

leave the, the existing players? None of them have AI

development teams or the AI capability or the ontology. You know, the Palantir, the word ontology

is, is kind of

a, if you don't know about it, it's essentially how everything

works.

The ontology of a process, how everything works, how

everything is connected to

one another. And if

this changes, then the impact of that

change. Not just, you know, in, in, a, kinda like

a Revit, um, parametric thing saying that geometry must change. It's kind of like this has happened, therefore this, this, and this are all impacted by that

timeline. Therefore, I will, I will

act, do whatever. So, so

Evan Troxel: And it's goal-based. It's goal. It's like it's not gonna stop at what you would traditionally even think

as solutions for those problems. It will find a way to solve the problem because

Martyn Day: 24 7 and it'll be

working on your projects.

And so we we can all depending on which,

which kind of it, it's almost like a, a fian series, you know,

it's, it's kind of fractal because we could all concentrate on all being, well, I'm an architect and I've got Revit

and,

and you know, I'm using a CC and I've got issues there.

But actually go out, go out, go out, go out this onion, you can go

to the out onion skin and everything is being attacked by this. And that's why it's so hard to understand

the impact of

this. 'cause everything's changing at once or everything. The technologies are changing

at once. They haven't really impacted yet, but we're just kind of looking

at this

asteroid coming towards us.

And we've gotta try and

work out what's gonna survive in terms of the workflows, the technologies,

the products, the, the, the institutions, Reba and a i a have to get their act

together and understand how these things are going to impact architectural practices. And I

how do you charge, how do you do bill, bill

by hour when you have automation and you have, uh,

you, you have things being solved overnight that would

take three or four months. How do you charge the customer?

Um, how do you keep

track of that? Um, I think there's a, a move with automation for drawings, automation for design,

even that will, that will make billable

hours just, just be useless. So then you have to start thinking about what

your value is and how you charge for your value. And by the

way, the software companies are thinking exactly the same.

They know we're kind of near, we are near peak,

uh, named user license because from now on in people are gonna be using automation. They're gonna be using

smarts to reduce the number of seats that

they need. And when that happens. Then these guys, these guys are going, well, Autodesk, I'm a $7 billion company.

I need to be a $10 billion

company. Oh, I might have a problem trying to stay being a

$7 billion company if this revolution impacts

my software sales. Therefore, I I need to do

something to a new business model

to, to keep bringing that money in and then grow into new areas. There is new opportunity for all software vendors as

well, but essentially they're gonna have to do it.

So what I'm

seeing is tokenization. So you're seeing tokens are coming

in

Evan Troxel: like

ai, everything running on tokens,

Martyn Day: and, and yeah, and this is kind of one of the fundamental things that was,

software has moved to the cloud or moving to the cloud, right? Okay. Someone else's computer, and you've gotta pay for it. So not only are companies like

Autodesk charging you for a subscription, they say, uh, let's

imagine that Revit was on the cloud rather than it's on your desktop.

Um, but they're charge, they're being charged by Amazon to run that instance and do that processing. They put a

markup on it, and then they pass it on to you. so they're making, they're making money not only from selling

you the software or subscribing to the software they're making on charging and making money

on

you actually touching it or using it because it's, it's now hosted.

Now, if you. Go out a little bit further and you start

looking at a PS and the whole idea of, um,

a, a gentech, uh, approaches,

they're now going to charge you tokens based on how many

megabytes you, you, you access from a CC. So you're paying to subscribe to, to get the design software. You are getting to pay, to have the stuff hosted with the services on a CC, which aren't

insignificant. Um, and then on top of that, you are paid to, to touch your

data to then process it with an a ai. That

AI might also charge you for processing as well. It

might be on your side of the firm of the, of the firewall. So pay, pay, pay, pay, pay,

it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, got to be a bad thing. So that's why I

think, uh, the net

result of this is that large firms are looking to reshore their project data to have it

in-house. If you have it in-house on your server, you, you don't

have this kind of constant,

uh, bleed of money. And you could charge,

you could develop an LLM on your data, which doesn't

have high token usage, which you, you are

paying through the nose for. So I kind of feel, think that, that, that firms need to start thinking about

where their data is,

how good their data is, can they centralize it?

can they protect it? And then what, what is it that they want to

extract, extract from that? Um, and have they got the in-house knowledge

to do that? Or, you know, there are gonna be new roles in firms where you're

gonna have to have someone with some kind of agentic ai, uh, approach. These people have to be structured in mind.

A lot of firms

don't hire

programmers.

Evan Troxel: You have to think think about data differently. Yeah. I mean, it, it's, it is interesting to even think about like you are, you are then competing against these

companies that you're talking about who are doing, developing their in-house and they're paying way more than architecture firms pay

architects, for

example.

I don't know how how much architecture firms pay data scientists, but it can't be anywhere. I can't imagine competitive

with a planete. I mean, not that you have to shoot that high, but it,

but

Martyn Day: Well, even in an, even in an Autodesk, in any software firm, so some of my friends

who've gone off from architecture to join software firms are amazed at the amount of money that software firms pay people. Um, you are an important person because there are very few of them, and

they develop something with that has a good margin

on it.

And, um, there's a huge market to sell to, but I, I,

I, there are, everything is going to change and it's going to happen a lot quicker than

I think people are, are, are, are looking at it in terms of, um, in 18 months time.

Well, I'm getting, uh, uh, uh, I'm getting, calls from

people who are programmers who are saying that AI programming is getting so good

that they're gonna be at the job within a

year. And if that's the case,

that level of programmer is AI programmer is gonna be available to every single AEC firm on the planet. And all it takes

for you to do is to have, uh, you need to be able to ask the right questions of the system to develop

the product. This is the, this is the the, big problem is understanding what

your problem is and being able to explain it to the AI so it

could give you a, uh, a, a program.

So, and I, I think a lot of the programs are gonna be ones that you stand, you see, so.

Right. You have an ai, you have hopefully

someone who kind of has a structured mind and says, okay, we need to develop a CDE. We want it to do clash detection. We want it to do X, y, and Z. So you, you specify it. Now every time, if you were to sit in

front of, of Claude and say, right near a C, d, E, and here's

the spec, it's not necessarily gonna write the same

piece of code with the same stuff in it every single time.

It will

be unique. There's no framework.

It's just off. You go, go and, and what, whatever is it, it

does on, on its research at that moment in time, it will go and build it

differently. This is

why a lot of the, a lot of the, I think that some of the most important firms in the next five to 10 years are gonna be open SDKs.

So that open company, Creo, XO kits, those things, they're out there and they're open source, they're free. And if you point, or you tell your AI to use that

SDK, you get common frameworks, common user

interfaces, uh, access to file formats that are

standard like IFC. It's all built

in. And you, so when you, when a company develops something, they develop a product that it,

uh, and then they develop a next product, they'll all have the same look and feel. And you, you kind of end up with creating your own software,

but you have a standard. And that standard

is this open, these open frameworks, and these open frameworks are, are starting to crush,

um, data moats. I mean, it, it. Things like, uh, CDEs are, are in real danger because that's, that's gonna be

easy. Bread and butter for a, for an AI to program. Um, clash

detection is another one, which is a, a another problem, uh, which will be solved. Um, uh, things like c Celebrity I kind of have worries about

because, you know, model checking is another thing. You know, if you can write rules, uh, uh, put, put your rules in the ai, then it can then put

that in the program.

So I think you're gonna, you're gonna find certain

products. Um, uh, uh, I've already had software firms reach out from that. Just that little thing I put on LinkedIn

saying, I asked, uh, Claude, could you rewrite a CC in '

open SDKs? And it just went,

and it, you know, it kind of last year it said it was

difficult this year it kind of said, yeah, I

can do it.

But, um, uh, there were, there were certain things that it couldn't do. It could do

70%. Um, and so software companies are coming to me going, Hmm, what does this mean for me? What does this mean for my

product? There are gonna be some low hanging fruit that are going to be

struggling. cause if you really wanted to, you could have an

AI write that for you specifically. Um,

and that will be from next year onwards. Um, you're still gonna have to understand managing code. You might have to

have some idea about user interface and how you like it.

Um, code has to be kept up to date to run on, uh, various, uh, standard software. And there that, so there are some, it's not, it's not,

straightforward.

You're still gonna need to have some knowledge, but. People like fostering partners have 30 or 40 computer programmers, and a lot of, these other firms have got zero. They're relying on an architect

who happens to

have, you know, studied Python because they're, they're a big fan of McNeil or something. Yeah.

It's like a,

it's it, that person or those people in your firm who have that

mind, they're gonna be like gold dust

because not only are they gonna be able to help with the grasshopper scripting or whatever you're doing,

but that, that idea of breaking down a problem

is going to be, and then explaining it is going to be

essential in, in firms to create tools for the, for

the, for the, for the company.

Um, and they'll be saving a lot of money. Um, and this is the other

thing is that firms will be able to start looking at their software

estate and start deciding what's important

to them. I don't think offering tools are in any real

danger. I think that BIM 2.0 and I think Revit and, uh, ArchiCAD, you're not gonna be able to have AI write, write you a Revit.

It's

just not, not, gonna happen. But it will do CDEs

model checking, um, uh, clash detection,

you know, those kind of things. Um, uh, but if there's

an

Evan Troxel: the side, plus the side of it that you talked about earlier when you're talking about how, how you're synthesizing all of these, like it knows you, your tool that you

use to do research knows you. And that's the other side of the coin that

these firms have to develop. It's interesting to me to think

about like this idea of, of like the billing structure, but there's also

the phased structure of our

projects and how they're linear.

Like seed, you know,

conceptual design, schematic design,

design development, and how compressed pieces of that get for sure. Depending on who's on the team, right? and

and, and who on the team could also mean these kinds of solver apps, right? So,

um, it's, it's really interesting to think

about, like you said, everything is going to change.

So it's not just

the tools that we're talking about. It's the way we

do the work. It's, it's how the time it takes to deliver

the work. it's like the value of the work. It's, it's so many layers deep.

Martyn Day: just, just think, just thinking about the one that I absolutely know is gonna happen first,

which is engineering, is

how do architects work with a structural engineer

and what's the timeline between design and then giving it to the

structural engineer and the structural engineer handing it back, and then the

way

Evan Troxel: look at what Core Studio did with, with asterisk years ago, right? And, and it was kind of too early. It was

too a big idea, a little

too soon. And now they're on the verge of doing it again and they're, they're doing it to themselves because they know these solvers need to exist and they need to solve 80% of the problems

so that they can work and focus on the, the

Martyn Day: why did AECOM buy Con

Sigley for 360 to $90 million? I mean, that is insane. Um, I had, I had VCs ringing me up I had software vendors ringing me up. No one could believe the price. Uh,

and then software vendors were worried that suddenly they

were going to

be competing with their customers to buy AI startups.

And that is gonna be the case. I've,

you know, I think C or on

Evan Troxel: big ones.

Yeah.

Martyn Day: C Scansca, Skanska, aecom, and, and I don't blame them because

aecom, if by looking at what was happening, they're gonna be in competition with other people, with

automated systems. So that makes. You know, uh, that's the reason why Andra

got a, a huge, uh, vc, uh, uh, they were turning money away.

They told me they were turning money away because they had so many people wanting to put

money into Andra. And then you,

you look at Augmenta and they're growing and Augmenta are the kind

of secret giants because they've been working on this for a lot longer than anyone

else. And they're, they're a lot

more,

holistic and they're, they're much more, um, press a button and seven hours later we've done some inquest.

Not only have they generated

the electrical, they've done all the conduits, they've punched all the holes. The MEP is exactly the same. All the support

structures in there to

put, it's it, and it's done it from the Revit

model. and it's all

happening outside of Revit. And this is the thing

that's gonna happen with BIM is that BIM is this kind of thing where you kind of do some Lego

modeling and you're kind of like building this thing.

What, meanwhile that data goes

out, 'cause it, it can't do it inside of Revit. it

needs to be in something more, uh,

modern and, and AI friendly. And that's being, then it's

being pumped back into Revit, like a

puppet just to create

some drawings. And this is the future of BIM. 1.0

is just going to become this kind of drawing conduit for geometry.

And I, I, think, I dunno how long

that will last for. Um, I have,

I, I, Yeah. I, I come across firms that are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to perfect their bin 1.0. Uh, platforms to, you know, like really refine

it. It's just like you're wasting your money. You, you, you are, you are trying to refine

something that's already dead.

You have to start

thinking about these tools that are coming out and how

it's gonna change the way you work. And I hope that,

you know, I was, I was concerned that a lot of the BIM 2.0 guys

started too long ago for AI and the AG agentic future

to. It, it, uh,

I, I, I've, in this issue of, uh, AC that's just come out, I asked them

all, and I'm kind of,

uh, okay with a lot of the, the answers that I got back from people in terms of what they're

doing, I do think that they have a handle on it.

I think motif,

um, being last to the party are the ones that are probably gonna

benefit the most from it because they're, they were still deciding their tech stack kind of last year already

for a lot of stuff. So I think they've got a handle on it,

con it con, have

a handle on it.

Snap Truth's already been demonstrating some very interesting

conceptual design features. And I, I think

he's kind of ahead in terms of delivering,

uh, AI at the concept level. Um, ar call has

has tended to focus on really that one platform that it's got, but I know full

well that Paul and the

gang, their total focus

is to replace Revit at some point in that kind of detailed design and drawing stuff.

But.

The question's gonna be is, is there really gonna be one platform

that does that in the future? Or is it gonna be specialist, specialist, uh, developers, like there'll be specialist, uh, MEP,

uh, and electrical. There'll be sort of like, uh, specialist facade

maybe be, um, auto drawings is coming along.

There's now more people involved in that. so are you just gonna have your, have your model in whatever you've designed it and just throw it into whatever drawing,

drawing service it is, and then you get all your drawings out, um, as opposed to having it in the monolith.

Um, and it seems like a lot of, you know, at the moment it's still

very file-based.

So that's another kind of problem is fi

all these files being sent everywhere. It's just they have to be in the cloud. It has to, it has

to move to the cloud. Um, but uh, it has to happen in a way which I

think the industry needs to recognize. They

have to protect their data. They have

to try and minimize the cost, and they don't want other people to train on their data.

And I think

that, um, in-house is going to increase. I think people are seriously going to

be, um, looking at buying some. Big hardware,

big server hardware, uh, in-house as opposed to, um,

paying and paying and paying and paying

for every single thing online. But where a CC and kind of project hosting sites will win out is you are working on a collaborative product project.

So

you have to put your data somewhere together. So, okay, a CC is maybe the

place that you do that, but um, in terms of your

archive and other things that you're working on, you really need to have that on your side of the

fence with your own intelligence running on it. and because this stuff is gonna be so

low cost to develop, it's not be free to develop.

I, I wouldn't be surprised if architects sharp sharing

applications that their ais have written. So why

reinvent the wheel? You know? So here's, here's, a CDE, here's a clash detection thing we

wrote. It works really well. Um, maybe there's a secondary market for

that, but I'm the, the, the, the very high

end architects are totally rethinking their product mix and the way that workflows go from

simple sketching to, uh, so you sketch,

you make some, you get some nice ar renders from the sketch, then you get a 3D model, um, from the

sketch 'cause that's now viable. Um, and then you are in Rhino.

Rhino is the one thing that seems to be consistent throughout everyone. It's, it's, it's so cheap for what it, for what it does. And it's so beloved. It's the product that no one's said that they're gonna remove from the, from the, the thing. And then

people are trying to work out how to get drawings,

um, or if they're gonna stick it into

Revit, how few revits they can get away with to produce those

drawings as opposed to having a Revit

on every single desktop.

So that you are using it primarily for

output of drawings of a model.

Um. So I, yeah, I'm, I'm intrigued every time I talk to a company that that's doing, doing some, doing

some internal research as to what, they all seem to be roughly

heading in the same direction. Um, and it's about hosting their own

project information.

Um, and then that opens up once you've got, if you've got a server with all of

your data in it, then you run the, you can run the application on your data. You don't need to put it in the

cloud. Um, so you can write your own agents. Um,

you can, so at the, moment I'm sort of talked to Greg Sch Lizer a lot age of came.

He's, he really wants to have real time clash checking. He said that his, his, I think he's been on his,

his bugbear is that, uh, people work on a project all week and on Friday they do a

clash check. And the clash detection

goes, you know, this is screwed up. And that, that's then wasted a whole lot of work.

Why, why couldn't, why isn't that happening in real time

so that it

Evan Troxel: Why? Yeah. Why isn't there a clash detection recommendation engine

that's working alongside you like an

agent would, right?

Martyn Day: and you can't really do it in Revit.

'cause Revit is single threaded. And, um, he told me that every time you need to save something out, then it, it's obviously gotta pause and then

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Martyn Day: output that

object and then move on. And then

it, it, I'm hoping, I'm hoping that,

um,

uh, we're gonna have these

real time systems, uh, demonstrated soon.

So you can see the benefit of having your data, uh, local and, uh, these kind of agents constantly running over it with no real huge token cost to then give you immediate feedback and flag things up as they

go along. Um, but everything that, that point downstream, the same kind of

agents running, you are d you're de-risking the whole process

Evan Troxel: Right.

Martyn Day: because you're checking drawings, you're checking models, you're checking everything.

And then, yeah. Well, and then what happens

to insurance? So if you've got these tools

and you are, you are

you are not guaranteed, but you, you've got a high, high, um,

uh, uh,

feeling that your data is always gonna be meet, meet the quality. So maybe there's not gonna be suing going on downstream then, you know, without litigation.

That's gonna be obviously a benefit to

the, to the market. I mean, these project hosting sites should be trying

to stop future legality.

If they, if they're hosting the project, they should be looking at all the data and, and immediately flagging up if there are kind of any kind of

anything missing. So when we get to the point

of

currently being sued, um, that's been handled

before, so it smooths the

process.

And that's why, another reason why I think kind of construction managers are very worried

because we're gonna have these, these, these software

applications of, uh, of loving grace looking after the whole process.

Evan Troxel: Well, let's, let's talk about the people side of that equation, right? I mean, you're talking then about needing

people who have tons of experience

on projects actually getting projects built. Right. And so that to me is concerning from

like the, like, obviously there's like the technology layer, but then we've talked for years

about those people walking out the door with all of that knowledge inside of their heads and newer generations coming in without any of that because they haven't done it yet.

Right. And a lack of mentorship and things like that. So, I mean, what, how do, how do you see firms dealing

with that and what are the, are they doing

anything to address it?

Martyn Day: Uh, well, they're, they're trying

to capture it. So if you look at products like Victor,

where if you've got anyone who writes

any code in-house, then the idea by using Victor is that you say they give you all the tools to write

the code, but they also store

it, and then they produce it as a piece of code that

the rest of the company can use. Hopefully you document it and

it actually makes sense. Um, so there's, there's, kind of knowledge capture

a little bit going on now. Then, uh, AI

is gonna be able to

reverse engineer some of that knowledge,

um, or capture some of that knowledge. People like Palantir are definitely gonna capture a lot of that

project running information once they get really stuck in. Um, so that's,

that's, yeah, I don't,

Evan Troxel: It's, it's

Martyn Day: I don't

Evan Troxel: because a lot of that information is exchanged just over conversations, or it's real time on the job site or, you know, and it's not captured and nobody does kind of that retrospective, well, not nobody, right, but

but like going back and saying, well,

what happened and why did we decide that? And

like a lot of that stuff just falls

through the cracks because it's never needed, it's never previously been needed. It was just one of those

things we, we just did in real time.

Martyn Day: Palantir gets enough information to go and kill people. I think they can kind of work out,

uh, what is and isn't necessary in a project. I think they, it is gonna be reading every single email. Uh, it's gonna be looking at every single drawing.

It's gonna

Evan Troxel: think it'll be able to kind of infer,

infer what's, what's meant in a red line of a PDF kind of

a thing? Mm-hmm.

Martyn Day: eventually it will understand everything

and, um, the more you train it, the more it's gonna know.

And I, I just don't think, I don't think that there is, um. Much

knowledge that can't be captured over time. And the more information you give it, the

easier it is. And, um, my, my deepest concern is for the next generation, because

what's happening in, in legal, um, it's definitely happened in engineering, but not because of ai, because of sheer stupidity, is if you don't keep

recruiting people in and training people up, what will happen is

what happened in engineering.

Like not, not build,

not building engineering, like engineering, engineering. Uh, I also run Develop3D magazine

and Develop3D live the show. I would, I'd go to these events, which were all about engineering. I remember it

was just being on the bus, going back to the car, in the car park. And there was this old guy there and we were just like chatting.

And he just said, the average age in my

company is 56.

Evan Troxel: Mm

Martyn Day: And I was like, wow. And he said, we are really worried that there's nobody below

35 who's actually worked on a project that has got a project done, completed, understands the whole thing. And he put it down to the

fact that they didn't have apprenticeships for a long time. The government introduced some tax breaks, they

took on some apprentices. Great. Then they took the tax breaks away. They got rid of the

apprentices.

Evan Troxel: mm.

Martyn Day: And essentially what's

happened is you, you've got a functioning being, which is this, the,

the company, but everyone's aging out. And as they start aging out, if they haven't recruited at the bottom, then you've literally annihilated yourself at some point that that business doesn't exist. Then you multiply that across all the engineering

firms in the uk and the average age is very high. So our engineering

is in real problems. It doesn't matter how much money you shove

at them, how are they gonna find somebody

now to want to go and study engineering as a course versus business studies, which is, you know, engineering is a tough, you have to actually know your maths and then once you get

out, someone needs to put time into you to teach you everything. Then you have to

ac accrue business

knowledge to step up And in the company, this is like, it's a, it's a

20 year process and how many, how

many firms have that mindset? And I think I see AI coming along and in, in the legal profession, it's very

hard to get hired now, uh, to, they're not recruiting anywhere like they were because the easy jobs are

where AI is killing. And so you deploy it, you don't

need to hire anyone. I make more money.

Brilliant. So that goes on. The longer this goes on and the better the

AI gets, the AI is gonna creep its way further and further higher

into the capabilities of, of lawyers and solicitors.

And so you might actually start getting rid of, know

real knowledge workers who've done stuff, but if

you're, if you haven't recruited at the back end, your business is, is, is gonna die. Not that I like Elon Musk and, uh, his, his views of um,

uh, um, I dunno what

his view is, but he keeps thinking that white people are killing themselves. I, in, if you, in businesses, if you do not bring pe

continue to bring people into the base,

your company is, has a finite life.

And I, I that will happen because

of, um. The same reason why

engineering firms handed all offshore,

all their engineering to China. And so you might have someone who designs

the product in, you know, Colorado, but it's actually every, all the real '

knowledge is in China for making it. And eventually

they, the Chinese are gonna learn how to

make really good products like cars.

And so then

you don't have the engineering base. And I mean, this is, you

know, it, it, there is, there was, there's not a lot of joined up

thinking going into the next

generation and instead there being mire

in debt encouraged to go whatever. Even

though if they're studying something, it's not particularly super useful.

Um, and the meanwhile their jobs are be, have been offshore

to China, or are gonna

be AI automated out. And, um, I really wouldn't know what to say to anyone's kids at this moment to, to go and study, um, you know,

Evan Troxel: A trade,

Martyn Day: I,

Evan Troxel: a

Martyn Day: a trade, uh, I, I, do,

you know, there

Evan Troxel: laugh because It's true. It's just true,

Martyn Day: that you don't know if,

if the next kind of, uh, call traver until they've actually gone through the process of studying

that and then practiced you.

You can't tell which kid is going

to be, you know, the next

big thing. And I, I'm horrified

to think that we're gonna end up discouraging, um, greatness or the next greatness that we

need.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Martyn Day: An AI

in some ways, almost, it's almost like social media, it's just mind numbing because it, it, it, you can get into the, to the part where you're

not ask, you're not engaging with ai.

You're just accepting the answers. And then that's your,

that's your output. And I, I think as humans, as a species, we're a bit lazy when it

comes to that. And I think that, um, yeah, I, it's more of a danger than Facebook

is to people's mentality. Um, but I, I do hope that the people who do persevere and go

through the process and think they're good enough can find a job in the, in the industry in the future. Um, we're definitely gonna need more civil engineers, people who are physical and out

there and, you know, learning how to build projects. Um,

uh, that's, that's, that's probably the biggest, um, physical thing we can

Evan Troxel: have you seen this website? Rent a Human, rent A human.ai, I think is what it's called, where AI actually need a human to do

Martyn Day: Oh, to do

Evan Troxel: take a photo of a thing or go deliver something to

somebody, and you get paid a hundred dollars an hour. I mean, there, there's the

future for the, for

Martyn Day: Well, we'll be slaves.

Evan Troxel: the physical things that AI need.

Martyn Day: Yeah, I, yeah, I'm, I, I, I'm excited by the

technology, but I'm depressed by, by humans in our inevitability

of, and in some way cap,

you know, it, it, it really confuses me that a lot of people are selling this

future are billionaires. And,

um, you know, I

think, uh, Musk said that we'd all be millionaires in the

future, eh?

I don't think so. Um, capitalism fought, fails basically when,

when AI and robots

are doing everything, um, I think it's been said a number of times.

It took a hundred years for the industrial revolution

to sweep through this thing's gonna

hit us and it's gonna be, uh, a 10 year process, and we're just not ready.

Uh, if you, I think all half of

jobs in America are driving or

related to driving. So if Musk gets his way and you flick a switch and suddenly everything becomes automated, that's, that's

who, where are they gonna, what are they gonna do? What, how do they

retrain? Uh, and then you go to Amazon and Amazon's gonna replace the people in the, pick 'em, choose things with robots.

Where, what are they gonna do? Um,

I, there's not a, there's not a holistic approach by any government to fully

understand what's what we're gonna put ourselves through. And as a technologist, I'm kind of excited,

but as a human, I'm, I'm deeply

worried.

Evan Troxel: Well, yeah, there's like that day-to-day kind of excitement of

development cycles and how quickly, and then there's like, you step back and look at the bigger picture. And I

think like this, this, this happens on many levels. Like you're talking about it

government wide, you're talking about it, um, organizational, like a i a

REBA level. And then there's, and then

there's firms and, and it's

like all of those

organizational levels have to be doing that all the

time now, right? It, it's like

a new model comes

out, you know,

all the time. A new, a new function comes out all the time. And it's

like the companies that are moving at this

pace are constantly reevaluating where they're going.

They're not just saying, this is how we do things. This is how we've always done

things that that doesn't exist in these companies that we're talking about, but that exists in our industry to

the deepest root, right? And,

and this idea of

creating a place where people want to be in the future doing this

kind of

Martyn Day: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I don't, like, you have

to step back and you have to look at that holistically.

Like, where are we going to be? How are we gonna get there? Who is going to be a part of that

and create, because architecture firms didn't ever, ever have to use, they never had to think about this. There were people lined up at the door, there were graduates lined up at the door of architecture firms because they got a degree in

architecture. Now

that degree in architecture can serve so many different functions.

Martyn Day: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: firms are competing against technology firms and all kinds of other

things for those

candidates. And, and they might not be feeling it right this moment, but this is like the near term

future that I see. Right. Especially on the coasts, especially in the urban areas where that's where

the technology companies are too.

Right. And so,

uh, you might be a little more protected if you were in the Midwest,

but I It's, it's going to ripple through everywhere

Martyn Day: So, I, I dunno if it's the same in the States, but over here a lot of your traditional run of the mill architectural

practices will give away the design. So they're going to, they wanna

win the job, so they'll design pretty much right up until detailed

design in a year or two.

The systems that will be available

will be

able to leap, literally leap from A A concept

design to level three 50 at a pressive a button. So you, at the moment, people are kind of going up just before the real

work starts and just to get the, just to get the job. And so they're kind of punting time and, and energy on that. But what happens when you're up against a company that's using ev, they don't really care about the, the, uh,

oh yeah, they want to win the business, but maybe they're, they're,

charging based on, um, the value of the building and they're not gonna charge you billable hours.

And they're, they've refined their

process to the point where they produce a pretty nice looking building all the renders and stuff, but they've already done the level 3, 3 50 drawings by pressing

a button. And so when the, the customer goes, yeah, do it.

Okay, wait two months. And they say, here are drawings here.

Here's, here's the business, pay us the money,

or, you know, if they're gonna manage the site, then pay us the money. But pe the, the, the business models that exist today will come under pressure from some firms that run with this stuff. And the question is, has it de will it devalue

the designs? I think there is a, I think there is a,

a physical limitation as to how quickly a client

can understand a design. And so you might have,

uh, a client can, uh, you win a co you win a, a,

competitive bid, the client goes,

okay, build a building. The next thing is, oh, the guy's changed his mind. He wants to, he wants an

atrium. Uh, we've already ordered the

steel. I mean, this is, this is like the future.

We, we, we've designed it, we've given you the drawings, you okayed it, we've started ordering

stuff.

Uh, the client might need. Six months to a year to really fully seep themselves

in your design to go, yeah, this is great.

Or we've been thinking, we held a meeting and we think

that

this should be looked like this, this, and this. so

um, maybe there is a physical limitation to how, how

quickly clients can fully appreciate what it is they're

gonna sign off on.

And if ai, what swans in

and within a month and a half you've

got everything to level three 50 and it's

required a small team of 10, what, what

role does the client have?

Evan Troxel: Well, okay, so yeah, let's talk about that because that, that small team nimbleness and maybe tech savviness, that, that, because you can assemble this

team today, right? Um, and, and compete against these largest

firms out there with a, with an entirely different tech stack mentality, way about,

you know, approach, um, billing structure. The way you can kind of spin that up, like, like a startup gets spun up,

uh, and to to test a, a, market fit for a product. I mean, that's basically what you're talking about. And, and why

Martyn Day: there's going to

Evan Troxel: why shouldn't architecture firms and engineering firms

operate like that? there is going to be commoditization

Martyn Day: of, of. of. bread and

butter design, bread and butter designs, office blocks, um, maybe not, maybe not a hospital, but

kinda like, you know, student buildings. Um, those,

those kind of things are gonna end up and you've already got it.

So with, um, H Arc, I love HAI love what they do, and, but the idea

that what you're seeing there is a expert system,

and I truly

believe we're gonna end up with expert systems for designing very specific building types, and they will be incredibly rapid and incredibly

autonomous in generating those designs.

The problem is, uh, is that even for

fostering partners, 50% their bread and butter is,

is probably buildings that no one knows anything about, but

they've been commissioned to accept

fostering partners. So I think, I

Evan Troxel: If they don't talk about 'em Yeah,

Martyn Day: no, there's

no name on them. It's just, it's just, and those are the kind of buildings that are gonna be in danger

and that threatens the size.

I don't think it threatens the companies themselves, but I think it

threatens the size

of

Evan Troxel: doesn't threaten their brand. Right. Their brand is not built on their size and their Yeah, absolutely. It's,

it's, it's, it's something else, but you're, but yeah, it won't continue to need to be

that big to

Martyn Day: that they'll be more boutique. And I

think you've got the large, really large,

um, firms, uh, the HOKs, the soms, kps, you know, they're gonna be under threat

because a lot of what they do is, is bread and butter.

If it, if

they've got niches like hospitals or labs or something like that, then I think they're gonna de, they're

gonna develop their own kind of, uh, high arcs for designing those buildings because to

get, if they know these people, know what the problems are with, with, with those styles of building, Autodesk doesn't know.

And they, And with the ability now to have. Bespoke applications written for them, then they're going to,

and, and there's enough open SDKs and there are, you know, things

like, uh, I, Twin was it uh, I, twin studio with Bentley. And then it

is the, the, potential for them to develop their own, their own BIM

applications. Bim.

But I say bim, it's so loaded as to thinking about what it was, but their own design

applications I think is huge. And then you then,

but then you've got very unique

firms. You've got firms that are highly specialized and that's the, that's the company you

go to, to hospitals, and that's the company you go to for, you know, student accommodation.

And I think, I think niches need

to be carved. Um, and I,

it'll be, it'll be a bun fight. But also,

you know, there's this whole capitalism thing, hangover as how profitable they are. There's, they're gonna be trying to be as profitable as possible. They're gonna try and curtail design time

and people and software as much

as possible. Um,

uh, and, and, they need to work out what their reward's going to be if they can't really do bit of hours. What's the

accepted, um, way new way of working out what that

is? And it's gonna be the same for the software companies.

Um, so there's an article coming

out, uh, it should be out by the time this goes out, which is all about a AI and the agent, the agentic

feature of bim,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Martyn Day: I spoke to Andrew Amos and he said, you know.

We, we understand things are gonna change and we, we probably need, tokenization is

one of the things, but then maybe we start charging a fee

per project. Maybe there's a, a slice of that kind of,

uh, project fee that goes to pay for the technology partner providing the, the, the technology as opposed to named use of

licenses or whatever. Uh, it probably could be a combination of those. So everybody's trying to rework what this

is. I mean, uh, anecdotes took 10 years to kind of

like refine Autodesk SaaS, and then suddenly

AI comes out of the, and then everybody's share price gets whacked

because that's old software.

SaaS is dead. Um, uh,

it's, it's every single part of the,

um, the, the business landscape is, is being

changed by this.

It's, it's share

price. It's how you pay for software. It's how fast you design, how you charge your client, uh, what software you do buy, what software you do develop if you have your,

uh, if you pay to have your data hosted online or if

you pay to

Evan Troxel: Who you hire?

Martyn Day: Yeah.

It's,

Evan Troxel: are the roles? How do you do your contracts? Yeah.

Martyn Day: so every single practice

should be trying to understand what the dynamic is and start making five year plans, three year plans even so that Five years too

of understand. I, I, yeah. I said five years.

I was like, well,

Evan Troxel: That's the old number, Martyn.

Martyn Day: So then the, the other thing

is in 20 28, 20 29, I think Autodesk's two for one deal runs out.

So eight years ago, uh, if, if I was in 20

28, 8, so in 2020 they gave people two seats for one, if they would moved to subscription for eight years. so that's one thing on the, on the

horizon.

And then I think also there are some people who are

running some very low cost copies of AEC collections

because they're historic and, um, uh, they got, they got special deal for upgrading that at the same time

also gets nixed.

So, So, there's a kind of a, we're heading towards a brick wall

in our traditional world, and I wouldn't be

surprised if Autodesk has some kind of offers coming out maybe to try

and, um, uh, help, help with that because

it's, it's, it's, it would be a hundred percent price increase if you've, if it's two for one

and you've got double amount of software, most people are, after eight years, are probably using all of those

seats. Um, and maybe

the, the manager, the, the, the BIM manager doesn't know The deal was done eight years ago, so I think it was called M two s,

uh, the, I can't remember what the exact term was. But, um, so on, on top of all of this stuff

that's happening in the next two years, there's a, there's a, a wall ahead where

firms, I think all the firms I've talked to are saying,

yeah, we, we will have to decide what we cut, what we keep, and what we cut.

Um, but that's, you know, it,

it,

Evan Troxel: Well, by then they, the new authoring platforms will be more mature at

least. Yes, you have a, then you have an uptake cost of

like what we already know versus what

we have to learn. Right. And, and I

mean, maybe that's where AI plays a part as well in these agents, right? Is just getting people

Martyn Day: unless Autodesk does something

very clever, what, what people are using

now isn't gonna be the future because file formats, RVT, all that stuff eventually goes away 'cause it's gonna be in the cloud. And the question, is it gonna be former or are they going to take Revit

and refactor it? I don't know what, what the score is with Autodesk any

anymore in terms of, um, their plans

for that.

But you've got

Snap through Connic

ar call Motif. Um, uh,

Evan Troxel: Giraffe test

fit. Yeah,

Martyn Day: well, yeah, they're kind, they're kinda still more at the front end. I think the,

uh, statute alcohol, um,

Connic, um,

Evan Troxel: BIM 2.0.

Martyn Day: they're going for they're going to, they, most of them were trying to replace the Revit stack from concept to drawings. and I think over time, and maybe the drawings thing isn't so important anymore,

maybe that's 'cause it's gonna go for automation. So

maybe that's a automated service in the cloud from your model in the future. So they're

not, I'm not seeing a lot of effort put into that. I'm seeing a lot of effort now being put

into detailed design. Um, but on top of that, there's gonna be an agentic

layer, which is gonna be sat inside these platforms running all the time on your data as you

enter it.

And, uh, you, it, it'll be a diff it'll be a different ball game to

just creating a family of a family of

parts and then creating some

Evan Troxel: So I wanna go back to something you mentioned earlier and you, you made the comment that Autodesk doesn't know kind of the nuance of hospital

design as an example, but don't you think there's a threat of them learning what those ne nuances are by a, a tool like what you're talking about right now, an agent running

on top of this stuff all the time or, and maybe and

not, or in the cloud, right?

Where all of these models are coming together and

it's watching changes and how, you know, like it, it knows your docs as well. Like so it's got

your meeting minutes in

there and it knows. The reasoning behind and what's

tied to what, and I could see, I, I'm just curious what you think about that kind of potential threat there as well.

And I don't know if they want to compete with

architects. I, I, I don't know. But, but it seems like they could learn a lot really quickly

with all that given, given all of this stance on noncompliance, I think that there'd be a bit of miss if they didn't comply with their own terms

Martyn Day: and use, which would they have to have explicit permission

from customers to train on the data. And it's very hard to prove, not, the only thing that

pisses me off is that Autodesk keeps saying, We've got all the data.

We've got all the data.

Evan Troxel: do. They say that, and I believe when they announced Autodesk ai, they even talked about it being like, opt out. Like it

was automatically opt in. I could be wrong about that, but, but it was, it's like one of those things where it's like, oh, this just seems like a gray area. And so they're gonna capitalize on it as long as they

can.

Martyn Day: it is a gray area. And I, but the thing is that a lot of the, a lot of the data that they've got

is, is not great. 'cause those models aren't

super accurate. You

really need to have a really, a really, really, really good Revit user to make sure that you've got

some great data to train off. If you part, stop putting

crap in, then you're gonna end up with a, a useless one.

So a, a, they've

got

Evan Troxel: that's a, that's an argument for keep making crap models,

architects.

Martyn Day: Yeah, just, just

throw, throw, a whole lot of rubbish

in.

Evan Troxel: Just get it over the finish line

people.

Martyn Day: So I, I think there's this,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Martyn Day: I, I, I think that Autodesk has to comply with its

customers. I think that they do

desperately want to train on that data. Um, they're telling the markets

that they've got all the data because that's part of

the AI play.

They're also saying that most of their

sales are based on the fact of all the great AI they've delivered,

which they haven't. So I kind of think that that Wall

Street gets one version of it, but we, we have to look at the reality.

And they haven't really developed a lot of AI yet. They haven't, uh, they haven't.

There's, There's, no huge changes for people at the moment. It's, it's coming, but they're definitely not, not delivered.

It, I, this is another reason why I think. Yeah. Oh, oh my God. Yeah. It's serious. I, I go from Claude to Siri and all I can do is set a

timer up for cooking on, on,

Siri that I think that's the only thing I use here.

Set my alarm. Set an alarm. Uh, God, I just realized, I set Siri,

set an alarm. So did go dig. Um, so yeah, I think, I think there's, there's, there's a whole lot of stuff that needs to get worked out. I think customers are better off training on their own data, um, and

cleaning up their data. That's the important thing is not only, uh, bringing it in

house, but also cleaning

it and, and realizing that their data has great value and it will have great

value for the future.

Um, but, uh, and also

start running agents over them to find

the problems that were in past projects. That's really useful information to know, uh, historic failures as opposed to, to help iron them out in the future.

Um, but I, I'm,

I think there is A,

um. A, a big problem in, in, in, the whole data world, and I don't think many practices fully understand what they can extract from their data.

Um, it's too easy to rely on a large vendor to,

to do these sort of things when in fact they will capture all of the information. It is possible that in the future, we, 20 years from now, Autodesk has fully understood every single aspect of the industry. And they actually, you, you say, I want a building, this is the land parcel. Give me a building, uh, you know, for, gimme the spec and it'll de and they'll design it. Why not? Because they have everything. Um, and

Evan Troxel: Yeah, so that's my question. Do they actually want to compete with architects? I kind of don't think so. And I, I think about the AEC market of Autodesk, which is a pretty, isn't it, a pretty small world within the, the grander

Martyn Day: no, it's huge for Autodesk.

It's, it's the number one, their mcat, their MCAT is, uh, so out of the 7 billion, it's very hard to work out because there's AutoCAD and lt and they kind of weirdly allocate those to different, uh, divisions. But I think, I think over 50%, um, is, uh, is ac

And then you've got MA and then you've got MEM and E

is kind of dwindling. Uh, it's spent 300, 400 million,

uh, MCAD is over a hit, I would imagine, with

Oh, m and EII, I, I, scratch my head on what the feature of m and e is.

Um, and, and they were, yeah, I, yeah. Sell it. I dunno, I dunno what's gonna happen

there. This is, this is the, the thing with, with, with the whole Palantir thing is your Autodesk, your Bentley, your N check. Do you do a deal with a Palantir or an open AI or, or Google to superpower your products, your business, your business offerings, because that seems to be like a quick way to get in. But if you don't, then Palantir are gonna come in anyway. Um, and, and they'll, once they're kind of king of the castle because they've come above you, then suddenly everyone kowtows to that system. Um, but then there's this whole ownership thing, the whole prot of and moat structure, um, which, you know, we might be swapping, we might be demolishing all of these lower down modes, but then suddenly Palantir turn up and they own the entire process, the entire, the whole business model of a company. They become such a important substrate for running that business that, that they can't be removed.

And anything else that's underneath, you know, what's stopping them? Palantir, buying an Autodesk or buying a

a Bentley and having a vertical, direct vertical channel. Um, and there's, uh, in this article, um, there, there's, there's huge questions about even down to the kernel level if, uh, because knowledge and when you create an object in, in Revit, it doesn't really know what it is.

It's just geometry with some metadata.

What happens if. The wall when you created the wall had some AI to the point that it knew what it was and it knew the limitations of what could be built and physics and stuff. So maybe there's an argument that we need to go right down to the bottom level and say, you know what? We have to go into the kernel level and start having AI right from the get go. So everything that gets made has some level of knowledge, has some intelligence, and then you have a totally different outcome from the BIM systems that we've used. Even BIM 2.0 doesn't really go to kind of sub-level. There's a great guy called Blake Quarter who, um, I, I knew him once, uh, first time at PTC. He kind of helped write the granite 3D modeling kernel and I've had lots of chats with him and he thinks that even geo geometric kernels need to be rewritten in the day of AI so that um, the kernels understand what it is that they're making so they can help as opposed to just be dumb geometry. Um, so, you know, that's quite a deep thing for a lot of people 'cause they probably don't understand how kernels work.

But, um, and kernels in AEC are, are tend to be very dumb 'cause it's like faceted geometry.

They're very rarely solid models. If you go to, um, Bentley, do, um, paras, solids and Vectorworks do paras, solids, uh, or the Revit has, um, uh, space maker I think or so, uh, they've got their own thing, which was ACEs, which isn't really used for much inside of Revit.

I think it's STL out. Um, but maybe someone will come in at that lower level and start thinking about how we can make software tools that are intelligent from the atom up as opposed to us formulating what a, what a win, what a door is, what a window is.

Um.

Evan Troxel: it's interesting to think about that though from like a design process standpoint, because a lot of times design starts ambiguously, right? It's like this represents space and there's no space object right in, in these tools that you're talking about. And so it's like containers of space and walls and ceilings and soffits and floors and like a wall could also be a something else, and it's really ambiguous.

And then, and then at some point, I mean, that's why people love Rhino, right? It's because it's just, you're just, you're dealing with form, like you're not dealing with those level of specifics, but at some point you have to transition to that

Martyn Day: It is, it is this whole leap from, from

conceptual massing

to level three 50, let's say you are, you are, you start off with some blocks and you convert those blocks into walls. Okay? Um, now it has an inherent knowledge of physics. It has an inherent knowledge of construction, of walls. It will then realize which walls are supporting loads.

So it'll then automatically detail, uh, the right or, or the right place, you know, structures to support that wall, that the windows and the doors and stuff in that feature. And, and as you leap forward by pressing a button, all of that, all that detail appears. I mean, you are, you're gonna have it, it's not impossible to have construction level information from the press of a button because it will have inherent knowledge of structures. Um, and I think kind of schema do it, but it's, it's not really ai. It's, it's a, they sit down with the architect and they say, okay, what kind of things do you build? Okay. They'll capture how they, how they design their kind of like, um, multi occupancy housing projects. And so that every time that you've done a massing model, you press a button, it'll leak forward and do all the detailed design for you.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it takes like those, that, that catalog of, of space spatial components and plugs 'em in, like the jello cubes, right?

Martyn Day: And that, that, again, that's kind of almost like a expert system, uh, 'cause they have to go in and program their expert system with how their customer is working. And you're gonna see a lot of that. You're gonna see a lot of people trying to make, all the software companies I speak to are trying to compress parts of the, the, the, the monolithic bim.

They're trying to speed up drawing. They're trying to speed up massing to detail. They're trying to speed up, uh, detail modeling to fabrication. And they're coming up with all these different ideas. I dunno if anything we're gonna stick, but they all have the potential to save huge amounts of time.

Um, uh, and you know, I think architects need to maybe be, learn a little bit more about offsite construction or just construction, uh, actual, you know, the actual physical and about how that is represented within their model.

And maybe they need to start thinking a little bit about workflow better, where saying, well, if I see the great thing about, yeah, architects, architects weren't super great at high quality drawings in cad. They would, that you'd always have like lines that didn't meet and it was, it was quality wasn't necessarily there.

You jump up to 3D and if you haven't got good quality in 2D then it gets even worse. And then if you try and get auto drawings out of a not great model or a model that you just say, I'll fix it in the drawings. 'cause I didn't, I didn't know how to stop Revit from doing that automatic connection. And I don't read like the way that those walls join, that's a problem because auto drawings really relies on your model being great. If your, if your model's great, then your auto drawings are gonna be great. And, uh, when I, when I wrote about auto drawings, Michael from, uh, uh, hi A contacted me and said, we do great auto drawings. And I was like, well, yeah, you, you designed the model. Uh, there's no modeling involved in hi arc. It really

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right.

Martyn Day: automated.

Evan Troxel: You didn't get the model built by an intern, right?

Martyn Day: yeah, there's the, it's it and it, and it's, it's level. It is one-to-one. The whole thing's modeled at one-to-one. So

yeah, you get great auto drawings out, but everyone else, they're gonna have to have trouble. But I think now with, with agen layers, maybe constantly patrolling your model,

making sure that it's correct, then you're gonna end up with really good models and

Evan Troxel: I was gonna say that,

Martyn Day: then the next thing is you get that helps auto drawings.

So a lot of these things, uh, are kind of stacked benefits and I think that, um, uh, all this stuff we're seeing, it's so compelling. It's so, uh, exciting. And that's when I, you know, to start where we started off is, I see when I see people trying to perfect their revits by, uh, you know, just, I, I'm just like, this is, this is really, I know it's current technology.

I know it's gonna be probably for the next five years, it's gonna be incredibly popular, the most popular way of probably doing bim, but the leading firms are not stopping there. They, they think that, that, that revit's a drawing tool. It's a thing to get drawings out of. And if automation comes into it, then that's gone. And they're, they're more keen on Rhino. They're more keen on, um, some of these AI tools that are coming out, the rendering tools, they're all over. Um, they're the ones that are, are looking at, at hosting their own pro uh, project data in-house, doing their own AI training, their own ais. Um. Uh, I, I think a lot of them are building their own workflows.

And so they'll build a workflow where, um, they're routing stuff to go into AI applications that are in the cloud as they're modeling. So they're modeling, they might be modeling in Rhino, but automatically there is there, there are re uh, renders ready to go

because the modeling is being fed directly into these things. Um, so productivity wise, uh, it's, it's, it has a huge potential, but you have to watch your tokens because that's gonna be the new bleed point, is

an unmitigated, unfettered access to AI tools, which require a payment, uh, for a large team is going to seriously start adding up. Um, uh, I was talking to, um, Greg, HOK, and he said, you know, they're, they're spending like $10,000 a month on tokens and he could quite easily see that doubling or tripling

based on their,

Evan Troxel: it gets more useful the more, the more you use it, it actually gets more useful and more, I, I, I hate to say addictive, but, but you know what I mean. Right? It's like, well, yeah, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna see, and, and there's a lot of experimentation that needs to be done to figure out how to work and the best way to use it.

And you're gonna get stuff that didn't work right. And you're gonna have to try again and again and again.

Martyn Day: And the real skill is having somebody who, who's AI cognizant to say that, okay, when you're doing this, the first time around your first iteration of this process, you're gonna bleed tokens. But once you refine it, yoga, then going to, uh, the, the most expensive, uh, thing you can have is like Opus, uh, 4.6, and

that's, that's really expensive to run, but once you've

Evan Troxel: Well, you're gonna come up with an instruction set and you swap it over to sonnet 4.6, right?

Martyn Day: yeah. You start farming it out. So that's,

that's how you, so that's the new thing is kind of like spending a lot up front and then over time,

working out ways to minimize your cost and some of it Yeah. Reduces it almost not to zero, but really low and working out which LLMs are best to do each task.

'cause they're all changing all the time.

Um,

Evan Troxel: task, just managing that pro. Yeah. For somebody

Martyn Day: I, I, I've,

yeah, I, so I, uh, yeah, I've spent 30,000 tokens this year. Um, just learning and yeah, I've had some real fun and real pain. I mean, I've been up, I've spent five hours n nurturing this, trying to create this one thing. And it is, yeah. My, my accountant on me saying, oh, I need all your invoices. I go, oh God, this is a pain.

I've just gotta keep going to all these different sites every month. And I was like, so I'm gonna write an AI agent. So I sat down with an AI agent and we went, okay, right. We're gonna go to this site, this site, this site, this site. Um, I don't really want to give you my luggage details, so I'm gonna, and, and all of them were, um, uh, two part authorizations.

So I had to sit there with my phone when it, when it wanted to get in there. So I was like, okay, here we go. And it, out of the 12 sites I wanted to go to, I could only get into two 10 of them. Immediately recognized. It was a bot once said, oh, your IP address is coming from Germany. A well-known and it's a well-known bot ip goodbye. Then your cursor's moving too quickly in my, in my browser. You are a bot. Goodbye. And I, uh, I was just running, I was running into this every time and you kind of realize, well, all this scraping and all this stuff that these, these current agents are doing, they are bots. And we have spent 20 years developing internet protocols to farm these to figure out, you know, two factor authorization, whatever, to try and stop this happening.

And I was

Evan Troxel: And now. And now. it's gonna be the main way you actually do things.

Martyn Day: and now it's, if you haven't got a good API, and so this, this, um, this, uh, agent said, uh, I was trying to get it to scrape Google Analytics. That shouldn't be too hard. For some reason, the, the API key that this thing kept getting would only allow it to look at YouTube videos.

It wouldn't allow it to go into our account. And, uh, I, and then I, uh, we, we several times it was like we delete, refresh the screen, get rid of all, all of the, um, uh, detritus from history to, okay, I did that. And then it kind of went, oh, hang on, the problem's at my end. I can't flush my own cash and it's stuck in there and I can't do anything.

However, I cannot write cri anything cryptographic in my sandpit. Have you got Python? And I went, yeah, I've got Python on my computer. And went, right, okay, let's write some code to get around

my, my sandpit.

And I was at This

Evan Troxel: oriented. Yeah. This is the goal oriented thing. It's like, uh, it, we'll figure out workarounds

Martyn Day: will not give up. I had to go make coffee 'cause I was like, sat there with it then. And we created a script. Then it said, okay, create a Google Cloud account. Um, put the script in the Google Cloud account. I can then poke it to then generate a key, and that will get me into, um, after, after five hours, it still completely failed. Um, but it, it was relentless. It was, it, it tried every which way it could to turn hack into Google Analytics because I've told it to, um, which is kind of worrying because, uh, this, this is, this is out there, this is what everyone's got that

this thing will, it, it was, it was writing code, going to some other site, putting it in a debugger.

I was watching it debug its own, uh, Python scripts. And it, this is a, it, it it's a very, um, if it couldn't do it through APIs, it's actually showing you the interface of the, the site it wants to go into. And if it can't get in there, it asks you to put in the password or the two factual authority. Uh, and it goes in and it, it, it, it just does whatever it wants to do. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I was blown away by, uh, the, in intrepid of it. It just didn't give up. It was highly fallible. But at the same point, um, these things are now out there and people are gonna be using them. And it kind of gave me a bit of some security feelings that, that perhaps were automating, uh, something which. Security wise, we're also not really prepared for all it takes is one person in your company to to be scripting agents and give it security, access, password protection to emails or something. 'cause, 'cause it thinks it's, 'cause the, the person doing that thinks it's a great idea to automate a solution and you've got an immediate security problem.

Um, and the humans as usual are, are kind of the fallible part of this. Um,

Evan Troxel: and you're gonna pay for it, right? With, with

Martyn Day: and

Evan Troxel: token usage.

Martyn Day: yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I emailed the, I emailed the company in the morning, said, I've been up, I've been up all night with your computer trying to hack into Google, which I thought you might find interesting. Um, uh, and we also spent 4,000 tokens in the process.

They gave me the tokens back, apologized and said, try again. I was like, oh, this is like, okay, there's something about this conversation they didn't quite understand. But, um, I, I, yeah, I, I'm, I'm, I'm in this really weird place of being in awe of it all. But at the same point, every now and again, something comes up, which makes me flag up problem worries.

And, um, I, I want every design IT director, every BIM manager needs to read up on this. They need to, um, I wouldn't say use open claw, try and find something else, but just learn about a creating agents and agentic feature because it's coming. Um, and there will be AEC agents that do exactly the same. Uh,

someone contacted me today saying that they were working on something like that.

So it's got, uh, a chat interface, it'll write programs. It'll go in and scrape information from AEC destinations. Um. Uh, yeah. Used with caution. Um, but, you know, your legal department needs to know about what, what, what's involved in this, um,

Evan Troxel: And, and not just shut it down. Right? Like I think that's kind of an important distinction is, is yeah. They need to know, and it needs to be a dialogue about, because to, to your point, like this is coming and it's not like lock it down. We're never doing that. We,

like, I think about this kind of internet thing, right?

And I, I kind of see it splitting into two, I mean this is not a, a, an original idea, but it's like there's gonna be like the internet for computers and the internet for people. And those are gonna be kind of two different things. And I think that you want to apply that thinking to these workflows and these processes and the access to data and the learning, the way that these agents can talk to each other behind the scenes and argue with each other and do all of this kind of thing while you're designing a project.

Martyn Day: we haven't even discussed that. I mean, that we're talking about individual agents of now, but there has to be rules and governance for multiple agents. So in, in the future, when you have automation, you are going to have, uh, when you, when you've got an agen system, so these things are running constantly on your data. You'll have an MEP expert, uh, agent, you'll have a electrical expert, you'll have a AC architectural expert, and all of them will need to work together to, uh, solve problems because everything impacts anything. It's got, comes down to that ontology argument about understanding not just the geometry and the, uh, it's actually the process and how different things impact other parts of the design.

And no one's come up with that yet. I mean,

what we're seeing at the moment is very early agent scrapers and gonna get some information from here and some information from there. And then we'll try and merge, mash it together and offer you some kind of insight. Um. Uh, uh, that's very hit and miss at the moment with Claude and with the tools I'm using. Um, in terms of what you get out at the end of the day, you can get some very deep reports and it's all based on assumptions, so you have to kind of question as well, you know, it's, it's overwhelming some of the reports you can get back and thinking, wow, it's so in depth. And so, but yeah, there were some assumptions made on there.

So, um, it's all, all to do with how good your data is underneath and how, how clean it is that if you got some information there that's not quite correct or not broken up very well, then it makes assumptions based on what it sees.

Um, and you'll, you'll have errors based on that. Um, I, I, it's, yeah,

Evan Troxel: You can do this now, right? Like people are doing this now with like hiring. They, they can create like a virtual hiring team of different roles within a company who look at a candidate or candidates and then argue about who they should hire, and they can, it can do this fully autonomously.

Martyn Day: So what you got, you've got people using AI to write cvs, to be emailed in, to be read by ais, to read the CV,

and

uh, and eventually at the, eventually at the other end. Uh, it's, it's filtered out the people. It doesn't think so, you don't even standard chance. Uh,

if, if you haven't matched that inner inner criteria, then you're just not gonna get a response.

So this is another thing I feel incredibly sorry for, uh, young people trying to get jobs, is that they're, they are literally feeding into an ai and they're not given a chance by a human who might have more intuition and more emotional understanding of what this person can bring their company. But that, that filtered out already by, uh, uh, an AI system that isn't you, it doesn't understand how many, how many good people you're gonna miss out on because they haven't hit your criteria.

Um, and I, I don't know in the future if people are gonna do degrees. So if you're gonna recruit a human being, they might not have done a degree, which means they might not get in because automatically the AI has gone. Nope. But that person might have more business knowledge and experience or whatever it is that you need, but because they haven't matched the identify, they won't

get in.

And I'm, yeah, the more, the more I'm, I, I I, I want more people in, in human resources, um, than anything because you, you, the anathema of having AI do human resources is, is just so ironic. It's just stupid. I mean, um, it's the one place where humans shouldn't be replaced.

Um.

Evan Troxel: kind of goes back to your, your idea about like intentionally recruiting the next generations for the future of your company. It's like traditional HR departments have been just playing catcher, right? Like they're just sitting back and waiting for inbound to come to them. And, and what you're talking about is a flip of that and go and actually like doubling down on the human side of it and going out and seeing and talking to people and what are they doing and why are they doing it?

And, and that it takes a different kind of effort, right?

Martyn Day: Look, look what, uh, banks and accountants did over here. When I, when I was going to college, the banks and the accountants would turn up, uh, the open days of the university trying to recruit people and there would

be human beings talking to human beings, trying to get people to come to their thing because they needed the manpower. Didn't really see many architecture firms rocking up, uh, Oxford Poly to try and recruit people. Um, uh, I, I, I think I've, I've heard stories of when Zaha have needed, they've got a huge project in, they've got a huge deadline. They'll go to the AA and just like, say, who wants, who's got a laptop now and wants, and wants a job, and they'll just send them over to Zaha, where we're in corridors doing bits of work for people.

You know, that

I love, I love that idea. Um, but I think, I think there that there has to be outreach. If you, first you have to realize that you're going to. You're going to, uh, you, you need to recruit. You still need to recruit, even though it's a cost. And AI, everyone thinks is a way to save cost, increase productivity, save time. Please recruit. But go out and find the best people you can and, uh, go and grab them from university now, because how many people are gonna be put off from studying in the future? I don't know. But the people who are in uni now are gonna be like gold dust, because if they know Grasshopper, if they understand the concepts of bim, if they understand ai, those people now are gonna be very good, very, very beneficial to you as you, as you make a transition towards a tech stack that we don't know what it's gonna be, a workflow that we don't know what it's gonna be, a billing system that we don't know what it's going to be. Um, but having the smartest people in your company normally is a good sign for success as opposed to not having or not having that many people and rely on ai. Um, and in some ways AI is really aimed at automation. You know, it's, there's some stuff in here for looking at your legal side of things which might be quite useful for your contracts, looking at your bids, um, analyzing stuff like that.

Um. Uh, yeah, I, I, I thought I tr I'd train. I tried to train, uh, it was chat GPT on, on, on, on things I've written. So I, I literally loaded 300 articles into this thing,

and then, uh, I said, okay, write me, write me something on, uh, BIM 2.0. And it was so negative. It was, I kind of read through it and I went, oh my God, this, this is that Really what I, what what it's kind of come up with is that everything had a caveat.

Everything was slightly crap. And I was just like, Hmm, right, okay, this is, this is, so I'm learning something about what it thinks I write about. Like, it was, it made up stuff, it hallucinated, um, it was a, you know, this is not reliable. This is not a reliable thing. So my use of of it now is I write my article, but I'll, I write, I tend, if I do such big topics, I can't write the morning one go. So I'll, I'll, I'll write about one part of it and then I'll write another part of it a different day, and I've got a different tone. So the first day I'll be using I, and the next day I'll be using We, and it's just say, this is a bit of a mess. So then I'll put, I'll put one part into, um, uh, I now use Claude and I, we'll, we have a discussion about what it is that I said,

and, uh, we have a debate and it kind of knows my history on what I've written. And so then I might change my tone. But the one thing I use it for the most is to blend these one bits with another bit that has a different tone because I, I've written on a different day and every day I wake up, I'm a different kind of person or something. Something's taken me off at a different angle,

Evan Troxel: Multiple personalities.

Martyn Day: Yeah.

well, it's, it is, I've had a bit of information.

Someone's just contacted me, therefore, yeah, I've slightly changed the, the, the,

the nuance of of what it is I'm trying to say. Um, but it, yeah, it has. It, it, it's all right at writing pr it can't really do a proper article. Um, uh, it's very good at taking an article and dismantling it and giving me five, what is it?

I'm, what is it I'm saying here.

It'll gimme the five points and I'll go, okay, this is, this isn't that important? So I always, my, uh, business partner Greg always is horrified when I send him an article because we kind of, we kind of agree what's gonna go in. I kind of give him a vague word, word count, and then I get carried away.

'cause something is major. So a, a 2000 word article suddenly ends up being six and he's like going, yeah, right. God need to try and fit this in the magazine somehow.

Evan Troxel: I know, I know Greg. I I can imagine this re this reaction. Yeah.

Martyn Day: yeah. I just don't, I'll give it to him and I don't, if I don't hear from back from him within a day, I know it's, it's, it's not necessarily a positive reaction. So, um, but yeah, that's why there's already, so the article that I sent you, the, uh, the agen feature of BIM

that's in the issue that is now available on issue, I think it's gonna be on the website soon. I've already got the follow up, is already written, uh, about

Evan Troxel: I was gonna ask you about, I was gonna ask you about that because you, you, you asked some questions in there and it's like, well, it, it is just amazing how fast things are changing because you're answering your questions, you know, in the next

Martyn Day: Well, the next I wrote it, gave it to Greg, and then the Monday a Google paper dropped about, um, agents working together and what, and how, first it was how do you, how do you get, uh, an agentic system to be precise?

And, uh, part of the solution is to break a problem down into intestinally small parts and break down the processing into that so that when it goes back up, that you end up with a much more likely, um, specific answer as opposed to, uh, uh, hallucinating. And then the other thing was that these agents need to work together. So you need to have a governance structure so that they all have the same playing field so that they're not, um. They're not acting independently. So that's kinda like the, that was one. And then three days later, I think on X, this guy from the finance industry, finance and legal wrote this huge tome about which moats in business are at risk. And it was obviously from a, kinda like a finance and um, uh, legal point of view. And then I was kinda like trying to work out taking those, yeah, they were very generic, abstract, um, issues that you were talking about, not necessarily within the industry. Um, but one of them was kinda like payment systems.

Payment systems are very hard to replace with ai. So things like Procore were actually quite strong. While things like a CC were a little bit mm, there's, there's some elements in there that are, are, are kind of easy to replace. And so, um, I've got this matrix now. Whenever I take a product, I slap it into this and AI will go through it and say, this can be replaced by this plus that open SDK, they're very gen generic.

Um, this can be replaced by this and this SDK, this can't be replaced. And uh, so you kind of, these big systems have been developed in our industry over time. You can see which ones are gonna be kinda like the massive game of younger. 'cause some of these applications will be ubiquitous and you can create loads, uh, for free. Don't have to buy the whole thing. So then what happens? Um, some applications, some 25 application col um, collections, 70% of those applications were replaceable with SDKs.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Martyn Day: Um, so yeah, stuff's happening. Um.

Evan Troxel: One, one of the things you mentioned earlier was this idea of like, we, we, we were talking about rhino and like the conceptual to the more level of detail and, and then there's kind of the other way now, which is, you know, you can ideate at a high level of detail through the image making process, right?

With nano banana, nano banana, two, nano banana pro, whatever. And, um, so that, that just kind of flips the, the process around potentially, right? You don't have to start with lightweight geometry, you can start with literally lines on a page and it can imagine So, the, the mid journey parlance.

And, and I wanted to just talk about kind of how this goes spatial, because Autodesk recently announced their acquisition of, is it World Labs, right?

Where it's like this they've invested two,

Martyn Day: they've invested 200 million and, and the total raise for, for the company was a billion. So Autodesk didn't, o

didn't

Evan Troxel: It wasn't an acquire. Correct. Right.

Martyn Day: it's a, they'll open their kimono or something at some point, so you can see some of the technology.

Um, I, I, yeah, it's, um, so the, the one thing that happened in February, I think, was that Google DeepMind showed a 2D sketch from, it was a 2D sketch of a, um, complex shape. And the complex shape had, um, gys, it's a very, uh, mathematical shape, which in, uh, engineering and 3D printing is, uh, kind of a, an interesting structure 'cause it's kind of self-supporting and it's got a lot of, a lot of things that, that, uh, could be used in 3D printed, um, solutions, air cooling and stuff. So DeepMind took a 2D drawing from the 2D drawing.

It created a 3D model. And it was a, it was kinda like a, it was kinda like a laptop stand. Made up of all these holes, which were gy, uh, which had gyro geo geometry. Um, so it made that leap from a 2D sort of tric drawing to a 3D model, a mesh model. Then they said, okay, make this into a laptop stand. It must support three kilograms and it needs to be able to cool. X, y, Z has to be freestanding, whatever. So it gave it some physical, physical constraints of a product. It then somehow, um, oh, it then, uh, somehow made sense of the mesh. It then started playing with the size of the gys to let the air air flow, 'cause the laptop was going on in it. Then had to create a structure that was strong enough to support three kilograms. Then it produced an STL file, and then it 3D printed it. Boom. That's like,

Evan Troxel: right there. That, that was

perfect. That's like, whoa. And we don't really know what it, what, what s STKs it was using or, or, or whatever. But just as a demonstration, it was like a bomb landing in our little part of the world. And, um, also goes back to Blake Corter with his idea of having a, a Aker that actually works well with AI and ML and, and it, we were talking about that 'cause he was blown away by it.

Martyn Day: That SDK is available and he's already all over it. But, um, this is, this is, you know, we are living, everyone's living in fear in our industry. That anthropic will just drop another one in our space one morning. Oh, we've wiped out this job. Uh, maybe it's automatic drawings. Uh, Google mines, uh,

already

Evan Troxel: posted the article about cobol, right. And IBM's stock tanked, right?

Martyn Day: It is every day these little bombs are going off and they're only gonna

get better. AI is the worst it'll ever be today.

It's always gonna get better. And so, um, within that, within that, within realm, uh, the possibilities of creating a sketch and having a model is, is becoming a reality. We've been able to do it for a while with certain things, not particularly brilliantly, but it, it, you could get from a 2D drawing.

You could kind of make a crappy mesh. The crappy mesh you could try and make so into nerves, clean it up a bit, um, very manual. But those little leaps were there now. Now, deep mind, deep mind just went, oh, I'll go from a drawing and I'll deliver you an STL and it'll be a functional object for that for, for, for the intended usage. Um, so yes, I, I think, I think, um, I, I'm pretty sure large, large significant architects are developing those kind of tools in-house for their teams so they can ideate from 2D 3D go back to 2D AI render, 3D model, 3D print. Um, that's gonna happen. The it, the question I, I don't think it kind of removes the need for Rhino and, and you, there is something to be said. You are always gonna have a translation from a 2D drawing to a 3D model. It's always gonna be, it's slightly inaccurate.

Um, there is still a strength in being able to model well and f the f Yeah. For, for fostering partners and for Zas, the form is everything.

Is that a roof or is that a wall? I don't know. It's, it's glass and it just flows. So I, I, I still think that that rhino and those skill are gonna be needed. I don't think I. I think the sketch can be taken further and maybe, you know, it's, it's enough to win the competition. I mean, the idea of entering competitions with this kind of technology behind you, it just crushes the cost that, that, that you'd spend on developing all these different models and all these different ideas. Uh, ideation is going to be very fluid. Um, you'll be able to deliver a lot of different ideas very quickly. Um, and you'll be able to sketch and get your 3D renders and then you'll sketch and you'll move, instead of redoing another sketch, maybe you flip the model around and go, oh, okay, yeah, I don't need to, I don't need to, uh, make up the back of the building 'cause it's symmetrical.

Or maybe the back of the building isn't symmetrical and then it's made some stuff up, right? You've got no idea. Um, but this is, this is happening. Um, and so you'd be able to come in it, you'd be able to scan a building, an existing building. Um, so one of the guys we've got coming to NXT BLD, uh, Flo Po.

POUX, he's a professor of, uh, point clouds and he's, he, he'll take a point cloud and go with an AI straight away and there's no, it'll recognize what's in the scene. So the, the, the intelligence that you can apply to dumbness

is just going to make everything incredible. It's gonna make everything incredibly, uh, fluid as to levels of detail.

I mean, this is a, this is probably a, a, a, um, probably what it boils down to is that we're so used to building up this level of detail from kind of there

to Very precise. Yeah. And I think that, that just, you can start at any point. You can start with a scan, you can start with a hand sketch. You can start with a, a massing model.

You

are Those are all versions of sketching, right? I mean, that's, yeah. I mean, it's coding is sketching, right? for

Yeah.

And you, you, nothing will stay dumb. Nothing stays

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martyn Day: And, um, I, I think that's

Evan Troxel: And the, and this technology filters all the way down to this, right? And, and you've got it in your pocket, or it's in your glasses, it's in your newest, wearable device and or all of those, and they're all talking to each other and

Martyn Day: And then you got, uh, uh, drones. Drones are kind of like a common thing now. Um, uh, yeah. And, and Photogrammetry's really good. Gaussian Splatting technology is amazing. From

just a few photographs, you can kind of get a, a really nice model now. Um, it's, it, uh, I was talking to, and they were talking about the, before they even get started, if they've won an airport job, they're not doing the whole airport, maybe they're doing a refurb on an airport. It's really important for them to get the survey data in so they can start getting, designing.

And normally they'd have to go and commission a, uh, survey. Survey will go out. Then they, you know, it could be weeks or month if it's a big site before you get the data to stop playing

Evan Troxel: Security clearances,

Martyn Day: Oh, all kinds of things. Yeah.

Now you can, you can send some office studios out with some mobile phones and they can capture the inside and you can get going.

You might

Evan Troxel: You can get going,

Martyn Day: you, you have the surveyor do the proper job, but you can get going. Um. Based off some phones and, um, or just a, a video. This even just go around making the video and the video is enough to capture

The, the

The, the

the, the, current state Gaussian SPRs is just coming along amazingly well. Um, so yeah, there's, we'll be, we will, we'll be doing a lot of on reality modeling. Uh, this is, yeah, there's so many workflows that could exist and I think a lot of firms have a workflow and that's our workflow. And I think that that is in inhibiting of taking on some of these new technologies and having a team look at other technology and think, you know what, maybe we could improve. It doesn't have to start here or it can start over here. And it's all about pipelines and getting data and having the data in the right format at the right time to do the thing you want to do. Um, and uh, I I, I, I think architects especially need to spend some time thinking about their processes to adopt some of these technologies to really rapidly advance. Um, uh, I guess the, the biggest fear is risk is getting the wrong kind of data in getting an error. Um, can, you know, that can be a big problem. So

I guess risk is the, I is not the architect's best friend. Um. But it also stops 'em from exploring some of these avenues. And you, you have to hope that they've got employees who are slightly, the, the, the architect that goes off to learn Python scripting because they're interested.

And so a lot of firms will have people who are going off and looking at this technology 'cause they're interested. Um, they're not like an HOK where they've got dedicated people or,

uh, fostering partners. Um

Evan Troxel: Well, so much of business has been established on locking down the way we do things because that's repeatable, right? I mean, there's efficiency built into that, and you're talking about. Everything is a moving part now, and you know, you don't have to pay attention to all those. You absolutely don't have to, but I mean to to your point, it's like you're going to be competing against firms that are paying attention to all those things,

Martyn Day: yeah. Uh, and, uh, at the very high ends, they are very aware of that. And that is one of the reasons that's driving them to look in the sort of medium to lower ends. Probably the, the impetus isn't quite there yet because everybody is quite stuck in their ways. And everyone keeps telling me how AEC don't spend, uh, spend less than agricultures and fishing, which really gets boring and it's crap. The, not, the firms that I see, uh,

uh, are laggards, um. And I kind of think they, they must take the entire construction market

and then they just like, tell architects, you are really slow. Well, yeah, if you're showing some guys out with a, a spade and a, and a pickax, then yeah, okay. If you take the whole technology fund, then maybe they're not spending that much. But architects today are spending a lot of money on, on their revits, spending a lot of money on real time rendering, spending a hell of a lot of money on workstations. Um, these people are trying, and I I I, I think it's a laziness in the software industry to try and label, um, the industry is laggards to in some way get them to buy more. And it really, uh, annoys me. Um, I think there's a, there's a la it's a lazy thing to say, um, but changing workflows is difficult. It undoubtedly,

uh, re requires risk and, um, but if other people are doing it, um, you know, from just this year, just from January to now, the stuff that's been released is mind blowing. I've got software companies that are worried about having their moats destroyed by AI next year. Um, I've got construction managers who think that soft AI software layers are gonna come in to remove their, their entire, uh, roles. Um. This is, this is panic. There's a lot of panic in, in, in the people I speak to, and yet I can see architecture firms with Foster partners of the week and talking to Greg, HOK, they're, they're like absolutely happy trying all these things out, trying to work out a new tech stack to make use of these benefits, to streamline their processes, to use everything that's out there from real time AI rendering to, um, automatic drawings. Um, you know, that nano banana, you know, it was a big shock last year when Nano Banana started producing, like it understood what a drawing was.

Um, now how accurate that was is another kind of fear of mine. Uh, Finch 3D are doing a load of testing with, with, with producing drawings with Nana Banana as a, kinda like a DWG output.

Um, I'd love to see what the accuracy is that versus a real drawing. Um, I mean, there's always that thing where they've got the, the video AI generated video of that actor eating spaghetti, and then now it looks like it's a, uh, it's a per, it looks straight from a movie, well before it's like a disaster area.

All of these things are just improving and the chances of having an, uh, you know, uh, I think I sent you the thing where it was somebody was just designing a, a, uh, internal building or layout

and

Evan Troxel: started, it started with a floor plan, right? That was it. And, and that, and even the floor plan was, was generated, wasn't it, by ai. So

Martyn Day: So I, these are all canned, so there will be some, um, messing around to get that. But if that's doing it now in two years time, you can imagine

what that's gonna be.

Evan Troxel: The, the wrong thing to do is to look at those things and look for the mistakes like that, that, of course there's mistakes. Like, uh, there was a, a a a, like an editor movie producer who posted a, a, a six minute movie,

right? Short film on LinkedIn, and it was entirely AI generated and there was lots of mistakes in it.

But you seriously just have to step back and be like, can you see what's coming? Because that, and, and that's why it's important to not just sit back and watch what, how this is unfolding, but to actually get in there and use it. And, and I, I, I hate to say like, you've gotta use this stuff, but if you don't get in there and use this stuff, you will not be able to use the next version that comes out as effectively as you would if you're in there doing it now.

Right. If you wait. So, I, I think it's, and, and, and just to elaborate on, on your example. So, so it started with a, I think it was an AI generated floor plan, and then it generated like top down perspective, floor plan views fully rendered. And then it was renderings of every room in this apartment. And then it was movies taking you through it.

Like it was all of that. And it was like, it was kind of built as like interior designer heaven, right? Like that this is who they're aiming it at. And, and it's absolutely incredible the kind of work that's coming and, and what does it take? It takes, you've gotta get in there and play with it. To, to actually be able to do that

Martyn Day: And it is it, the weird thing is a lot of it is down to being able to explain it in a, to a chat, in a chat box, which isn't very intuitive for a lot of people to try and explain that. I mean, I, I've tried generating images, just, just straightforward flat images, and boy oh boy does, that's, that's hilarious.

You know, just, just trying to get the image that you have in your mind, but trying to put it into words and and to your point, like that is a muscle that you build over time. It's not something you just go in there and, and you start getting good stuff immediately. You just don't, Well, I mean, it's just like learning a tool like Rhino. It's just like you're not gonna build a great model the first time you do it. How do you learn how to build great models?

Evan Troxel: You build a lot of models, right? Like that's how you do it.

Martyn Day: Or you go online and say help. And then there's loads and loads of, you know, you thank God for Reddit and all those kind of things. But, um, there's a great self-help community, in fact. So I was having trouble writing an agent, and I asked the agent that I was having trouble writing an agent, and it went, oh, okay, let me watch.

And it, and then it was, it, it debugged itself. It told me what I was doing wrong or the, the clar the clar, the lack of clarity that I was giving it. Um, and then I was like, oh, okay. So now, now agents are kind of extracted from itself, from the agent to look at everything. It could look at my repository of other agents and say, oh, I can see I've already done this bit before.

I

will instruct the agents to do it this way, way. And I'm, I'm like, oh my God,

Evan Troxel: How many times? It's like you've already, you've already done that. I found it over here. Do you want to just, do you just wanna modify it a little bit and update it so that it's the, the latest version of how, of what

Martyn Day: Shall I? and then it goes, shall I run? And I go run. And it just,

um, now after a month, I've deleted 50% at least of all the agents I created, because they weren't giving me what I, what I needed or the value or I'd, yeah, I'd done dumb things. And, um, but I've kept half of them. And, um, I. Uh, and they're the ones that sort of don't have security issues.

They, they're, you know, I've, I've got one of my nicest ones is that it just goes out and it looks at all the major BIM vendors forums and it, every Monday morning I log in and I can see what the top five, um, talked about things are on the Revit forum, the ArchiCAD forum,

and I, and you just start kind of like, I've never had the time to do that.

Uh, you know, if someone was saying to me, oh, so it's all blowing up on the Revit forum, and I've go

and have a look, but yeah, I've got a pulse check every mor every morning.

And it's kinda like, okay, there's nothing major's gone off. If it, if a release comes up that causes some crap, I can get in there straight away and see what it is.

So, um, it's, it is trying to be omnipresent. It's that,

it's that god-like feeling of being able to scrape in what's happening that month, that week. Um, one of the worst, uh, one of the worst things I did was I, I created this app to go and monitor the share prices of all the major BIM vendors, of which there aren't really that many. And then I said, okay, I'm gonna give you a fictitious $1,000. You can go off and invest it and we'll, we'll see where you are at the end of the month. And, um, uh, then Anthropic launched, its, its bomb. And, uh, because I'd only given it a thousand dollars, it could only afford four Autodesk shares or, or, four, or it bought two Autodesk shares and who bought something else.

And, uh, by the end of the month, everything was underwater. The whole thing was just like, yeah, this is, this is, this isn't, this isn't quite where I thought it would be. It's

not

Evan Troxel: need more funny money, more funny money to give

Martyn Day: it's a good game. I should have given it more diversity in what it could invest it in. But, um, yeah, I think. It's a good thing just to sit with a blank sheet and say, what is it that I've, I've always wanted to know, but I haven't been able to, it's just been

too complicated. It seems too broad

that I can, uh, that I can create an agent to go and to go and try and get me this information. And, um, and there's practically no cost in coming up with it and scripting it. Um, the more complex it is, the more likely it's to go wrong. That's, that's the first,

less than I could tell anybody, but, um,

uh,

Evan Troxel: the more interesting things that I find about it is it's that you can get to a point where it'll make recommendations about how to do the next step, and then you can literally just say, do that.

Martyn Day: yeah.

Evan Troxel: It's, you thought it was, you thought it was telling you how to do it, and then you just flip it around on it and say, yeah, just do that for me.

And it, and it's like, okay, done.

Martyn Day: Are you sure you want this or do you want them both? It'll always give me like, and then I'll go ahead. Do both and, um, uh, so yeah, I, and there is something to be said. I think someone said that AI doesn't necessarily give you a productivity benefit. It actually just gives you more work

because

Evan Troxel: I could see that.

It's like bim ca bim over cad there.

Martyn Day: It, we get absolutely enamored with the fact that we can get all this data, and I'm just, I'm reading more reports that it's generated on, on things that I'm interested in, that I've ever read in the past. And that's made me think more, which has made me wanna write more, which has made, you know, my Greg's life hell. And, uh, I really don't fit in with our schedule of writing of which has been, you know, kind of regular. And now I'm, and now

I'm totally outta sync. Sorry, Greg. So I think there's, um, there's there's this, um, it definitely gives you more, but I, you know, we're human. The more information you give us, and it's not as long as it's not conflicting, but it kind of builds your, your knowledge base on something.

I think, I think it's absolutely possible to not know anything about,

let's say 3D printed concrete and within two days know everything about 3D printed concrete that's going on, because you can, it can go off and find it, it can, uh, prep it, it can pressy it, it can give you information, you can ask it questions.

It's like a private tutor and research agent. And, um, what would, in, in the old days of CompuServe and telephones, uh, you'd ne you'd never get access to that information. And now, um, you could even find out who the leading lights are, who are the people who are, who are most popular and, uh, respected the most.

And then you can go and track that person down on LinkedIn and then have a real conversation with somebody. Um, so I think there's, there's a, it's, it's for all the bad things, it's got huge upsides. Um. I, so it's, it's very conflicting for me to kind of sit there, worry about the next generation, worry about loss of jobs.

And then I, I, I think people who in your company who run with this thing and will build up a level of knowledge and competence that will be so valuable to firms. Um, you, you need, definitely need to keep people who are there, but you also have to have this legal oversight. 'cause it's so easy to stray into this world of giving away, um, access to stuff, security. I mean, everything you upload to these sites, I'm not, I think chat, GPT kinda like, thinks it has a right to and stuff. I'm not too sure on the, um, the legal ins and outs, but I know that if you go, how do you bury, how do you, uh, hide a murder and bury a body? If you get arrested, they can go and find, um, your chats and use it in evidence against you. So, um, you know, it's, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a, a, it's an official record, which, uh, you have to be careful. Not that I'm murdered anybody, but you have to be careful

Evan Troxel: Well, so is email, right? And how many people have just put stuff in email that they should have never put in email? Right? I people think it's a safe, secure, private system, and it's not. It's the opposite of that.

Martyn Day: I, I, I, uh, so Mae Winfield from Bureau Apple, she's a regular at, uh, next Bill because she's just all over this stuff. I have regular,

and that's the great thing is that she's like a super, super, super lawyer. I am not. But, uh, when I was looking at all the Eli stuff and, and trying to work out what was going on, I could actually have a conversation with May on her level.

'cause I'd, I'd, I'd used AI to go through the legal documentations, and I had questions from that that I could ask her about, and I might not have understood exactly what she's on about, but I could take that conversation and, and get the AI to translate it into more human terms. So, um,

Evan Troxel: terms. Yeah.

Martyn Day: yeah, so I could, I could have, uh, it's enabled me to have conversations with people that, um, uh, that I, on a level that I couldn't do before.

And then sometimes I get responses from people that I don't really understand. So I've, so I'll put the chat or that portion of the chat in, and a number of times it's kind of said, oh, what they're saying is this, and Oh, okay. So it stops me from misreading. Uh, one of the journalistic skills you get is interviewing somebody historically on a, on a tape or on a, even when it's digital. Um, as there was no voice, voice to character recognition, I'd sit my headphones on and I would be literally typing out exactly what they said or ignore me. But within that process. I hear things in what they've said, like they were trying to tell me something here that they felt they

couldn't say. So there was a really weird kind of like nuance that you would pick up on the

Evan Troxel: Reading between the lines,

Martyn Day: So at the time in a, in a, the hot fire of debate, you wouldn't necessarily pick up on it. Um, and that's the only thing that I think is probably missing is, is the

nuance of the, the human, uh,

trying to give you a hint. Yeah. Yeah. It's language, right? Yeah.

but I think that will also be ai, I think, I think it's only a matter of time before

it picks up on this person's pointing towards that, pointing

to this if you put this and this and this together, then this sounds like what's happening.

Um, they've already got AI that they can tell if you're

lying or not, allegedly. So CEOs are really worried about reporting to

Wall Street, um, and seeing their face because the AI might be able to kind of identify

which things are the, are the big fibs. Um, I don't know what the world's gonna be like. You imagine you won't be able to, if everyone's

got glasses

on and you've got an AI in your ear, you

you're talking to somebody saying, Hey, uh, this person isn't telling you the truth.

Well, that's my

Evan Troxel: There's been movies about, there's been movies

like this, right? Like, liar, liar, and, uh, you know, the, these, these things have played out for sure

Martyn Day: I think, I think we're, we're gonna live in a become reality. Yeah. So, so let's make the case for the

Evan Troxel: anti AI slash like Luddite AE firm. Do you think that there's going to be, I, I could see,

you know, this is my identity as a firm and I align

with people who are not gonna go down that, road.

I'm just curious if you've thought about that if you've played that scenario out in your mind at all.

Martyn Day: uh, I, I think there will be

a. A boutique surface where you are dealing with people, but you still want

them to have AI to remove the risk and stuff. They, they will,

they will have to use technology.

But you will, uh, sorry. Um, look at

banking. Uh, I used to have a bank manager years ago, maybe 15 years ago, 20 years ago now, and I haven't had a bank manager since.

The people who have bank managers are very wealthy people.

The this, the one-to-one service is for you where,

you know this, yes, there are three bags full. Everyone else just deals with their webpage.

And I think that, um, human content,

human uh, interaction is going to be incredibly important for very expensive high-end

services. And I think the rest of us will be dealing with

machines, and the machines are gonna get better and we probably will forget. We're dealing with

machines. Um, but I,

I, I, yeah, I, I ultimately, the machines are gonna be right most of the time, and humans are fallible

and, um, I, I don't know if we'll be too happy because like when they sold cars, they used to

say, say that we're handbuilt by robots giving you the idea that they're very precise and that means they're really good engineering.

Um, that didn't mean they rust didn't rust or when it was a bad design or whatever. But

the, the idea of something being automated,

um, I think, uh, yeah, for in architecture, I think there's always gonna

be the savant. There's going to be somebody who comes up with something that no

one's come up with before. The problem is.

Is how that person gets educated and into the business

and goes off to do their own. I mean, you see

practices like fostering partners recruit all these top guys that come in and then eventually they leave and they set up their own practices and

um, uh, that will be still the case, but I think it's going to be fewer because there will be

fewer people in, in the system.

You're not gonna need a legion of people doing

drawings, you're not going to need a legion of people doing renderings,

which you used to be the case. They're saying that across from partners still was like

2000 plus people in it. It's it's huge. They, they're busy as hell.

Um, so there is plenty of work.

Maybe it's overseas, probably, probably

is. Um, but it's,

I just dunno how big the firms are gonna be. I

what, what's the ratio that AI is going to

compress, um, in increase productivity and compressed team size? No idea. Um, you are always gonna have to have

somebody, you are always gonna have to have an engineer sign off on anything that gets produced by engineering software.

Um, I think the architect will always wanna speak to a structural engineer

and not just computer says yes, computer

says no. I think there's, there's, there's still that has to be, um, in there.

Um, I, I think the software industry's gonna be a very different place.

Um. If you're a software developer, you're gonna have to

offer more than just a what could be created.

With AI plus

an SDK, you have to offer knowledge, you have to offer a higher level of

value. And uh, we're coming to the end of the low hanging fruit software developer. You have to add real value, whether in breadth or in

depth. Um, and I think that that's, people are gonna be rethinking

their product strategies. So you're gonna have very different kinds of products coming

out. Um, I unfortunately think a lot of people are kind of thinking in

this tone of

creating an AI feature, one feature that's AI or a couple of features that's ai. So it's in the, a standard bit of software, but they've got AI on this one bit,

which will give you checkout.

And that's a feature that's not really an agent system.

That's not really

where this thing goes next. So I kind of feel

the next two years you're probably gonna see a whole raft of

people doing single features, which

aren't working together, will take something,

automate, spin out. But what we really want is something that all together.

works together.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Martyn Day: I dunno who's gonna be developing that or where that's gonna come

from. You, you'd kind

of as assume it was kind of like the Autodesks and

the Nex and the Bennies. Um,

It could be a completely new company. It could be a Palantir, that buys something. Um, it's the level of knowledge

that has to go into an MEP agent or a level of knowledge.

You know, augmenters are spending a lot of money and a lot of time building those MEP agents. I don't think it's

something that could be done again and again and

again. And, um, and then this is, this is the problem for the big software firms

where. If you are

Autodesk and

you've got me, you've got, uh, rev, MEP, and you've got stuff there,

but it's dumb.

Um, and then you've got an augmenter, which is solving overnight, but maybe Augmenter gets bought by,

I know. Uh, Cowie or, or, or an AECom.

Wow, okay. There's no one who spent five

years and $10 million to do all of that.

So what you gotta do is you got, you're left with whoever's next or

developing it in house.

And I, these, these, these things are gonna be like rocking horse poo.

And that's why Consign got bought by aecom. 'cause they're all very, once they got taken outta the equation, how was, well there's Augmenta. That's really

the only other company AI agent in this, in this area that I know of, And then Andra kind

of uh, waved the flag.

Um, one of the guys

that in Autodesk told me about them. So I was kinda like, had a

conversation. Um, yeah. Uh, the rarity of the knowledge of the skill might

be the thing that keeps the industry as it is for longer than I think maybe I've underestimated the

lack of, uh, or the, the time it takes to build an AI agent, um, in a specific

vertical.

Um, but you've got you, um, DDS CAD never check. They've got all of the pa all the parts and the libraries to make a

3D uh, NEP, but they don't have the AI

logic to, to do it automatically. Autodesk could do it automatically, um, with in-house.

Um, but then that's specialist knowledge and there aren't gonna be that, that many of those people to do

it.

Um, architecture for me is, is the.

It is a difficult one because there's so many things that an

architect, it's as you said before, as as a degree goes, it's a

brilliant baseline to cover, um, whole manifest of different types of

artistic, uh, physical, structural, um, aesthetic, uh, historic. Um, a lot of my friends who went off to do architecture ended up

doing set design or interior design or nothing to do with design whatsoever.

It's a,

it's a very good

basis. Um, so maybe it's something that we should be recommending that people

do anyway, 'cause that even if there aren't

brilliant A A

A C jobs in five

years, three years time, then there might well be

other areas where that that skillset that

you get can be used, uh, or put, put to use.

Um,

I don't know.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, let's talk about your, your conference that's coming

up in, when it's May this year, right.

Martyn Day: 10 weeks. Yeah. And so

we,

Evan Troxel: wincing? You got a lot, to do.

Martyn Day: I've got a lot, I've got a lot to do. It's,

so we've been going

for 10 years and this is our 10th year of doing it. I do not have a shortage of people that want to

speak. The, the challenge is to get the right people to speak who are

doing things that are out

there. And if you, if I got a, a BIM show, nine times out

of 10, it's someone pitching their product and that's, it's like, doesn't really tell you anything.

I,

next bill for me is like next. It literally is what are we gonna do in the next

three to five years? I've already decided that old BIM is a dead

thing, walking,

Evan Troxel: Not a topic.

Martyn Day: what's coming. And while I, I, I assume that everyone in the

room

is, is, is using dead thing, walking technology files, all those kinda

stuff. Um. We have to start thinking about how

this industry changes. AI is gonna be huge. So agent AI and

AI is gonna be like a substrate for it. The BIM two point ohs are now kind of, they've got product out. It's

not the product that we want yet. They're all coming. Um, so they,

they're gonna be there. Obviously

I've mentioned the engineering side. I've got everybody who's doing AI

engineering design all in one place. Um, we are gonna be having a discussion about the impact of that on the industry and where that's going.

Um, uh, I've got, uh, offsite construction firms that are still willing to try,

which is like this, the biggest graveyard in the industry.

It's

Evan Troxel: Yes. unbelievable, uh, that I'd hate to add up all the money that's gone into offsite

Martyn Day: construction. Um, that's been

burnt. Um,

so obviously we're, we're kind of having two themes. We're having,

uh, the event, the event's over two days and,

uh, normally have kind of like a, a, a communal session, and, then it,

it breaks into two streams of which it's a bit random, uh, in bedrooms.

This time I've decided to keep

architecture in one room, construction in the other so that we can go quite deep into these very specific

areas. And then dev is still dev where unfortunately, a lot of

people think it's about developers and it's not software developers, but like developers. It's like, no, no, we,

it's the day when we sit around and we try and work out

where this technology's

going. And the important thing about dev is that people from the design it,

uh, guys from AC firms are there to tell the software developers and the money people where their problems are today and

what still needs solving because we are fed up of seeing stuff that gets.

Developed that, you know, we we'll have 10 different um, uh, CDE uh, modelers or 10 different kind of like, um, you've got test fit and then suddenly there

seem to be like 50 of them.

And it's like, well, we don't need all this money's being poured into developing the same thing

again and again and

again to do coordination. What can we, can we

tell you what we need

so that you can spread, spread the load and maybe like solve some

problems. So NXT BLD, uh,

this year we're, we're

we're still continuing with the automation of drawings.

There are now more

people who are, um, developing auto drawings,

uh, applications. I think there's gonna be some launches at the show. So we are going to see some more

auto drawing technology server based in the cloud doing

all sorts of stuff. Um, we're gonna be looking at, um, how do software firms and

AC firms get together?

Because if, if, these startups don't get some engagement and

feedback, they're going to die and they have to have some level of engagement

to get VC funding. And so we're gonna have a, a debate about how

how we can

get these startups to work better. I mean, AC firms

are, are time poor, they haven't got a lot of time to invest in stuff.

So

how can we cross that gap? What, what could we do? The other one is looking at future

business models. I already talked to Autodesk, talked to Benley.

We know they're looking at different business models because named user

licenses is, is gonna die because automations are gonna start killing seats, not, not

growing them.

So, uh, we're gonna have a look

at token.

Uh, uh, value based, outcome-based. Let's have a discussion

because I think it's important that a

e firms get their,

say into the software

firms and the VC Oh, yeah. It's, it's come up on the podcast. Many, it's come up here many

Evan Troxel: times because it's like that you, you're not in the same phase of, you're not in that early phase of design all year long. You're not in the middle

phase of design.

You know, you've got, maybe you have multiple projects, but maybe you

don't.

And, and so yeah, it's complicated, right? Is the, is the answer. And, and

firms are spending a ton of money maintaining seats that they're not using all the

time.

Martyn Day: The sub, the subscription model was supposed to

give flexibility to the customers. Uhuh, no, you've gotta sign up for three years.

There's no flexibility. I think I, I, uh, in a

conversation with Andrew GNAs, I said to him, you know, I, I believe that KPF hired Goldman

Sachs to come in and look at their token usage so they can estimate it for their EBA agreement for three

years. That's the level

of crap

you are putting on your customers that they have to get an accountant in to help them estimate their

token usage. This is

Evan Troxel: And then manage it.

And managers like, like you have to have roles in your firm just to manage that

process. That you never had

to have that

Martyn Day: Someone told me that

KPF decided that the thing that they

were gonna do was just delete AutoCAD. Because what would happen is everyone would go into work, they'd start up their AutoCAD and their Revit

and

just like make that grab in the morning. Not that,

not there's network licensing stopping them anymore, but every time they started it, then like nine tokens or whatever the

token rate is would just disappear.

And they, they were

spending something like one and a half million dollars on unused sessions because people were just starting the

application. and that part of that is. It's, habit, it's

it's a very expensive habit.

And, and so by deleting,

uh, AutoCAD, then everyone stays in Revit. And that sounds

like, wow. That means, or in some ways I'm kind

of slightly pleased 'cause it means that, that hopefully they won't break the model or the drawings

by taking 'em to AutoCAD

to do something which would, they'd have to do it in Revit, so it would be in some way coordinated. But anyway, so that was

one thing. And then the other thing that's come along

is, so I'm understanding that Autodesk

has kind of introduced some kind of

like higher token pricing for seats of Revit that are doing automation.

So,

so you as a company are looking to save

money, you're looking to deploy

automation. Now, before you might have had like 500 seats where everyone

did their drawings, but maybe you're just like

gonna concertina that down to two

with

some clever automation tools to do it well, that's kind of, they're gonna

cost

more.

So they want a slice of the

productivity benefit that you found for yourself by buying some third party software that,

that, you know, because you've lessened the need of the number of seats that, they've got. And so that's another kind

of problem that

I

think the

industries is there's gonna be a rear guard action as

we, as we, move from name to user

licenses to

whatever tokens and something else, these companies are gonna come back to you and go

with our automation, even though it might not be

their, it could be a third

party.

We've saved you five employees

wages. We want our, we want our slice.

And I find that outrageous

because the architects are the ones who have brainstormed and come up with a solution.

And, and the, they've delivered the automation. And with ai,

they're gonna be delivering more in-house automation, and yet the software

vendors are gonna see that

the number of licenses shrink and they're gonna come back from, for a bigger chunk of whatever it is that you are

using.

I, I think

that's my, my, big fear

is the

software companies

and capitalism, I keep saying this, but they all have to grow, and if they don't grow, then

there's a problem. And

so therefore they need to do the growth

thing and they've only got one source of

revenue, which is

customers. And unfortunately, you are gonna be paying more.

Um, so I, I kind of think

this, the price of software, even though we're in a world of

AI, is actually gonna go up,

um, because you're gonna need less

of it. And if you're not

metered to hell

and paying high prices for the metering, they're gonna come after you for a slice of how much that project was

worth, um, because they need to

maintain.

But, you know, how long does a project last? When does the

software company get paid? Uh, if you are willing

to accept that, um, augment has got an interesting business model where

you, they'll go to the client, they'll, they'll say, how long would

it take you to design this data

center electrically? Oh, six months.

Okay, we'll do it.

Uh, 10% of the, of the cost that you, you

estimate that you will

do to do it, we'll do it overnight, and you can do it as many

times as you want. You

can run, run the run the out outputs as much as you want

until a set

date. And go ahead. Okay, fine. And that's, that's one model.

So everyone's gonna be testing

this out.

Um, the SaaS world, the cloud SaaS world

that

these guys thought was gonna

happen five years ago

has, is vanishing. Um, and automation is, is now their biggest threat. Their biggest threat is their

customers being more efficient. uh, it always makes me smile. Um,

and

it's, uh, and, and that's what's gonna happen.

Smart companies are gonna start

looking for

automation. And if you can, um, get a workforce

that will work towards helping you, finding those automations

and saving that money, you can either spend the money on going after more projects

and being a bigger company, um, or you start ing jobs away and become a smaller

company that's quite

profitable. Um,

I'd like

to think that people would keep their jobs as opposed to firms

deciding

to be more profitable. But, um,

Evan Troxel: Well, if you look at what's going on in the tech space, that's not happening. Right. There's being, they're

just being slashed and slashed and slashed

because of automation. Yeah.

Martyn Day: so I, yeah, I, I, fear, um,

I

think you're gonna, so look at the engineering

world. So electrical cars

come out. Um, there are normally huge

design teams that work on cars,

and most of that is because of transmission in

the

engine. You've got body shop

people and

you've got, you know, interior design

and stuff, but. A lot of

that is down to the mechanics of car outcomes. An electric vehicle, you've got batteries and you've

got an e uh,

electric motor. Most of these things are built on a standard platform. The batteries you have no say in the

electrical engine is something you

buy

in.

So the only thing that really needs to be engineered is the body, the interior, and

the suspension.

Um, maybe, okay, you can think about the cooling, but the design teams for cars

have been hugely slashed based on the technology

of the car. And I, I I, I kind of feel that,

um, in some ways the, the mo the, the failure of modular has saved a lot of jobs in, in the

industry because, um, buildings haven't become

things that you order online particularly easily. Um, but, you know, at some point that,

that we all feel that that's an inevitability,

that there will be.

sort of a modular solution

to, uh, a lot of building

types. Um, but yeah, I dunno how far away that is.

I dunno. Uh,

Evan Troxel: Like you said, there's a big graveyard

there of companies of

startups. yeah, I, I

Martyn Day: went to see one company and they had a,

they had a

load of all of their, these modules were on an

airport.

Um, and the, the reason was because the delays on

site meant the factory was churning out all the modules while the site had problems. So they had

all these modules, didn't, they had a storm somewhere, so they stuck them out in the open in a, in an

airfield.

Um, the,

the process is so

shockingly inept between, between the different departments from design to construct

that, you know, it is a, it's a massive

coordination problem, uh, anyway, but yeah, so we'll be

looking at, at at that as

well.

Um. The, the great thing I

I got, we got an increasing number

of, uh, a i, a large firm

Roundtable firms

come to the NXT BLD, which is great. You have amazing conversations in the hallways.

Um,

Evan Troxel: not just the software, the software companies that are

showing up to, to, Yeah. You gotta

have all sides of the conversation there.

Martyn Day: Yeah. And, and, and, and in, in my

event,

the, the AEC

firms are king because, and, and so yeah,

Autodesk, uh, have come along,

which is great, but they get 20

minutes. So does

Connick, who, I don't know how many things they've sold, but everyone, everyone I've got, I've, uh, last year City weft a

company that didn't have

any, any funding that I knew of or, or, or, or they got 20 minutes. It's a case

of we've got a level playing field. Everybody has got,

I want this to bring your a, a games, say exactly what you are doing, not what you've done, but what are

you doing?

Um, last year was a bit of a

special, because we had

all the BIM two point ohs in a

row, and it was kind of like the first time that all of them

had been available, but they, this year, they're all gonna be looking at their AgTech

features and what, what they're gonna be offering and how they're

gonna bring that

in.

Um,

I've got,

Evan Troxel: in a year. I mean, it's, it's, it's only been a year,

but the topic has changed completely. Right.

Martyn Day: I've got Raven coming, the guy

who's doing the,

um,

the sketch, the

sketch to model in in Rhino.

He's flying from

the States. Um, uh, I hope Nate Miller, Nate Miller's still got, he's gotta still give me a, a few ideas of what we're gonna use him for, but he's talking to coming. I love Nate.

So, um, that'll be great.

Um,

now I did

ask, I did ask, um, hay, I need to

get circle around, uh, to see, they said yes last year, but I

need to

circle around because even though

what they do is not

applicable to

the, the Europe, because timber frame, um, McMansions,

we don't have them, but what they've done with their software

is absolutely beautiful.

I think it's, it's, it's,

it's a demonstration to

this

industry of you pick one building type, you build, you build one cloud-based modeling solution for it,

and you can do the drawings and you can do everything. You can even include people who can't model.

You

can take a sketch and with ai, bring that in and turn that into a model.

It's, it's a delight. And I

think, I think

that it's just such a shame they've come to market while there's an idiot in charge. And the, the building market in

in the States is in terrible terrible state. Um, but when things do

pick up, uh, I, I think that kind of technology is just going to be

an absolute killer

for

house builders.

Um, I reckon There'll be an equivalent of that for

office buildings. There'll be an equivalent of that

for, well, if we still

have jobs in offices. Um,

uh, a hospital

version. um.

Evan Troxel: hmm,

Martyn Day: I, I, it just, it just is,

um. It's the perfection of computer, of bim.

Computer science is what

H is. And,

Evan Troxel: Hmm. everybody needs to see that to realize what's possible

Martyn Day: in a

multi-discipline, uh, single solution, um,

Evan Troxel: bar. Yeah.

Martyn Day: sets the bar. But then the, the breakaway from that is

Maybe you know, I've had a conversation with somebody yesterday. Maybe the generic

Revit kind of building model is not, is not gonna

exist in the future. Maybe everything is

an expert system,

maybe a cause How many

new, new types of building are

there that are generated?

I mean, why do you need a generic thing that doesn't really know much about the building

type? When you could have a building

solution that actually understands,

okay, these things are

important, the fire regulations in a office

are important. Or, um, they can run that all the time.

Um, But then that's, that's out there.

But the moment we're dealing with the world as

it is, um,

and we're, I'm just seeing the breakdown of that

monolith happening very quickly now, those

moats, um.

I think RVT, you know, file format issues,

uh, that will be, that'll be

dissolved. It always reminds me there's that, there was that film with Piers Bronson where he's, he's, he's

monitoring some volcano that goes off and to escape.

They get, they get into a boat

and the boat's made of, out of

aluminum and the lake

that they're going across turns to acid.

So the boat is slowly melting

and the propeller finally gives way, and it

just goes down to a little stub. and I, I kind of feel that's, that's the future for a lot of software in AEC space is they're in a they're in a metal boat, in a, sea of acid.

And, um, we'll see which bits of the

boat, uh, survive the journey to the other side.

Um, but yeah, I, it's, it's, um,

yeah, my, my, brain jumps to, to visual whenever I

kinda, like, I'm trying to,

I'm trying to send it to myself so I can, my brain throws in these kind of like Oh yeah. In that

film. But, um, I, I, obviously it's a bit

like, it's a bit

like rowing across a, uh, an, a lake of acid.

Um,

Evan Troxel: Obviously, well this, this idea of having an in-person

event and just the value

of, of that and getting people in the same room to have these conversations for two days is still super valuable when obviously the fire hose of information and the internet

is just constantly flowing.

Martyn Day: it's, it's the best maybe just talk about that human

Evan Troxel: element, you know.

Martyn Day: So, um, it's the best thing that I do all

year, and it takes three or four months to plan it and

that, so the, the night before we get the speakers and,

uh, some of the

exhibitors and some of the design it,

uh, royalty, we have like

a few beers, so that's like

a good start

point.

Everyone's super social, so they know each other. Next day we get going there, it's

absolutely manic because every 20 minutes, Uh,

each room's doing something different. Uh, people send teams because they're

scared of missing things. Um, I think, yeah, NXT BLD and NXT DEV we do,

uh, NXT BLD both

streams. We do

do live.

So keep an eye out on the

website for that so

you can join in. Um, and then at the evening it's kind of like more beer, more,

more,

meats, more

little conversations. It's

always a great place to hear scuttle,

but, um, and then the next day is dev, which is a, a different field. So that NXT BLD kind of vibe is very much

about, um, seeing, seeing practitioners. So it's like, you

know, the Fosters and the HKS and the Perkins and Will talking about their, their workflows

and uh, and how they're adapting,

uh, to adopting new technology. But the next day is very much more software. People

talking about what, where they're, where they're

at, brand new things we haven't, people haven't

seen before.

Some, uh, guy up in Estonia

that doesn't have any money, but is doing something really interesting

in in, in something that I've kind of found out that I might have written up in the year and said, this guy's

really fascinating in, you know,

Gaussian splats or whatever. Um. And then at the end, uh, it's a bit

of a after two days of talking nonstop, a

lot, I mean, all the night, all the nights are late. Um,

it's a

bit like a

collapse and it's just great to, uh, have the conversations with people that,

um, uh, the first time, uh, uh,

Julian moot

from Bentley came. I

thought he was just gonna be there for the day and gone,

this guy's way too important

to hang around. He was the last person to leave the bar on the second

night.

And, uh, he was super

hyped and he'd, he'd like

say, you know, uh, the one thing I've learned from the last two days is

that the market

is completely open there, you know, talking about

moats, it's,

it's, the future hasn't been decided yet,

but in London for some unknown

reason, uh, there's a lot of signature architects, I guess,

who are kind of out

there and thinking about workflow changes.

And now we're getting become New York crowd coming in who are also,

um, better funded probably,

and have, have equally

big ideas of what they're doing. And, and there's a, a, really interesting mix between us architects and UK based

architects, and

that you sit there and listen

to their conversations

or we try and try and take part in it and you see that they're all doing,

um, or they're all doing a lot of things that,

um, anybody who

thinks that,

that the AEC space spends

as much money and time, uh, as agriculture and

fishery really needs to kind of like leave that at the door because these

people are

are doing amazing things.

They're all training their own

lms, They're all um, totally

experimenting with piping data around all

different

all different, products. Um, they're all looking at

automation. Um, uh, yeah, it's, it's

just, yeah, it's a pulse check. yeah,

So

yeah, the stuff that these guys are doing, is amazing. It really is. And some of It wasn't possible. the the exciting thing

is

that these firms were large and they've

got, they've got people who

can program,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Martyn Day: I reckon in 18 months time, they'll be,

be people coming to NXT BLD who

can't program,

but equally can

get their own bespoke programs and they'll be coming along

and they'll be on the same level

because suddenly they have that ability to,

to play.

Uh,

architects have always said to me, oh, we are not

fosters. We can't afford, We we, are Bill, bill Perrow. We can't afford to have

co

computer programmers like they can. The world

changes. The world changes. And,

um, ev I, I kind of

Evan Troxel: of tech, you know, of

tools to,

Martyn Day: it's, it's a ation

of research and, development. It's a democratization of

application development. It's a democratization

of, uh, of data because suddenly it's not locked

inside of

moats and you can do what, you know. The one thing that everyone will realize very

quickly is if you don't have your

data

on your own server, on your own

storage, then you are limited as

to what you can do.

I mean, this is the one thing. I probably should have said earlier

because we're talking about, uh, a PS, so I was

I was looking at Autodesk, KPS

thinking, alright, someone told me that, that

the MCP servers are gonna be shoved on the end of a PS. So if you want to do a, um, AI check on your data, you've got

to go through, um, uh, a PS, which is all tokenized.

So

you

know, however, you know, if you want to touch your

data,

Autodesk can kind of open in that

respect that you can just go in, pay the money, get

the data. The problem

is, is that a

PS has limits on how much data you can take out. It's actually

bandwidth protected. So there's only so much data you can take out over, and there's only so many

times that you can ping it over a

certain period of time so it's actually constrained. I think that's okay for the next year where people might

want to do, I want to have some dashboards. I wanna, I want to

check my

project information every week, roll forward to when you've got agen systems that are

hitting your data on a CC constantly,

you're gonna have a huge token

bill and you're gonna run into bandwidth problems because this thing's constrained and I don't dunno why

it's constrained. I don't know if

it's, it's their server limited or

maybe they, they can do something

about that, but the, cost alone would be enough for you to go, this isn't a

great place for me to do any agentic, real agentic stuff on on my

information. And so, um, yeah, I kind of, a PS is 10

years old.

It was never intended to,

be an agentic

system. It was in intended,

maybe it was, it was very far. It was amazing. It was an amazing thing for Autodesk to

do 10 years ago, plus to realize that the cloud was where they wanted to be. And every

time they've got all these applications, they

needed a port to the cloud. What a nightmare. Can we break down our applications into core areas and then assemble them in the cloud?

So when we came to port them, we could rebuild them

in the cloud with common, common, DWG, common document management, common

viewing, and, and, then third parties could also

develop

on top of it, customers could

also develop on it. It was a brilliant idea. Really, really

farsighted.

But Autodesk didn't really ever, because inventor's still on the

desktop.

Revit's still on the

desktop, AutoCAD's still on the desktop 10 years later. You know, the,

the, the only real product

that they

developed that I know of is Tandem. That was like, that was a, that was the first

real a PS product, but all the real money makers are still on the desktop.

So a PS is a bit of a failure in terms of.

what it should have brought Autodesk, they were very early in

identifying the cloud, perhaps

Evan Troxel: Never realized its full

potential. Basically.

Martyn Day: Never really for now, you'd think, oh, now

it's coming into its potential with

the Gentech workflows. But, uh, from my analysis with the limitations and the price,

um, it, it, it, it's, it's a stop

gap. It's, at

best, it's not a, it's

not an

ag agentic system where you have huge

amounts of data being ingested and processed

by, uh,

ais.

Um, as you, as you

work and as stuff is developed

and dropped into the repositories, just it, it strikes me that Autodesk will need to come up with something else,

um,

and, and. I, you know, software developers should be aware that this is a

weakness that

that we, we currently don't have anybody

visually on, on them, on the market saying that they've got

an

agent, um, solution.

It's worthwhile. In this

addition of the mag, um, Connic alcohol

test fit, uh, motif, uh, uh, who else was there? All, all the, all the BIM 2.0 guys have, have given their

views in, in the

addition of how they

see, uh,

AG agentic. Um, and it, again, you can copy paste that into Claude and

then ask Claude to

analyze the differences if, if, if you, uh,

that's, that's quite a, good way of,

uh, of

figuring out what boiling down what each one's

doing. Yeah, I think, uh, Altaf, uh, uh, Altaf sat

as well,

another one. But, um, uh, a Mars is very

interesting and very if you read it with a auto

desk

hat on, it's

incredibly pointed as to,

uh, the

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Martyn Day: Yeah. A motif is.

Yeah.

I'm very interested in what Mo Motif will

come up

with. Um, I know that they're licensing the Parasolid

engine. I know that they're very heavily

into, uh, ag

agentic, um, ai. Uh, I think that's been a bit of a switch from their view, maybe

from two years ago.

Um, and, and.

Evan Troxel: But like you said, they're kind of the latest

one to the party,

but also maybe in the best position to implement.

Martyn Day: And Am and Ammar is, is a, an old dog.

He's,

he is not developing his

stuff in the open. Everyone else is,

Hey, here's some new

features. Here's some new features. So it is, it's very easy to go and see what

other

people are doing. I, I think Motif is gonna

come left field. It's not, no one's gonna have much of a

clue of its capabilities.

Um, he's, he's, he's very kind of old school in that kind of don't develop out in the

open, don't give your competitors the edge.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Don't show your cards. Yeah.

Martyn Day: And I think that probably puts the Woolies up or desk a bit

because

they can go and see what the

the other competition are doing. The

BIM 2.0 is, but they

can't see what Motive is doing.

And I don't think you'd have much of an idea from the stuff they have sold or, or showed or try to sell,

uh, to this point.

Um, and they're a very

capable team of people who are, have a lot of respect in the industry.

So, um, there's always that threat.

But, uh, I think,

uh, snap Truths impressed me incredibly with the,

uh, conceptual, conceptual stuff they've added in, in the last six

months. 5,

5, 5 months.

And Connic is,

just, Connic is, Uh,

just

uh, amazing. Uh, I, I think I've said

this multiple times, but literally the whole time of my life when I've seen software develop, they've developed

it for data sets that are a certain size. And then over time they end up with customers building

more and

more. They have to try And find more performance. And so they

end up trying to get

Evan Troxel: It gets worse and

worse.

Martyn Day: It gets worse and worse and it's like, oh my God, we wouldn't have built a data set as it was. They've started off with just this ability to ingest

everything and fly at f huge FPS, uh, numbers.

And then you you just fly into the building, you fly up into the one

object, and then you start modeling. And anyone who's got got Revit is just like,

uh, uh, uh, I mean this, this, if it has the right tool,

cell

bit on, built on it, it will demolish

anything in its path If it has the right tools for now,

it has the right scale, scope, and speed. Um, it's very, very angled

towards construction

Because it's, uh, it just seems

that's, it's also quite an interesting greenfield

space to be playing in as opposed to trying to compete against a Revit or they've got, they've got their own kind of little

sandpit to play in.

But, um, if that thing, if that thing

delivers in, in the a, a c space, so Revit is

constantly, if you edit it,

it's

constantly trying to check the parametrics of every single part to see if there any edit you made has got

any kinda like follow on.

So it's

constantly, uh, in this,

uh, high process

state. And so that slows

it

down because It's got so much stuff to go through. All these

Evan Troxel: It's looking for you,

Martyn. It's

Martyn Day: It's

looking out for you. But, and, and

if it was, if it had just

been to use

more, more processes, more, more. Cause that

might have been okay. What, what Connic doesn't do that. Connic, you just infer

parametrics, you infer a relationship between the geometry, then you do your edits and then you remove it and it's always done geometry, and you just

put

smarts on it.

It's such a, a refreshing

way of dealing with it that it is it's, it's chalk and cheese. this, is why Revit can't be

this, this,

future and cheese.

It know what that means.

it's a British is, I have no idea where

it came

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Martyn Day: um,

it it connic has

everything, uh,

that it's showing and it's doing like four D

now. And

it's doing, you know, I'm just, every time,

every month they stick a whole lot of stuff up on it.

I'm like, you guys are just nailing it. Um,

Evan Troxel: more like a visual effects workflow than a AEC

workflow in that regard. Right. It's just like raw

speed and power and like, get the job done,

Martyn Day: they've taken no don't have time to wait. we don't have time to

Evan Troxel: wait for

anything, and that's totally what they're delivering on.

Martyn Day: and there were, and the thing that's interesting is that there, I I, I kind

of must have gone over to see

them maybe a year or

two after they'd started and we went for

lunch and it was like 25 people for pizza and. All of them had been working

together for over 10 years,

but they were at Brix cad. He, they, it was like a family. So, so these people immediately were a

team. And to have that

velocity of people all working together, pushing forward, rather

than all hire him,

we'll hire him. it's a It's a massive advantage, massive advantage. And then no VC

money. It's all self-funded. Thank you very much, hexagon for

buying Bri scad. Um, and so no one's dictating to the many

rules.

Um, so it, it, they've got a lot of

things that, that are very, you know, fortuitous,

uh, some of it happenstance where they got, you know, ex are gonna realized that

British Canada was gonna be really useful for them. And so they they

exited with that. But also, uh, I just, there's the first time we did Dev, I asked Eric to

give a talk about, I want, I always try and have someone

who's, who's older, an older, uh, generation

to be there to try and tell software startups a little bit about their

story, about, you know, how they

managed to exit or whatever.

And it, Eric had me in tears

because he, he literally built a company. Um, then he got,

not greedy,

but he thought the, the great thing was to go off

and, uh, um, go public, get a lot of money

in. Then that kind of caused

problems. The company goes bust,

he's. He's like in, in that process, he's going back

to his staff saying,

look, to survive, we, I need to cut your wages.

And they all went,

yes. And then, you know, kind of eventually, I think

it did go bust. And then he, he said he was sat there in

front of his bank manager

saying, I owe you three or 400,000

euros. The only way you're gonna get that back is

if you lend me more money and I start

my company again. And the guy

went,

Evan Troxel: it worked.

Martyn Day: And

it worked. And

um,

you know, it, it, the thing was the story about the staff and Eric and Eric and the staff

being totally simpatico and

just, just being a team. And it was, it's definitely worth watching all of these, all of these people who have been through the

mill. It's inspiring to hear their stories and to hear what went

wrong and what went right.

And, um, some of it is luck. I,

uh, they'll always say that, but, um, Eric, even though he sold his

company and he could very easily

be living on a, on

a, on

a beautiful island, um,

with a yacht, uh, decided to start again and build another BIM

tool. 'cause he tried twice before and now he's doing it again. And he's doing it with the same people that he worked with

before. But all those lessons that he learned along the way are being

applied to, to Connic. So, you know, I,

I, I'm, I am deeply impressed. I'm

talking about Eric

and the team, but I'm

deeply impressed by everyone. Altaf. Altaf was in this space where nobody

wanted to

develop a new Revit, and they just, uh, you, I,

I spoke to hx, someone at Hexagon.

Was it Hexagon?

Um. Yeah, I spoke to someone at the CTO

of Hexagon and I said, you know, there's all these people who want the next generation of

tool,

but no one was willing to do it. They're all the open letter guys are, are willing to talk to anybody

who's li who'll listen. And after about six months, they came back, said, oh, it'll cost 250 million now, not interested.

And I'm like, go. There's a guy in India, he's got, he,

he hasn't got any money And he's, he's willing to

sort of develop and have a go at it. And here you're a company with unlimited resources. You

just

think, uh, uh, it, it is very shortsighted.

Um, and then, uh, talking to other firms, they said, look, we are volume players.

We, We, can't go

and talk to these

large signature architecture firms because there's no future in us selling volume to these people.

And then AI's coming along and I'm like going, how many volume seats are you gonna be selling in 10 years

time? Because I think we're in a different world

now. And talk about making

Evan Troxel: assumptions, right?

Martyn Day: right, it's my favorite one is

the Phantom jet, where they designed the phantom jet

thinking that all future warfare in the air

was gonna be beyond visual range.

So designed this plane with loads and nodes of racks, loads, and loads of missiles.

Uh, the Americans sent them into Vietnam and then they were suddenly

dog fighting with migs and they didn't have a cannon. And they only had,

they only had, um, these long beyond visual rain

amram rockets, which meant that they were

completely useless. So these things

were sneaking up behind them with their radar off. And then they were in a dog fight and they had

no gun. And so they had to take the phantom jet

and reverse engineer

a gun inside it, which meant them, they bloated the nose of the

thing so much that you could hear a phantom jet coming

from 10 miles away.

Um, it's all about making. Um, making design, it's like, yeah,

design's really important anyway. Design is

important

in fighter jets. It's, it's important

in, in CAD

Evan Troxel: out,

Martyn Day: And, um, the, I dunno if you've ever been to Stockholm. There's, um, there's

an amazing, the boat that

capsized

the, oh God, there's this one boat,

uh, it's, it's like

six 16th,

17th century boat.

And, um, it might be even older than that, maybe

1. And it, it's, it's is the valda

in my head. I'll have to go and look it up. But this, this boat is in,

its, um, they were building it and the king heard that

in Britain we had an extra layer of

guns on our boats. So he midway through designing

this

build boat, he says to his guys, he another layer, More guns.

More guns. And so they do it

and they,

they every ship does a test. and

the test is they have that, the full crew

go from the left port,

starboard, whatever, and they do the, the, they run

to see how it rolls. It

failed that test because it

was so top heavy with all the guns.

He insisted that they go out

anyway, so the, the boat goes

out, um, and the first,

uh, gust of

wind, it leans to one side, all the lower port, um, that

gun. Holes were open, water flooded in, it

sank. It never, It never, did anything. It never blew anything up. It never shot a

gun. It sank straight out

of

Evan Troxel: was a lemon. Yeah. Right.

Martyn Day: they changed the,

they, they tried

to build something on a

platform that was not fit for purpose. And, um, God, I wish I could remember the name of the damn thing.

It is the most

beautiful thing you've ever seen in your life. You go into this kind of darkened, huge warehouse and it's there with all the ropes and all the guns and all the paint

and all

Evan Troxel: Oh wow. uh, it is right next to the ABA

Martyn Day: museum. So you, you can you, can,

kind of compare the two. But,

um, for me, you know, these, these

stories Resound. When I kind of look

at technology and I look at

products that people are trying to

extend the life of by building things on that they were never

intended to be.

And at some point everyone has to realize software has a life.

and then at some point you have to have a new generation. And that

Evan Troxel: Well, and I I would, let's extend that to

firms. I think it needs to be

extended to firms too,

right? Like the same analogy can

totally apply. Like it's I'm, and I'm saying that because it's a difficult problem

and I think a lot of people aren't putting the

attention on it that it actually deserves. And so of course you're gonna have attrition

and those people are gonna just go

start something from scratch, which is literally a small team is going to compete

with your big giant thing because the technology is

leverage

Martyn Day: they, yeah, I

Evan Troxel: this is a reality.

Martyn Day: The, it's winning that

first deal that keeps you in business and then

doing a really good job on that

to the point where you can

go and get more business and then it'll come down to fees. This is the thing is the

everyone. Everywhere all at once is going to be rethinking their process.

rethinking and being fearful. Every design IT

director should be speaking to their board

saying, this is coming.

I'm telling you early because it's you, we're a big oil tanker

and we are gonna have to turn.

And, um, there are gonna be

pitfalls along the

way and we're not gonna

get it all right. But there's enough technology and there's enough momentum

in what I'm seeing.

I know that means that we're gonna have a different world and that world

is

not going to come slowly. It's gonna come quickly. Um, and it will impact different parts of it at

different speeds. Um, if I was an engineering firm,

like, like I would be,

you know, if I was a Ks,

if I was someone in in, MEP in

structural, I would be seriously

evaluating what's going on because they've got

18 months before

this hits.

Um, uh, the, the biggest thing that could happen is if, if

if large firms bought that technology so that it wasn't

available, uh, or it couldn't be weaponized by an

Autodesk or a,

uh, to, to be given to everybody,

if that can get sucked

Evan Troxel: Available to everybody. Yep.

Martyn Day: Uh, yeah. And

I I, it could go one of two ways 'cause there are so

few companies out there doing it.

Um, but people like Andrew have gotta have, gotta prove I haven't seen the software.

All I've done is talk to 'em and

and they've, they've talked the right

talk and they've said the right things that they're gonna do. But it doesn't necessarily mean that,

um,

it's, it's, uh, it's gonna be a great product. I'm just, I'm guessing that they speak, speak

the right

things.

But, um, that would, that's something I'm watching very, very.

Hard what's going on there because there are so few players and it's get, those products are starting to get very, very,

uh, obviously beneficial. Um, and and that kind of goes

down to people who do startups. If you're doing a

startup, are you developing a

startup to, to create a

business

or you create a startup to sell to

someone.

And the vast majority of the technologies I see are being built to sell. So they can, yeah, it's a five, five to seven

year

marathon and then someone will buy us. The VC companies are there, that's what they want to do. They wanna 10 times multiple. Thank you very much.

And um, so that's the thing with Connic where they don't

have VC money,

so the incentive to them to sell is, is, is not outside.

It's internal if they want to do that. Um,

so this

this,

space has,

uh, twists and

turns coming. I can guarantee

you that there will

be consolidation this year. Uh, all the firms are looking at buying all of the major BIM firms,

uh, are looking at the market

thinking. If I add that and that maybe I'd buy them, everyone, every

single one of them, um, you know, even Autodesk is, is sniffing around.

But that could just

be normal strategy, um, analysis perhaps 'cause they've

got former, but um, it is former delivering. I don't know.

Uh, I don't

see many people using it out there. Um, it's free. Yeah. I don't, I don't

know. So, um, I talk to Arco a lot. Paul's doing really well.

Uh, I

know Snap Truth's getting

six times the traction that they were

last year with the a, uh, AI stuff.

Um.

Uh, yeah, I, I, I'm speaking to people who are saying, you know, we just wanna get away from American

software. And I'm like,

wow, that's, there

is, I mean, there's that, the aspect of the whole trade war thing,

um, anti eu, there's, there's that playing off as well in terms of, I wouldn't be

surprised if the EU is gonna be

More

um, more investigative of American firms playing in Europe

based on what's

happening, uh, with Trump.

Um, there is definitely a a feeling within governments in Europe to replace, uh,

traditional American software, uh, like wood and that kind of stuff, uh, with local brew

equivalents. Um, it's, uh, it, it really does that, that stuff's

really

playing out. it's

it's not, um,

yeah, he, he's making a, he's making enemies out of allies,

And that's

feeding through to businesses who don't

want to be

supporting that, even though most of the software companies have nothing to do with what's

going on. Um,

Evan Troxel: Victims along the

Martyn Day: yeah, everyone

is a

victim in this, uh, sad world. Apart from, I was very disappointed with,

um, open AI signing with the Pentagon. I was very happy with Hmm. Um, so maybe I get

Evan Troxel: what

happened. The, the people

voted

Martyn Day: Yeah,

I

was, I, yeah, I, I, I've got both and I still have

both,

but I, I've

spent so much time training the damn thing that kinda, oh God.

What, well, which,

which, bits are in that? Which bits are in Claude Claude's kind of

new for me, um, but by far and

away, Claude is.

It's, it's so different. It's so

much better. It's, I feel like

Evan Troxel: It's a different

animal. Yeah. It

operates very differently.

Yeah. I.

Martyn Day: uh, uh, the only thing that was, so I had chat GPT, and I've been using

it like for day in, day

out. And then I moved to

Claude to do, because

I'm, I'm using it for the, for the, uh, one of the agent tick

tools I'm using is

based on top of Claude.

I kind of realized this is a very clever

system, or maybe I should get

Claude. So I moved to Claude, and then by two

o'clock in the afternoon

it said, okay, you've had your credit SULs, see

tomorrow.

And I was like, huh, what?

what? then I'm like, I have to ask, I had to ask chat GPT

about, uh, about Claude. And I

went, oh, yeah, yeah. That's, that's the way, that's the way it is. And so then I upgraded my

Claude because I, there was no way on earth I, I could not do

without this thing. Um, so yeah, it's a, it's a funny,

and now I'm

very glad.

And the,

the, the,

I, I do not like the way they just like

dump. Oh,

we've, we've done illegal, we've done accounting. I don't like the way they dumped that

out,

like, like bonds. Um, but, uh, I was very, uh, in intrigued

to learn a

lot from the CEO about his view. And he's, he's the

one

going, I'm warning you now. I'm warning you now.

Everybody. you're not,

You're

not, you're not listening. And he can't say, he

Evan Troxel: Over and over say, yeah, he

Martyn Day: can't say, he didn't

say this

This year feels very different to last year. Like, uh, I could have gone 10 years in, in the land of BIM and I just felt nothing's changed. And now in the world of technology, it's moving at such a, I haven't even tried any of the kind of free LLMs or the kind of Chinese ones. it's a very different world.

I'm kind of aware that I'm, I'm not really an architect. I'm a mechanical engineer by training.

Mm-hmm. But I love architecture and I love construction. I love the, love the creative, collaborative process of it. So when I go and see people. I used, yeah, I was with Martha and Sheriff from Fosters for an afternoon and they, uh. They, they communicate to me through the lens of people who do this stuff, and I communicate to them as someone who watches the developments of this stuff.

And we somehow meet in terms of, I learn from them about their process and their vision. And on the other side, they learn from me about the ins and outs of software companies and all the kind of shenanigans that goes on there and what's being developed, who's developing what. Um. And so I, I think, you know, you do a great job of just pulling in all, it's such a great diaspora.

There's so many different inputs into this industry. No one's got it all. No one can confess to understanding it because it's multidisciplinary. It's a motive, it's human. It's uh, it's, uh, theoretical. It's, it's. That's the thing that's so good about architecture and studying it, is that they'll hopefully, on a good architecture course, they're gonna give you all sorts of input.

I mean, I remember all my friends in Oxford University were architects and I had BIM skills, so I was, I had CAD skills, I had auto CAD skills, so I could do modeling and 3D um, and their first project was like, here is the space. Build something. And in a cri, in a crit. Defend why you built what you built.

Yes. Right. And I'm like going, oh my God, that's so open. That's such a wow. And here I was trying to write a bloody program in Pascal or do some maths.

Evan Troxel: Well, you're gonna get a different answer from every student in the class. A wildly different answer from every student in the class. Whereas, you know, you're turning in a project that is so prescriptive, you get the same answer 50 different ways, right?

Like 50 different versions of the same answer. This is a, it's a, it's an entirely different thing. That you're talking about

Martyn Day: it. And I went and sat in on the crib and I, I, it was hor horrific to watch ripped Park. There

Evan Troxel: were, yeah.

Martyn Day: Yeah, yeah. It was. Well, no, I, there were, I, I, I knew that as projects got bigger, when people had pulled their heart into them, there was more tears to come.

Yes. But to see, you know. Their, their, their tutors ripped them apart. And then other people, you know, their fellow students ripped them apart. It was really quite a, it was like, oh my God, this is so much more than I expected. Um, uh, with that liberal. Uh, with that liberal kind of, uh, freedom of creativity comes a, a, an acts of being judged, uh, by your peers in front of everyone.

Um, you know, it's almost like acting act. You have to be an actor. You have to be able to project, and you have to be certain of why you've done something. Um. So, yeah, I've, I've always felt it's very

Evan Troxel: vulnerable in that way.

Martyn Day: Yeah. I, I think it's

Evan Troxel: a, and and people call it the fun job, right? The fun job is designing.

It's actually very vulnerable and you have to be willing to take that criticism.

Martyn Day: But I, it's, it's just, uh, it. Yeah. I, I, I think it's, it's good for people's characters because how often do you have someone coming around and saying that shit or, Hmm, yeah, you didn't really think about that, did you? It, it doesn't happen.

And it, it, especially in my, you know, you were either right or wrong. Your program worked or it didn't work, or your maths was right or wrong. Well, there that, it's so subjective and you have to be, um. You, you have to be a single architecture firm on your own. Basically as you, as you're studying, then you work in groups and you have to work with somebody who's a bit of a lemon, who's holding you back.

Um, uh, and then when I was, I was still at uni, so we were sharing, I was sharing hash architects. They, they were up all night all the time. I mean, uh, the amount of work they had to do was just insane. But they enjoyed it. And that was, um. Yeah, it's my, one of my friends was much better at drawing people than he was at drawing buildings.

And so, uh. When he was, uh, submitting work and I was like looking at his drawings, there'd be like a huge face covering, like a quarter of, of the, of the, and I'm like, what, what's going on is he is like, oh, I didn't have time to, to like finish it off and I'm better at drawing people. So there were always more people in

Evan Troxel: right.

Martyn Day: I was just like, oh, how sneaky. Obviously didn't really, that didn't fly very far either. But, um,

Evan Troxel: there's stories of people taking their exam when the exams were done on drawing boards for architecture registration. Uh, there there are many stories of people. Covering up unresolved issues on buildings with trees.

Yeah.

Martyn Day: Ah,

Evan Troxel: vegetation to the rescue.

Martyn Day: Uh, at this time I was helping, uh, one of them submit his model. In, in drawing in, in, uh, um, in cad. And he was marked down for doing it in cad. Yep. They wanted, they wanted the artistic element of it. They didn't want the computer drawing of it or the model that was generated, um, which I kind of felt was, was, was very backward.

Um, I, I, I wasn't writing about CAD at that point, but it was, um. Yeah, he was, yeah, he was a friend of mine, Nigel. He was, when Release 13 came out, we were still sharing a house in Oxford and I was writing about CAD and um, so I had an early beater of 13 and he modeled the Radcliffe camera, which is in Oxford, this amazing Stoke library building Park, Oxford University.

We, and we worked out that if you, you modeled. One 12th of it and then array it around. You could end up with a, a good model of it 'cause it was perfectly symmetrical. It was that point that we just kept crashing on release 13 and I was, uh, constantly ringing up tech support in the states trying to get fixes for what's going on here, what's happening.

Um. So, yeah, that was, uh, that was, that was always very useful to have architects

Evan Troxel: when, see there, there's a difference between an engineer and an architect. An architect doesn't call support Martyn. We, we, we tried to figure it out all night long every night.

Martyn Day: I, yeah. Um, I made a lifelong friend, actually. I spoke to her so much in, uh, in.

Autodesk Tech support. Um, and her, her, her dad was one of the, the singers of Jefferson Starship or Jefferson Airplane is one of those bands that have come, come through various names and whatever. And, um, so yeah, I still talk to her now on Facebook. She's nothing to, to do with it, but, um, yeah, I, I, yeah, it was just.

One of those things where we were trying, trying to use something in anger and couldn't believe that it, it just kept failing. Um, right. Anyway, so, yeah. So, yeah.

Evan Troxel: This has been a great conversation. I wanna thank the audience for hanging out till the end here for all the stories. I love all the stories and uh, you know, it's great to catch up with you and I, I wish you all the best with NXT BLD and NXT DEV coming up in May.

We'll put links to that so people could go in the show notes for this episode.

Martyn Day: You can watch NXT BLD online. Um, the base streams will be videoed and live streams. And if you obviously are gonna be five hours behind, forward nine hours, whatever, I think you can just go in and screw it backwards forwards.

But within one or two weeks, they'll be available on NXT aec.com, which is where we store everything, um, post-show.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And you can watch last year's and the year before that there as well. Yeah, Martyn, that's been a great. Super fun. Thanks you so much.

Martyn Day: Good, thank you.