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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

246: Someone Already Figured This Out

A conversation with Marty Rozmanith, Randall Stevens, Aaron Vorwerk, Mike Soldan, Ross Wagner, Dimitrie Stefanescu, Sasha Crotty, Chris Razzell, Roderick Bates, Scott Reynolds and Theodoros Galanos about turning years of project data into a strategic asset by capturing the “why” behind decisions.

246: Someone Already Figured This Out

Arc 3 of the Next AEC Tech Stack series is about your data. Most firms are sitting on years of project information, and every company in this arc says it can turn that into an asset. This first episode asks what that history is worth, and why so little of it gets used again.

Marty Rozmanith at Skema starts with lawyers, whose old cases keep their value for a whole career. Randall Stevens at AVAIL calls project knowledge a capital resource, and says the part firms never capture is why a decision was made. Aaron Vorwerk and Mike Soldan at Egnyte separate a pile of files from data you can use. Ross Wagner at Pirros and Dimitrie Stefanescu at Speckle describe what leaves when your most experienced people do. Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora at Bimbeats show what firm data can tell you about your own time and fees. Sasha Crotty at Autodesk says to start with the question you want answered. Chris Razzell at dRofus takes on who pays for good data. Roderick Bates (Chaos), Scott Reynolds (UpCodes), and Theodoros Galanos weigh in on small firms, public data, and why waiting for clean data is the wrong move.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, BIM managers, and design technologists who know the project archive is worth something and can't say how to get at it.

Original episode page: https://trxl.co/246

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Arc 3 presenting sponsor
Speckle Speckle makes design data actually usable across projects, so your team can trust it, own it, act on it, and make better decisions faster.
This series brought to you by
Graitec Graitec provides AEC software, training, and expert support to help architects, engineers, and construction teams design, build, and manage projects more effectively.
With support from
AVAIL AVAIL's content management system (CMS) helps architecture and engineering teams find, manage, and reuse their Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and other technical content in one place.
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The Series

Previous episodes in the series:

Voices in This Episode

What a Firm's History Is Worth

  • Skema on the lawyer comparison — Skema — Marty Rozmanith on why a lawyer's old cases keep their value for a whole career, and why architects never had a practical way to reuse theirs. Later, on what manufacturing does that AEC doesn't: carry lessons from one product generation to the next.
  • AVAIL on project knowledge as a capital resource — AVAIL, From Project Knowledge to Capital Resources — Randall Stevens on the white paper, why the "why" behind decisions is what firms fail to capture, and why he'd start from today's work instead of feeding 15 years of files into an AI.
  • Egnyte on structured and unstructured data — Egnyte — Mike Soldan on what unstructured means, how small language models can tag thousands of documents, and the 15-year "goldmine" claim. Aaron Vorwerk on the difference between a pile of files and usable knowledge.
  • Pirros on collective memory and standards — Pirros — Ross Wagner on how firms remember by project, what walks out the door with a person, and what happens when a firm sees its own details laid out in one place.
  • Bimbeats on firm data as a learning resource — Bimbeats — Ariel Cooke-Zamora on benchmarking, fee accuracy, and structuring data so people can learn from it. Matt Wash on the typical-details business case and the weekly time sheet.
  • Speckle on the access problem — Speckle — Dimitrie Stefanescu on tacit knowledge locked in people's heads, data fatigue, and what a firm can see on a live project today.
  • Autodesk on context and starting small — Autodesk · Datum — Sasha Crotty on capturing why a decision was made, learning from the last five projects instead of 15 years, and picking the outcome before uploading anything.
  • dRofus on who pays for good data — dRofus — Chris Razzell on a "democratized organizational intelligence layer," data transformation, private clouds, and whether you charge for better handover data.
  • Chaos on large firms training on their archives — Chaos — Roderick Bates on why big firms' repositories become an advantage, and what a small firm does with six bathroom renovations.
  • UpCodes on public data and the infrastructure behind it — UpCodes — Scott Reynolds on building codes as public data, and why handling tens of thousands of code updates a month is the advantage.
  • Theodoros Galanos on the exhaust — Why "get your data right" is a war firms can't win, and how agentic workflows can become the engine that generates good data.

Tools, Events, and References Mentioned

  • ARKI — the AI tool for typical details in Matt Wash's business-case example, built by Natalia Bakaeva.
  • TRXL 183 — An Appetite for Transformation, with Natalia Bakaeva — Natalia Bakaeva's earlier episode on this show.
  • NotebookLM — Ariel Cooke-Zamora's example of feeding project PDFs to an LLM.
  • Deltek — the ERP system in Matt Wash's time sheet example.
  • Populous — where Marty Rozmanith's stadium back-of-house example comes from.
  • Bluebeam — the redlining example in Randall Stevens' segment on capturing intent.

Series Partners

These companies took part in Arc 3 of The Next AEC Tech Stack.

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The tools I use to make this show: trxl.co/tools

Every voice in this episode is on trxl.co/guests with their own bio.

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