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Leadership Edge

Is Your Data a Cluttered Garage?

📰 Everyone says firms are sitting on valuable project data. Few say where it lives, who can see it, or what an AI finds when it reads it. This edition covers the gap between having the data and being able to use it, plus three tests for this month.

Is Your Data a Cluttered Garage?

If an AI tool went through your firm's shared drive this afternoon, what would it find that you didn't know was there?

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Who this episode is for: Especially relevant if you're a CIO, BIM manager or design technologist who has been told to get the firm's data AI-ready and needs to know what that means on a Monday morning.

Summary

This was the second episode of Arc 3 in The Next AEC Tech Stack. The first one asked what a firm's project history is worth. This episode asked why you can't use it. Two reasons kept coming up: the data means different things to different systems and different people, and it's scattered across far more places than anyone planned for.

I put that to Ariel Cooke-Zamora and Matt Wash at Bimbeats, Randall Stevens at AVAIL, Aaron Vorwerk and Mike Soldan at Egnyte, Ross Wagner at Pirros, Sasha Crotty at Autodesk, Andy Rahden at Bentley, Dimitrie Stefanescu at Speckle, Chris Razzell at dRofus, Marty Rozmanith at Skema, Jesper Wallgren at Finch, Scott Reynolds at UpCodes, Campbell Yule and Theodoros Galanos. What stood out to me was where they split. Some said structure the data first and write down what every field means. Others said an AI agent can work through the mess, and the real gap is the decisions nobody recorded.

A reminder that applies to every episode in this series: these conversations were recorded weeks ago, and the tools have kept moving since.

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.
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.
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Free and paid subscribers are getting the same full newsletter for this series. Normally the full edition of Leadership Edge is a paying-member benefit. For The Next AEC Tech Stack it isn't: every edition goes out complete to everyone on the list, free accounts included. Graitec and AVAIL funded the series, and Speckle presents Arc 3, so the industry could actually use it.

If someone forwarded this to you, sign up free and the rest of the series lands in your inbox as it publishes. The next episode, 248, is about who owns your data once it lives in someone else's platform. TRXL+ members also get the ad-free feed, the full back catalog, and all the content that goes back behind the paywall when we return to our regular schedule following this series.
Catch the full episode

What's Inside

  • The dictionary. Ariel Cooke-Zamora's first question to an LLM about Revit warnings got a wrong answer. What did he have to write down so it stopped?
  • Clean it first? Marty Rozmanith called a firm's data a cluttered garage and said nobody has to wash it before using it. The people selling structure see it differently.
  • The why. Aaron Vorwerk heard from customers that up to 80% of a project's data never sits in the delivery tools. Where does it sit?
  • Nine digits. A customer that hadn't classified its data typed a short request into an AI tool. Mike Soldan told me what came back in two seconds. Spoiler: It’s not good.
  • One database or many. Chris Razzell said the model is the wrong home for most project data. Sasha Crotty and Campbell Yule came at it from different angles.
  • Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Theodoros Galanos said it works in only two cases. Which two, and what does he pair an agent with instead?

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