Digital Transformation & AI for Humans
Welcome to 'Digital Transformation & AI for Humans' with Emi.
In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation, and most importantly, the human spirit.
Each episode features visionary leaders from different countries who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch—nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence, soft skills, and building resilient teams.
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Visit https://digitaltransformation4humans.com/ for more information.
Digital Transformation & AI for Humans
Driving Innovation: AI, Gamification & XR Technologies in BIM / VDC (Virtual Design and Construction)
In this episode, we’re diving into the future of digital construction with a focus on AI, Gamification, and XR (Extended Reality) Technologies in BIM (Building Information Modeling) / VDC (Virtual Design and Construction).
I'm thrilled to meet Gary Cowan from Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK - a Multi Award-Winning BIM Leader, Global BIM and Technology Thought Leader, AI Enthusiast, and STEM Ambassador.
Gary leads Digital Construction at Kane Group, a company renowned for its strong heritage in designing, developing, and delivering building-service solutions throughout the UK and Ireland.
Key Discussion Points:
- The Current Landscape: How AI, gamification, and XR are revolutionizing the UK construction industry, tackling challenges, and transforming workflows.
- Gamification in Digital Construction: Exploring gamification engines, their role in improving collaboration, and the tangible benefits for teams and project outcomes.
- Practical Applications of XR: Real-world examples of XR in construction, its impact on stakeholder engagement, and decision-making processes.
- AI in Construction: How AI enhances efficiency, safety, and sustainability in construction projects.
- Barriers to Adoption: Overcoming challenges to unlock the full potential of these cutting-edge technologies.
- Future Trends: The role of AI, gamification, and XR in shaping the next decade of construction innovation.
- Actionable Advice: Guidance for construction leaders ready to embrace these technologies and drive transformation in their organizations.
This conversation is packed with insights into how modern technologies are making construction future proof: smarter, safer, and more sustainable. Whether you’re a construction professional, tech enthusiast, or just curious about the future of the industry, this episode is not to be missed.
Tune in now and discover how innovation is driving the evolution of digital construction!
🔗 Connect with Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garycowan83/
🔗 Learn more about Kane Group
About the host, Emi Olausson Fourounjieva
With over 20 years in IT, digital transformation, business growth & leadership, Emi specializes in turning challenges into opportunities for business expansion and personal well-being.
Her contributions have shaped success stories across the corporations and individuals, from driving digital growth, managing resources and leading teams in big companies to empowering leaders to unlock their inner power and succeed in this era of transformation.
📚 Get your AI Leadership Compass: Unlocking Business Growth & Innovation 🧭 The Definitive Guide for Leaders & Business Owners to Adapt & Thrive in the Age of AI & Digital Transformation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNBJ92RP
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Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host, amy. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. Today, we'll talk about driving innovation. We are going to take a closer look at AI, gamification and extended reality technologies in building, information modeling and virtual design and construction. My amazing guest today is Gary Cowan from Belfast, Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom. Gary is head in digital construction at Kean Group. He's a multi-award winning BIM leader, global BIM and technology thought leader, ai enthusiast and STEM ambassador. Kean Group has a strong heritage in designing, developing and delivering building service solutions throughout the UK and Ireland. Welcome, gary, I'm so happy to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Yami. Thank you very much for having me. I really love to be here.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies but our ways of thinking and leading. Interested in connecting or collaborating? Find more information in the description, Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. Gary, to start with, it is such a pleasure to have you here today, and I know that this topic is going to be so relevant for many of our listeners and viewers. So, to present yourself, could you share a few words about your journey, your passions and your experience?
Speaker 2:Thank you. Well, yes, my name is Gary and I am the head of digital construction for Keen Group, which is a building services design and build contractor based in Banbridge in Northern Ireland, and we have several offices across the UK and Ireland and we are sort of industry leader at digital construction at the moment. We have a real strong focus on design and prefabrication. On design and prefabrication and we've kind of become what's known as DFMA Design for Manufacturer and Assembly Specialists over the last sort of 15 years that I've been involved with the design team here at Keynes my own journey.
Speaker 2:I graduated from Queen's University Belfast in 2006 with a degree in mechanical and manufacturing engineering. Bim didn't exist back then so there was no degree to do BIM. So I kind of learned BIM from the ground up. I spent several years actually working on sites as a site engineer and then a sort of site manager and sort of climbed my way up the ladder of responsibility up into contracts management, did a bit of contracts management and working with jobs, really just to get a fee for the actual physical requirements of of building services engineering. You know, whenever I left universally, I didn't really much more than a diy knowledge of of, you know, fixing things and building things. So the decision for me at that time was to to go and hit the sites for a few years and try and gain as much practical knowledge that I could. To return back to design then for a real appreciation of how these things are built. It's very easy to try and draw building services, but it's actually very difficult to coordinate high-stakes stuff that's buildable and that's commissionable and that can operate that it's buildable and it's commissionable and it can operate. So my idea at the time was let's go and learn some stuff on real sites and earn my stripes, as it were. And then around about 2011, 2012, I returned back to the design side then and discovered BIM.
Speaker 2:It was actually around about 2008,. I first discovered BIM as a product and was blew away. Up to that point I had really only used 2D metal cards and you know, being the traditional draftsman, as it was drawing polylines and shapes and squares on a 2D sheet that had no real bearing or resemblance to anything. You know it was quite a difficult process and at that stage all of the skill lay on the site. You know the draftsman really only sketched the intention and it was up to the skilled tradesmen and women on the sites then to go and actually build the thing.
Speaker 2:Over the course of the last 20 years that skill set has shifted. That I have seen. You know the skill set now lies in the boom model and the boom technicians. They almost need to have an NVQ and qualifications in the physical aspect of building buildings because it's no longer just 2D polylines and circles and squares. We're actually building a virtual building with all the same fixtures and fittings that the real site team would use, but just in a virtual setting. For the last 15 years in Kean I've really worked hard to try and pile an industry-leading MEP design system of prefabrication and thankfully it has worked very, very well up to now.
Speaker 1:Exciting, and it is so interesting to see how those technologies are transforming the industry and how the requirements are also evolving along the journey. So now we're going to take a look at the next stage of development. Could you give us an overview of how artificial intelligence, gamification and extended reality technologies are currently being used in the UK construction industry? What specific challenges do these technologies aim to address?
Speaker 2:Well, gamification is something that I sort of stumbled upon right about 2016. I'm an avid gamer myself, I love to game and I think it was right about that time that the first Oculus Rift VR headset launched and, of course, me being the tech geek that I am, I simply had the album. So once I got my first headset, I probably spent the first six months just playing games, you know, just playing different games on the VR headset. And what struck me while I was in these games was that I was looking at an artist's rendition of buildings in the virtual environment, and some of the games were actually quite detailed and all the pipe work and duct work that was in the game, and obviously, with my brain, I was like I was paying more attention to the building services than shooting the enemies in the game. So it sort of set an idea in my mind, surely, that this technology could actually be used for construction, for what we do. So a bit of research led me to find a company called RSVR which had produced, at that stage, a brand new application called Prospect, and that was basically a gamification engine that allowed you to import BIM models and use the BIM model in the gamification engine, and at that stage it was absolutely revolutionary. What the gamification engine does is it releases the BIM model from its host model or its host application. That makes it so. No matter if you're an architect working in SketchUp or you're a building services guy like me working in Rabbit, or you're a steel erector working in Tecla, all of these systems can output a common 3D geometry that can be brought into a gamification engine. And for all the listeners who use Rabbit all the time, you'll understand that the rendering engine in rabbit is 20 years old. It still is the same rendering engine from 20 years ago and it's very, very slow. It really does need replaced. So what this does is it sort of closes the gap between the old tools that we still currently use in Revit and the new Unreal Engine-based and Unity-based gamification engines. So it allows so much more sort of consideration of the BIM model.
Speaker 2:We've discovered Cesium, which is an add-in for Unreal Engine 5, which allows the world to basically be brought into the virtual environment. So in Revit, a lot of the times you're actually looking at a building that's just frozen in space. There's no context, there's no background. What the gamification engine allows us to do is to put that BIM model out into Unreal Engine and bring it into the actual world and set the building on its exact footprint in the world where it should be. And then the Unreal engine has amazing sort of lighting uh engines without like lumen that allows to actually do sunlight analysis on the building with all the surrounding context and all of the surrounding buildings in place that actually cast a shadow on the building. So if we are doing a design of, say, photovoltaic panels on a roof, we can actually really simulate a day cycle on the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year to ensure that the placement and the rotation of the PV panels is actually optimal for the day cycle, you know, on both the longest and shortest days. So things like that can't be done in Rabbit. But the gamification engine sort of supercharges it and takes it to the very next level and allows animation and 4D sequencing, so many other things that just aren't available in Revit. You know Revit is a fantastic tool. I love Revit, don't get me wrong but it's an authoring tool. It's really for generating the 3D geometry. It's not so great for other things. So that's where the gamification kind of closes the gap a wee bit and allows the models to be looked at in a different arena as such.
Speaker 2:And AI is the next big thing. Obviously, that's the buzzword that everyone's talking about AI. At the moment, we are very tentatively looking at AI. I can see amazing potential for the technology, but I have a real fear that you know I don't ever want it to replace people, if you know what I mean. I would hate that an AI would ever come in and remove a Roan for someone with me. So I'm very sort of cautiously looking at how we're going to implement this.
Speaker 2:Obviously, I think AI should always augment a user and not replace. You know it should be another feather in the cap of a professional who makes their output, you know, five or 10 times better and early indications. I see sort of document checking would be one big thing that we're looking at. You know, at the moment we employ a big team of document controllers who check each and every document that comes through and we generate an obscene amount of documents. In a week. There could be 500 drawings and a thousand technical documents flowing through our document control manager at the moment, and it's a manual check at the moment. You know someone has to open that drawing and read every word and make sure there's no spell mistakes and look for mistakes. So I do believe an AI engine will probably augment that really well for a user and that'll scan a page in seconds and show the problems to the document control officer and hopefully just speed that entire process up for them.
Speaker 2:But on the B, the boom side, we've kind of been experimenting a little bit with a few different ai engines, almost like a chat gpt interface, just really to ask questions of the rabbit model more for like bill of qualities and materials and things like that, powering items.
Speaker 2:But again, it's it's free, dependent on the model itself. You know ai isn't going to make a a rubbish model brilliant. You know, if the data is dependent on the model itself, you know AI isn't going to make a rubbish model brilliant. You know, if the data is bad in the model or there's objects missing and AI can only do what it can do. You know I think it is slightly overhyped at the moment as well. A lot of people are sort of expecting that it's going to. You know everyone thinks it's going to be Terminator and SkyNet's going to come and kill us all. But I do think that it can be a very, very useful tool if used correctly. But it's very early days for us AI teams with AI. We're not kind of rushing with everyone else just to try and implement it to every aspect that we do, because I think it could end up causing more problems than it solves if it's uncontrolled.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate this consideration and it is heartwarming for me to hear this opinion, this considerate and responsible approach from the leader you are, because I see two different ways of approaching AI, and one of those ways is really about unrolling it as fast as possible and then seeing what will happen, and that is probably not the best way to do it when we're talking about these type of capabilities, this type of impact. So it is really good to think about it, to plan and, of course, I agree with you, ai shouldn't replace humans. Shouldn't replace humans. It should just enable them to be more creative and more impactful, more efficient and probably less stressed at work as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like the invention of power tools. You know what I mean Carpenters used to use hand tools, and then there was an invention of electric tools. It didn't replace the carpenter. The carpenter still had to do the work. It just made them better and faster. And I do believe that that should be the core function of AI. It should never, ever, replace a person, and I would never, ever replace a human with an AI. There's not a chance, no way.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I'm curious to dive deeper into the advantages of all those technologies and specifically gamification and extended reality in digital construction. What benefits do they bring from the perspective of teams and from the perspective of project outcomes separately? Can you tell a little bit more about that?
Speaker 2:Certainly. We implemented the virtual reality system in around about 2016, 2017, specifically in a project that we were involved in that was the Claridge's Hotel in London. It was a huge project that required very careful consideration. The site itself was an underground five-story basement substructure and there was absolutely no site storage. There was nowhere to put anything anywhere on the site. It was in the very centre of London. All of the surrounding buildings were occupied, so everything had to be basically designed, prefabricated and brought in a specific sequence and installed piece by piece. Literally as soon as it arrived on the lorry, it was onto the hoist lower down to the floor. It was then moved to position and installed straight away. There was no site storage whatsoever, and the shaft that we were using for all of the deliveries to site was also the shaft that they were using for all of the excavation and everyone used that shaft. So it was a very detailed sort of time scale and you had to put all the slots week in advance. So what the xr technology allowed us to do was it allowed us to actually go into the building model in a first person perspective and review the design from the inside out almost it. It was a hugely complex floor. On one particular floor on the B5, there was about 11 kilometres of paperwork and hundreds of hundreds of different fixtures and fittings and steelwork and it was so dense that trying to review that design in a traditional sense, from a third-person perspective looking at a 2D screen, just wasn't going up the mustard. It really didn't, and we implemented the XR technology then in 2016. But what we sort of very quickly realized was it allowed all of our different stakeholders, across different offices that were separated by oceans, to meet in the model and actually virtually sitewalk the design, almost like we're on site, and it was revolutionary at the time. A lot of the senior guys and canes you know, I'm the technology guy in cane, I'm the guy who figures out all these uh class systems and technology but everybody else in the company are just, you know, they're not technology people. They're, they're they're plumbers and they're pipe fitters and they're they're electricians and sparks. So what it did was it allowed all of those people entry into the digital model who would never have really even used the digital model or even seen the digital model before.
Speaker 2:And when you actually enter into the project, it's almost it's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't actually used vr. An example that I would use is if I showed you a photograph of the eiffel tower and then I took you to paris and stood you in front of it. Which one of those experiences would allow you to convey what that was? You know you could describe it very easily from a picture, but you would miss so much that the human experience needs you. You need to see it, you need to smell it, you need to touch it, and the VR is all you know. It's the sight. Obviously, there's no touch or smell. But when you enter into this model from the inside out, it's almost like something clicks inside your mind. It becomes more tangible. It becomes more real. The users sort of seem to cower more about the design because it's tangible. It's very easy to draw a lot of stuff in Revit and then sort of walk away from it and not understand the scale of it, the size of it. When you're drawing a 10-inch pipe in Revit, you don't appreciate the actual diameter. It's just that size. It's bigger than your head. So it's a great learning tool for any of the junior technicians, meaning that we don't have to actually physically put them on the building site. It's a much safer environment for them to learn how building services are put together, how to coordinate, and for all stakeholders.
Speaker 2:We were able to actually build a VR room on site for everyone to use, and that included the client as well. So very early we were able to bring the client in and put the headset on to the actual client, the owner of the hotel, and show him this is exactly what we're going to produce for you. And the room downstairs was completely empty. There was nothing there. But yet when he went upstairs and he set the headset on, that basement was sitting, pretty much finished, ready to go into manufacture, and simple things like. He had seen the google platforms on the internet and loved the color schemes, the colorfulness of it. So we spent a lot of time with the client choosing colors for all of his pipeworks and his systems.
Speaker 2:Then we were able to actually go in and color all of the services in the vr and give them sort of different. So here's option one of what you thought and here's option two. And then that gave us real buy-in from the client. He was more than happy to sign off on all of the things and there was no surprise then. So when it was finished he didn't come in and go oh, that's not what I picked. You know, that's not what I chose, because it was all accepted.
Speaker 2:So stakeholder engagement was probably one of the biggest things that we've seen. It went from just the bin guys being involved in the digital construction to everybody and absolutely everybody, from the director right down to the guys and girls on the ground putting the thing together, and it was a huge success. And now we've rolled it out across absolutely every project. Every project that we do do now has an XOR element to it, and more recently than this year, we started to look at augmented reality, which is the next step in the XOR family, and we did a trial with a company called Gamma AR, who are a phenomenal group of guys and have produced an amazing system, and what this lets us do is, with a LiDAR-enabled device like a big iPad or most modern phones, you can actually go into the app and it shows you what your camera is looking at, but then it also overlays the BIM model over the top in an augmented sort of setting, almost like Pokemon Go, if you know anything like that and what that does.
Speaker 2:It allows you to see the BIM model actually in context against the real world, which is great in different use cases. So if you're going into an empty room, for example, you can see the BIM model in situ exactly how it would. The proposal and the system allows you to measure from real world objects to the digital object. So you can actually measure between a real column in the real world to a fictional holographic version of a boiler or a duct or whatever it is. So the QA process can almost start before the actual installation, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It lets us catch problems on site.
Speaker 2:We can walk around and check all of the builders' records against the model very, very quickly. Is that all in the right place? Yes, qa becomes a very quick thing. Whereas before you would have had the BIM walking around with drawings, maybe several different drawings, now it can all be done on one device in your hand and it's actually linked right through to the BIM 360 system. So should the user find any particular issues, they can actually flag an issue in the gamma system and it mirrors across the BIM 360. So it all works in one ecosystem and works together. So our QA guys are over the moon at the moment. They are loving the new system. It allows them to see through walls. They can see everything as it sits um. The pre-con guys love it because they're able to go in and look at you know everything in situ and and look or catch and show any things that would have been missed or would have been missed to the critical point of installation um, and it's just streamlining all of the installations, the the amount of technology there really is.
Speaker 1:Sounds absolutely magic and I think it's so amazing to work with those technologies as well. So you are in the right type of industry for real Speaking about all those technologies and all those advancements, there are also barriers when you implement them. So what are the primary barriers to adoption of this technology and how can companies overcome this to realize the full potential of ai, gamification and extended reality?
Speaker 2:well, I would say the first, obviously the biggest and most clear and barrier is cost. You know there is cost associated with these things. These systems aren't free. The hardware isn't free. So you know, prepare yourself to have spent a bit of money, not only just on software and hardware, but time. You know you need to take time to train all of your staff to realize the benefits of the system. So sort of cost would probably be a big barrier for a lot of smaller to medium-sized companies that maybe would be a bit tentative about stepping into the world of digital construction.
Speaker 2:I've been very blessed to work for a very forward-thinking company who trusted me and my judgment and sort of let me do my thing. And you kind of need someone like that in your company as well. You know these things don't just magically fall into place. You kind of need someone in the company to help that drive and help that sort of focus on improving standards. You know I don't bring these things into cane because they're cool or they're they're. You know they're, they're snazzy or they're they're popular. I bring them in to to help everyone in canes do their job better and do their job faster. That efficiency is really the focus for me, don't get me wrong it is great fun to play with all these tools and meet all the people involved. You know I don't just go and and buy a bit of software. I always go and touch base with the developers, speak to them directly, like when we we took on the xr. It just didn't work. It just did not work. It didn't like. The cane models of our models were far too complex. None of the colorization worked. So rather than just crunkling it up on the ball and throw it over my shoulder, I thought, no, I'm actually going to reach out and speak to these guys and see how it's not working and see if I can help.
Speaker 2:So very early with the Aris guys, we entered into an NDA where we started supplying them with all of our BIM models and with the thought that if I can really cane model, it should be able to run any model from any anywhere in the world. And those guys were fantastic, they were really receptive and they improved the application immensely. And then those guys were actually bought by Autodesk and Autodesk sort of enveloped them in and they all became the WorkshopXR team and I've kept all the links with those guys and I've been in a really early sort of beta tester for workshop. So workshop xr is the, the latest product offer from autodesk, which is their version of the xr technology and it's sort of based on aris, which is one of the most popular, and the wide, which is sort of the second, and they kind of just bought both those companies and enveloped them in and they've built workshop was sort of the second. They kind of just bought both those companies and enveloped them in and they built Workshop XR off the back of those two apps and brought all of the free points from both.
Speaker 2:But I've been really cheeky, you know, I've kind of made it work for us out of the box as well. If it works for us, it'll work for everyone. You know, we're not the only people in the world that use fabrication services and colorize our stuff. So whilst I'm being selfish and trying to make this up work for us at Keyn, I'm doing it in the knowledge that it's going to help the entire industry worldwide as well. So cost and implementation would be the biggest barrier.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of people. Some people are great with technology, some people love technology and they really want to use it and they love all these things, but some people don really want to use it and they love all these things. But some people want to use technology, that they're set in their ways and and that's more of a challenge than the people who love you nearly have to calm the excited people down and encourage the the worried people and kind of meet somewhere in the middle. But I lead by example. You know what I mean. I don't just throw things out to people. I'll spend six months a year researching any system that we're going to bring in, speaking to the developers, trying to work it into simple terms for our easy to understand um, so that would sort of be.
Speaker 2:Another barrier to adoption is the people aspect. You know technology's moving at such a fast pace but unfortunately a lot of the educational systems aren't really keeping up. So that's another thing that I kind of do, that I'm a ambassador, so I spend time sort of going around a lot of the schools and universities here in northern ireland to try and encourage the educators to look at industry and see where we are. By the time someone does a degree in university and spends four or five years in university. When they emerge from university the landscape has totally changed and the technology is moving at such a fast pace now that it's very difficult for the educators to try and keep up. They're already maybe five years behind.
Speaker 2:So I think the whole education system is another barrier. You know, the software is moving and the hardware is moving much, much faster than people are keeping up with and we're starting to see that lag. Now we're not able to find people that can drive the software, that can use these technologies. So I try and always keep the human element of it as important as the technology. You know there's no point bringing all these technologies that if no one wants to use them they'll fail. You know, if no one adopts it, no one uses it, it's a failure, no matter how fancy it is or how you know good it is for market and anything like that.
Speaker 1:If our guys and girls on the ground can't use it, that's useless. I truly admire your mindset and your approach to this because I've been working with that as well, in a way bringing new technologies into the ecosystem of big corporations and seeing how powerful they can be when used correctly and how useless and probably sometimes even heavy they are and disturbing they are when they are not used in the right way. And this human resistance is that factor which makes or breaks the transformation. And I think it is also dramatic that trend that educational systems are so much behind and this gap is getting just bigger. The faster technologies are evolving and developing, the bigger the gap gets and it is a huge problem and it should be addressed. So I really admire your participation in the change of whole the environment around this journey between the educational system and the real life application.
Speaker 2:Very, very important.
Speaker 1:It is super important, truly. Gary. How are all these modern technologies helping companies achieve more sustainable practices and safer work environments?
Speaker 2:sustainable practices and safer work environments. Well, prefabrication really takes a concept of design and irons out all of the mistakes in a virtual digital environment where the cost of working out these mistakes is so much less than the real world. I started building buildings 20 plus years ago and in those days it was very much a scramble at the start of a job. In the UK. Here we had a saying that it was first in, first up, which meant that you know if you were slate to starting, you had the hardest job because everyone else was in ahead of you and no one cared about anyone else. The duct men were in. They had to get their duct works going. The drainage guys were in running pipes everywhere. It was always a fight. It really was, and the amount of wastage, wasted time, wasted materials in those days was actually sad to remember back. And how much time was wasted and just resources.
Speaker 2:There's nothing worse than altering good work. Do you know what I mean? If you've spent a day or a week installing something, then then you realize, oh dear, I'm running through a path of a duct here and I have to go back and take that apart. None of that's ever factored in when you're pricing for jobs. The margins on jobs are so low, jobs are priced almost it has to go in straight away. There is no, I have to say, contingency money for mistakes, so pressure's on to try and get it going. And on what digital construction has done is it kind of brings all of that off the site into a digital environment so you can change ductwork and pipework runs with no consequence really other than the time of the person involved versus what would have been involved on site.
Speaker 2:You know material wastage, time and, as you say, health and safety. If the stuff can come to site and literally just bolt together like a big Lego set, it reduces the amount of hot works on site. It reduces cuts and burns and just makes the working environment a lot better for the men and women on site. It reduces, you know, cuts and burns and just makes the working environment a lot better for the men and women on site. A lot less skilled people are required on site because all of the sort of fabrication has been done in the factory and for the people that work in the factory it's a much nicer environment for them to work in.
Speaker 2:You know it's temperature, controlled. They're not outside. In the wet we can controlled. They're not outside in the wet. We can monitor health and safety and quality much more closely in a factory setting than we can do on a building site which is 200 miles away across the Irish Sea. So digital construction really has brought a focus on sustainability and constructability and health and safety forward the construction for a much better way of building. It really is safety for the construction for a much better way of building. It really is that I often wonder how a lot of these massive buildings that were built 50, 60 years ago, however, actually managed to get built with the tools of the day. But they did. You know what I mean and that's what. That's what we've seen that this skill transfer has happened over the last 20 years, that the skill really, you know, has this move from the site installer to the BIM technician.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting and actually it's such an amazing transformation because it creates more safety for all the participants, it introduces more comfort and at the same time, it optimizes the processes so that the results become less of a guesswork and more of a safe outcome and a very predictable one as well.
Speaker 2:It's just ordering materials. In the open days you had to do a manual takeoff from a draw and there's human error involved in that. You might have overestimated or underestimated the amount of materials required and then that's that's wasted generally. So with the digital model now, with a button click I can tell you exactly how many meters of 50 mil pipework is required, how many brackets, what we model, absolutely everything right down to the screw, nut and washer. So on any floor I can quantify absolutely everything at the click of a button. So even just in human time the savings for human time. So our QSs are now on board with all the digital systems. Whereas they would have maybe spent a week taking a drawing off, they're going to give a day. Do you know what I mean? So there's nothing but efficiencies to be made from digital construction in every aspect.
Speaker 2:It started off very much in Keynes as just a coordination tool. The BIM model was nothing more than a way to produce 2D drawings for the sites. And now everyone in the company touches the BIM model in some aspect. It's used for marketing, it's used for estimation, it's used in procurement, it's used for estimation, it's used in procurement, health and safety design operations After occur. Every part of the business touches the digital model. Now. It's not just for the design guys and the upskillings, it's for everyone.
Speaker 1:Exciting. It sounds really really good. How do you think these technologies we've been talking about today will reshape the industry in the next five to 10 years? Probably five to 10 is too long time from now, so maybe you prefer to take a look at three to five years. It's up to you to choose and decide. And what emerging trends or innovations do you see in the area of digital construction, connected to everything we've been discussing today?
Speaker 2:Well, prefabrication has really risen since the conception of digital construction. Obviously it existed beforehand. Don't get me wrong. People did prefabricate before there were digital tools. It was a much more drawn-out process because it involved a lot of manual drawing and manual measurements. So today's modern systems are far more quicker and in the future I only see this accelerate more. We have seen the percentage of prefabricated jobs rise very sharply from when we started doing it and in every job now we try and look at each job to see how can we prefabricate different aspects of this building to be able to produce it quicker and faster and better, and I only really see that accelerating in the next three to five years.
Speaker 2:It's not just us in the building services side. I've seen quite a lot of sort of bathroom pods, for example is another thing that we're starting to see. Quite a lot of our residential projects. All of the sort of bathrooms come in pre-fabricated as a built pod and kind of set in, and we've seen that again with the sides and different aspects of the building. So pre-fabrication I think will be the big push for the next five to 10 years and that will be supported by all of the sort of technologies surrounding it. Point cloud capture and reality capture is another technology that we've got really involved in in the last wee, while, especially, we're doing a lot of sort of retrofit, renovation jobs in London, where we're got into an existing building that was maybe built in the 40s or the 50s and they strip that right back to the bare brick and we go in and reality capture the entire inside of the building and that lets us get a digital photograph of the job and lets us work remotely with complete confidence that there's no surprises when stuff comes to site. So we're seeing a massive uptake and acceleration in the requirements for point cloud scaling, um, both for planning ahead and designing but also for verification. You know, whatever we go in and we first fix all of our services, we go in generally now in point cloud capture as well as sort of 360 degree photography using like ailder and different systems like that. So all of the digital tools have been in the industry for several years now, but the curve is kind of going exponential at the moment now, whereas it was established and it's kind of been used a wee bit, but now we're really starting to see the adoption of these technologies.
Speaker 2:I was using VR seven years ago and it was unheard of, and last year when I went to autodesk university in vegas, it was probably one of the biggest. Ai was the number one and xr was number two everyone was talking about and I'm starting to see much more on linkedin people using xr, but again it's being used in silos. At the moment. We use it in our company, but I have yet to sit with an architect in xr, for example, or a structural guy. You know it's been very difficult to try and convince all of our design team members to to take the plunge, and I'm kind of pushing at every job. Now can we do at least one design team meeting in the model? Please Do you know what I mean? So the barriers and the things are slowly slipping away and I see sort of XR technologies taking over here over the next few weeks.
Speaker 2:I do obviously foresee mixed reality headsets appearing on sites in the next five to 10 years. The current crop of XR headsets that are coming out of the quest 3 and the apple vision pro, for example, are phenomenal devices. When we first started doing vr technology back in 2017, you literally needed a gaming pc at about 5 000 pound and you know a high class headset. It was very, very expensive to do vr when we did it back in 2007. Now you can buy an Oculus or a MetaQuest 3, excuse me for about 400, 500 pounds and that does all of the rendering in the headset. There's no external PCs or anything required. It all does it in the headset. And there's some amazing platforms for XR out there, like Resolve, for example, which they discovered last year. It's an amazing piece of software that can actually render an entire building on the standalone. So we went from only being able to render one floor of a building in ARIS to being able to look at the entire building in Workshop, for example. So the pace of uptake on that but where I see that becoming on the site is that I fully expect to see people walking around a building site with the mixed reality headsets.
Speaker 2:On these headsets have cameras that look in all directions, so it would be able to alert the user in a mixed reality environment of potential dangers, for example, if there was machinery coming at them from behind the headsets, as cameras look in every direction. So it will have met the user on site again and you'll be able to put in an ar version of the model with the headset on and, whereas we're looking at it, on a tablet like this, a fully and but busy people wearing xr headsets and communicating with each other both on site and off site. You know you'll be able to put in technical documents from the cloud and stick it to the wall and the technician can be working with the headset on, looking through the headset at what he's doing With the technical requirements of his installation beside him. Or, if he's stuck and he's a suspected team member, he can team call him and stick him to that wall and they can see through his headset what he's looking at and getting live feedback and help from someone who could be anywhere in the world. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:I think XR technology will be a huge, huge driver in the next five to 10 years. I fully expect to see people wearing some sort of holographic heads off display or a mixed reality headset. There's already, you've seen it already. There's the Trimble XR1010, which is the HoloLens V2. I've had a go at it and I was very impressed by it. Don't get me wrong, but I do think that the mixed reality instead of augmented reality with holographic heads-up displays. I do believe that a video fiend from a high-definition camera with an AR overlay will be the future of construction. I do with an AR overlay will be the future of construction. How do you think everyone will have a smart head? Is that all within a couple of years?
Speaker 1:The future is here. It's absolutely unbelievable. We couldn't even imagine science technologies maybe 10 years ago and we saw them in the sci-fi movies and today it's a part of our reality, of those businesses, and I would like to invite you back in three or five years and discuss all the changes of the latest years. It is so exciting. We are blessed to live in these exciting times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I say it all the time. What a time to be alive. I love it. I love technology, but I love people as well. You know what I mean, and for me it has to be a perfect blend of the two. There's no point concentrating on the technology if it's useless to the people and there's no point looking at the people without technology.
Speaker 1:I kind of try and knit them together and I agree with that oh, I loved it because I see it in exactly the same way and it makes so much sense to have you here today, exactly on this podcast, where technology and humans are meeting each other in the best possible way. I'd love to continue this conversation endlessly, because it is so exciting to learn more from you about all those technologies, about all those transformations and innovations. But to wrap up today's conversation, I would like to ask you what advice would you give to construction leaders who are interested in integrating these technologies but aren't sure where to start?
Speaker 2:Don't be scared of it. A lot of leaders are very cautious and don't really want to look into it or are scared to commit to it. And one would say is don't be afraid of failure. Don't be afraid of looking at things and trying to implement technology. It's for the benefit of everyone. Don't be clouded by the cost, the initial cost. Once you get over that hill, you know the amount of savings and optimization that it brings pays it back tenfold once you actually have that system developed. I would say look out to the industry as well. There are plenty of us out here in the industry that are making waves, that are leading the way.
Speaker 2:I didn't have anyone to follow. There was no one ahead of me that was doing what I did. When I started in Keynes I was given a PC and a rabbit on a pen stick and told away you go. I kind of watch and learn by example in the industry. Again, don't be scared to reach out to people. I've been blessed to meet some fantastic people in the AEC industry worldwide and everyone's very receptive and very helpful. I try not to play poker with my cards against my chest. Any innovation or anything I do I release to the world. I think we should all be doing what we do, and I'm not overly precious about it either. I'm more worried about the industry than myself, if you know what I mean. I don't want to sit on my laurels and think it's brilliant. I cannot practically show the world this is what's possible. This is how it can be done and how it should be done, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I'm sure it will be super valuable for so many of those who are listening to us and watching this video, and I'm so grateful for having this conversation with you today and for the opportunity to share your insights, your experience, with the world. Thank you so much, gary, for being here today.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation and AI for Humans. I'm Amy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.
