The Next AEC Tech Stack — Starting Thursday

I've made 238 episodes of this show since 2020, and I've never put anything in front of one of them. I'm doing it here because this one matters to me more than anything I've made.

Last year I sat down with Martyn Day from AEC Magazine, NXT BLD and NXT DEV. He's been covering AEC technology for 37 years, he's watched a dozen technology cycles come and go, and he is not an alarmist. I asked him how this moment compares to the ones before it. He said it feels like watching an asteroid come in. Not because he knows where it lands, but because everything is arriving at once. Open SDKs are cracking moats that took decades to build. Automation is turning weeks of coordination into hours. AI is writing the software that competes with the software you already bought. And underneath all of it, the billable hour, named-user licensing, and the subscription model are under pressure at the same time, from different directions.

I couldn't do that conversation justice in one episode. So I spent this year building nine.

The Next AEC Tech Stack series runs all fall. Nine episodes across three arcs: BIM 2.0 in August, agentic AI in September, the data play in October.

I went to many of the companies building the next stack tooling and asked them the questions I'd want asked if I were still working in a firm as a technologist and as a practitioner. Nobody got a soft question. That was the deal going in, and every company in this series agreed to it before we hit record.

Here's my one ask: I didn't make this for the AEC tech crowd. They already argue about most of this every week. I made it for the person signing the software contract, the principal who hasn't thought about who owns the firm's data, and the project architect who got told the new tool would free them up to design. If that's someone you work with, send them this. Send it to your firm's leadership. Our industry has a habit of having its most important technology conversations in a room the decision makers aren't in. Nine episodes is a long runway to fix that, and you passing some of them along is how it happens.

Sixteen companies backed this series. Every one of them put a real person in front of a camera and let me ask my questions. None of them had any final approvals on how I cut the episodes. That takes more nerve than it sounds like, and not one of them flinched.

Arc 1, BIM 2.0, starts Thursday, August 20. There are three episodes in this arc: Half Your Day Isn't Design, You're Not Going Home Early, and I've Got to Get My Project Out on Friday. They come out over the next 3 Thursdays.