.jpg)
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.
Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes.
Visit https://digitaltransformation4humans.com/ for more information.
Digital Transformation & AI for Humans
AI & XR in BIM / VDC (Virtual Design and Construction): Translating Technologies into Reality - Use Cases from Kane Group
In this episode, we explore the transformative role of AI and XR in BIM/VDC through Kane Group’s pioneering efforts, guided by 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.
Gary takes us behind the scenes of cutting-edge projects like the Claridge’s Hotel Refurbishment. He shares real-world examples of how AI and XR are reshaping workflows, enhancing design validation, improving quality assurance, and delivering measurable results such as reduced rework, cost savings, and improved safety.
🔑 Key Discussion Points:
✔ How AI and XR began at Kane Group – The challenges and opportunities that inspired their adoption
✔ AI in BIM/VDC workflows – Streamlining tasks like clash detection and design optimization
✔ Claridge’s Hotel Refurbishment – A showcase of technology turned into reality
✔ XR in design review – Immersive VR/AR experiences enhancing validation processes
✔ Gamma AR on-site – Improving quality assurance and accuracy by overlaying digital models
✔ AI and XR synergy – How predictive analytics make XR experiences more precise
✔ Challenges of adoption – Overcoming obstacles and driving team buy-in
✔ Results of AI and XR – Reduced rework, cost savings, and improved safety
✔ Future trends – Kane Group’s vision for emerging innovations in construction technology
Whether you're a professional in construction, technology, or simply curious about the potential of AI and XR, this episode is packed with actionable insights and visionary perspectives.
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
🔗 BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001gqnm/the-mayfair-hotel-megabuild
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
📆 Book a free Strategy Call with Emi
🔗 Connect with Emi Olausson Fourounjieva on LinkedIn
🌏 Learn more: https://digitaltransformation4humans.com/
📧 Subscribe to the newsletter on LinkedIn: Transformation for Leaders
🔔 Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes
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. Let's focus on AI and extended reality in building information, modeling and virtual design and construction, and discover how to translate technologies into reality. We are going to dive into the real use cases from Kane Group. I'm happy to welcome Gary Cowan from Belfast, northern Ireland, the United Kingdom. Gary is head in digital construction at Kane Group. He is a multi-award winning BIM leader, global BIM and technology thought leader, ai enthusiast and STEM ambassador. Kane Group has a strong heritage in designing, developing and delivering building service solutions throughout the UK and Ireland. How are you, gary? So great to have you here today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Elma. Good Thank you for having me back again.
Speaker 1:Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies but our ways of thinking and leading. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. Gary, such a great pleasure to have you here. I would like to hear everything about your achievements, about your success stories, about your dreams, experiences and insights. Tell us a little bit more about your journey.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been quite a long journey. Now, when I actually look back almost 20 years now, which is hard to believe Because I still feel like I'm 21 inside inside, even though I don't look 21 anymore, unfortunately oh, there's been so many stories over the years. You know, when I first sort of graduated that was very much bottom rung of the ladder. My first job was a CAD technician and basically spent almost a year doing two dimensional drawings for shop fitting and different things and and onm manuals which at those days were a real. It was a rite of passage for anyone coming through into the design side. You had to produce the liber arch boulder with all of the paper documentation of all of the technical requirements of the, the kit and all of the drawings and stuff. So you would have sat and folded maybe 100 drawings and that was almost like a rite of passage at the time.
Speaker 2:But I sort of very quickly got out onto the sites then and decided to go out and try and learn the trade a wee bit more. I didn't really have too much experience in in building services and plumbing and heating and all that. So at the time I had kind of dreamt of being a consultant. A design consultant was kind of my my first idea when I left university and I thought to myself well, I'm not going to be a very good consultant if I don't really understand how pipes are hung and how ducts go together. So I had the opportunity very early in my career to go out there onto the sites and I took that opportunity and kind of went out and spent a lot of time on the sites physically building buildings and learning how it was going together. And it was kind of funny because at the time I was maybe the project manager. I was a very young project manager. I was a project manager about 23 or 24, which is crazy when I think about it now, but at the time I kind of was leading men and women on a site and I had no experience, I didn't know what I was doing. So I was in the site meetings in the mornings and then got out on the site and pulling a set of overalls on and going and working alongside the guys and girls on the site to physically learn. You know I had learned all the theoretical side. I had a degree in design. I was very much paper based. It was all theory and no substance.
Speaker 2:So I spent about a year or two actually physically working, as well as as doing the management roles, just for myself to learn, and that's kind of always been my thoughts through my whole life is not afraid of work, I'm not afraid of taking on extra work and I'm not afraid of going above and beyond for my own benefit and for the benefit of whatever company it is I'm working for at the time and there was many, many lessons over the years. Many failures, don't get me wrong. Um, I'm working for at the time and there was many, many lessons over the years. Many failures, don't get me wrong. I'm enjoying success at the moment, but I tell everyone that the mountain that I'm on top of is a. The snow peak on the very top is the success, and the the vast majority of the mountain below my feet is failure, and I live with failure as a lesson. You know I don't get overly caught up in failure. I try and take the silver lining from every situation that I've been in. So quite a lot of mistakes over the years clangers, as I would call them, you know, missing things, forgetting things, not having things lined up in time. So really, the journey to today was just a journey of learning more than anything.
Speaker 2:I started in Kean Group then around about 2012, where I sort of came on board as the very first BIM technician. At that time, kean had won a contract in London with the contractor Boigs and it was the very first job that they actually were contractually required to produce a 3D model, and at that stage they had a real great CAD technician working for them Craig, who's a close friend of mine, and he was basically the CAD master. He was brilliant at CAD but he'd never done Revit, whereas I maybe had a couple of years Revit experience by that point. So I came on board with Craig and between the two of us we kind of built this phenomenal BIM team, which is now probably the biggest digital construction team in Northern Ireland at least. I'm massively proud of that, you know. But it's been a learning curve for me.
Speaker 2:I have a degree in mechanical and manufacturing engineering. The BIM didn't exist when I did my degree. I very much was one of the first people to use Rabbit. I came across it on a project that I was involved in in 2009 and instantly fell in love with it, because at that stage I was still drawing 2D polylines and circles and squares, so it absolutely blew my mind that there was a 3D package out there that would let us draw the building. My degree, I had done solid edge and solid work. So I had an experience of 3d modeling, but it was for components rather than systems. So I kind of stick the plan to learning.
Speaker 2:You know dfma, designed for manufacturing assembly, really is looking at a building like a component. It's like a machine. It has to be designed like a machine with very tight tolerances and it has to go together. Whenever I first came out, building was a was a free-for-all. It was first in, first up. Whoever got in first got their services up, and on the early days I seen many fisticuffs on site, people fighting over I was here first. No, you people cutting and damaging other people's work. You know it was quite a hostile environment.
Speaker 2:The the construction in the early 2000s whenever Agbush sort of came on board, and what I've seen was a radical transformation over the years. You know of skill transfer from the site to the drafts person. Really more than anything. You know the drafts people who produce these models really have to have an insane amount of knowledge now of how built-in services go together. Maybe not so much for the architects and structural guys, but certainly for the built-in services. Guys and girls, you really almost need to be a pipe fitter and a duct fitter to understand how it goes together, because what you draw ends up being put together on site. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:So it's been a radical change over the last 20 years and, as I say, it hasn't all been sunshine and rainbows. A lot of it has been late nights, hard work. If you were to ask my wife, she would tell you that you know I live and breathe them all day. Every day I I land bed at night and look at videos on youtube for latest technology. It's kind of how I came across the XR platform way back in 2017. It was from myself being a gamer and playing VR games and then looking at BIM videos on YouTube. The algorithm kind of threw the RSVR system to me and that started the whole technological revolution really in games.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting. Thank you for sharing this with us. Super impressive, and I agree it is important to be humble and to highlight as well that all the success stories they have a price we paid, and there are many failures behind as well, and it applies to I believe it applies to any successful person, any successful leader, and I have had many of those as well, but what people usually prefer thinking about is only the bright side of things. People usually prefer thinking about is only the bright side of things. However, it is not only white or only black. It is something in between and a mix of it, but it is amazing that you are where you are and now you're going to share all that with us. How did the idea of integrating AI and extended reality into BIM and VDC at Kean Group first came about? Was there a specific problem or opportunity that these technologies aimed to address?
Speaker 2:As I said before, it was. It was around 2016 2017 that I purchased my first vr headset. Uh, it was an oculus rift and I immediately I was blown away by the technology. I was an 80s kid, you know. We all grew up in the 80s and the 90s with vr um, and it was very clunky, it was very. It wasn't for the masses, it wasn't certainly for your home use. You know, I remember using a VR headset in the early 90s and the headset itself actually had to be suspended on a chain because it was so heavy you couldn't actually put it in your head. So the revolutionary technology of the VR headsets in the late 2010s was phenomenal and I jumped straight onto it.
Speaker 2:I'm a real geek tech nerd. I love technology and I'm a gamer, you know. I've been a gamer all my day. So I started off playing the games and sort of seeing a lot of built-in services and beautiful artistic renderings of buildings and I sort of thought to myself oh, hold on a minute, you know, if I'm starting looking at this in a game, surely I could use it in my day-to-day job. And I started researching and developing and, as I was saying on our last podcast, I came across a very early solution that had just literally been put on the market in a matter of weeks. Whenever I found it and that was the Prospect by a company called Aris VR, and it was phenomenal for me I immediately sought a demonstration of it and the guys at Aris were great.
Speaker 2:They gave me a free demo for an extended period. I asked for a month. You only normally got a week, but I rang them and said look, I'm not going to be able to take this apart in a week, I need a month. And they were very gracious and gave me a month's demo. So initially it was just my own curiosity, more than anything. There was no real uh, need for it. It wasn't in the industry, it was more my own curiosity. Um, I like to take everything apart. You know as a child, if I ever got caught any sort of presence, instead of playing with them, I actually took them apart, and I went and got my dad's tools and screwdrivers and I actually took them apart. I was more interested in I had worked on the inside than what it did on the outside, and that has applied to everything I've done, even in my adult life. So immediately I got to play with this VR system and the first model that I ever put in.
Speaker 2:We were very sort of confident on our models at that stage in 2017. We knew our models were good and we knew that there was plenty in them. But the first thing that struck me whenever I took our first project into vr having had about 10 years experience of actual sites was actually how empty the model was. It was it was just empty. It's hard to explain, you know. All of the pipes and ducts were just floating in the air and there was no bracketry or clips. My first instinct as an experienced engineer is this isn't the full picture, this isn't right. So that almost sparked an idea in my mind that prefabrication was a thing in Cayenne then, but it was very, very small and it almost made me think well, if we can get this exactly right in the model, then we can just build it like a big lego set. There'll be no.
Speaker 2:We were suffering quite a lot at that stage with criticism of the model, and rightly so. You know, the the operations guys on the ground were really struggling that make the things fit for that very reason that we didn't give enough consideration to all of the brackets and hangers and clips and no one in the industry at that stage was even considering it either. It wasn't like we were an outlier and we weren't doing it. No one in the industry was putting that amount of detail into a BIM model and, to be honest, it was actually frowned upon at that stage. Because of the taxing it does on the system and the amount of objects to render it was actually frowned upon. People looked at me like are you? You know you're not doing the way it should be done, but that's never, ever stopped me before. So at that stage it was a very much exploratory and it was around about that time that the Claridge's Hotel project sort of landed in our lap. For context, for the listeners, the Claridge's Hotel is a is a hotel in the centre of London. It's a hugely prestigious hotel. It would welcome dignitaries from all around the world, royalties. If anyone comes to England to meet His Majesty the King or the late Queen, it's carriages that they would stay in. You know, it's that reputation of a hotel and it's.
Speaker 2:We were asked to look at prefabricating all of the basement services. They had constructed a six-story concrete substructure below the hotel whilst it remained open and trading, which was a phenomenal project to be involved in. But the complexities and the logistics of the job meant that absolutely every piece of it needed to be prefabricated. We had no, because it was six stories underground and there was no real ventilation. There was only one main shaft. That was the main access egress route for all of the materials, everything going out and everything coming in. There was no hot works in those environments. There was no welding, there was no grinding, you know, no cutting. Everything had to come to site and fit exactly perfectly.
Speaker 2:At that stage we were very much still using other technologies. Um, all of our pre-fabrication was done in autocad outside of the revit environment, and that in itself had its own problems because of sort of design lag and and things not marrying up together and also the huge complexity of that b5 level. Um, there was pipework up to 10 12 inches in diameter and I think we ended up being around about 11 kilometers of pipework alone in the whole building. So the sheer complexity of that meant that we had to drop autocad completely. We couldn't work on two systems simultaneously.
Speaker 2:I had to do a lot of preparatory work to bring all of our prefabrication stuff into the Revit environment, train them how to use Revit always proved to the prefabrication director at the time that Revit was capable of producing content. That was, how, would you say, accurate enough to be fabricated. A lot of problems with Revit, for example Revit, for example, revit pipework can have the wrong radius of bends. So when you're trying to prefabricate, you know pipe sections that are 10-inch diameter even being 5 millimeters out is a problem. Do you know what I mean? You have to be spot on. So it was almost like the planets aligned at that time for me.
Speaker 2:I was already looking at XR. This amazing project landed in our lap and I really just pushed the directors of the company to invest in the XR technology. It was a fight, don't get me wrong. My director Martin kind of shrugged me off on the first outset when I talked to him about this new VR technology. He laughed at it and said you're wasting my time with games. You know we're not in here to play games, we're here to to do business. He kind of thought I, you know he didn't understand at the time the concept.
Speaker 2:So I brought my own computer into the office on a Friday and got one of my colleagues, shay, to bring his computer in, and I got another license sorted out from Prospect and on the Friday afternoon when everyone went home and I knew the director the two directors, martin and his brother, john, were on their own. I asked them to come down and they got up and the two guys came into the room and we had the two VR headsets set up, looking away from each other, and I asked the two guys to slip their headsets on and turn around, and they both turned around and seen each other in the model, and then you could just see them look at all around and the instant reaction was oh my god, wow, what is this? Those two guys were time-served plumbers. You know what I mean. They're not technological guys, they're not bin guys, but they're sight guys. They're used to spending a lot of time on site. So that just that.
Speaker 2:The BIM model was this strange creature that I looked after up to that point, and once the VR system came in, it brought everyone into the digital model. Everybody wanted to see the BIM model, everybody wanted access and because this, this XR system, works remotely, it meant that all of our stakeholders that are all across the different offices across the UK were then able to meet virtually in the model, and it was just game changing. It was almost a catalyst for all of the succeeding technologies that we have brought in. From that it really shone a light on the BIM model and made it the central focus of the company. We build the building twice really. We build it digitally once and then we rehearse it in the digital sense and sequence it and prefabricate it and then we manufacture and assemble on site in a planned sequence. You know what I mean. So it was the catalyst.
Speaker 2:The XR really started all of the technologies that we've brought in. So there's so many digital tools that I've implemented and innovated. In Keynes, the point cloud reality capture system, we use a precision set note system which is unique to us. There's no one else in the world uses the system that I have developed for precision setting out using uh, total station technology and gis. So we're we're using all of the the digital tools now that are available on the market, such as ar, xr. Ai is the latest thing that we're also looking at. So it all really started back in 2017 with the Claritas project. It really did.
Speaker 1:Amazing, very impressive, and I know BBC also highlighted this project and it was a big deal highlighted this project and it was a big deal and, considering the complexity level, it is really impressive that everything went the way it did and yeah, and you have to remember we were implementing all these technologies live as we were going.
Speaker 2:I didn't have two years before the project started to get all this going. This was almost all live reacting. You know it was. Does this work? Yes, get it in see how it works. We were flanned by the seat of our pants at that stage with all these technologies and it was amazing at the time. It was really fast-paced and it was successful.
Speaker 2:I have a methodology for DFML. I call it the three-legged stool. I conceptualized BIM and digital construction as a stool with three legs and there's three important legs. Each are as important as the other. If there's one leg that disappears, the stool falls over. The first leg is to use reality capture technology to remove building tolerance.
Speaker 2:So in the case of the clarities hotel, the concrete substructure had been completed when we were asked to look at it and all of our design team are in northern ireland, in van bridge, across the irish sea. We can't just jump in the car and drive to site to review it or take measurements. But even at that, human measurement has its flaws as well. It has its problems and there can be mistakes, and so I sought to remove all of the human aspect. And that was the first thing that I did was contacted leica and said right, that point, light capture technology, how does it work? So we took that apart and we did that. So we went in and reality captured the entire concrete substructure and we paid an external company to produce a bin model from the scan data which was millimeter accurate so you could see all the bends and the walls and the columns that were slightly off plumb and the ripples in the floor. So when we prefabricated all of our stuff, there was absolutely no surprises when it came to site. We knew exactly what was there awaiting us when we arrived and it gave the technicians the ability to virtually walk the site from a remote location. So it was phenomenally groundbreaking at the time.
Speaker 2:So that's leg one. Leg two is the digital model itself. It has to be hyper granular, as I call it um, which is a term I stole off um, a daggum on on linkedin. He's good greg. Um, the model has to have everything. Back to my first original comment when I first tried the xr if there's gaps in the model it's useless. You know you can't leave anything up to decision on site. If, if the goal is a streamlined installation on site. You can't have the technician or the operations guys on site second guessing anything. They can't be starting scratching their heads. They need to know exactly what's coming, how it's going to go in and in what sequence for a speedy install. So that's number two, the BIM model.
Speaker 2:We spent about a year getting mastering rabbit fabrication services and drawing and custom modeling all of the ancillary items, as I call them so pipe clips, slide guides, uh, unique struck bracket hangers, right down to even the earthen bonds on on the on the tray. You know, absolutely everything is modeled and a consequence of that is digital takeoffs. That was something that didn't even envisage at the time. If everything is in the model and it's there in a digital sense, it can be very quickly and accurately taken off. So digital dollar quantities and material takeoffs appear almost by itself as a consequence of that, which was fantastic.
Speaker 2:But then the third leg of the stool was how do we actually ensure that this goes in as accurate as we need it to be we have? The amount of accuracy spent on the other two legs of the stool is immense. It's all about accuracy. So we can't have guys stand on site measuring with slack tape measures and you know, being five mil out, ten mil out here. So we looked out to the industry to see how are things actually precisely set out, and we looked at the steel industry, for example, because obviously your stanchions and your beams and columns have to be set out with millimeter accuracy or else, you know, the building doesn't go together quite well. So I reached out again to my contacts at Leica and said to them what is is the solution, and they recommended the Leica Icon system, which is a topography laser sat-nav machine that works on a system that you pull the CAD file into your pad and you can stake out individual points. So you can click on a part of the drawing and the machine will react and point the laser at the exact spot in the real world is where you've chose on the pad. And we took that system and we reverse engineer it and I said well, I don't want the user to be starting on site with and choosing individual points, because that in itself can be wrong. Again, they can kick the wrong point, that can forget a point. So we actually reverse engineered the whole system to create a coordinate family point that we can place into the digital model and that captures its GIS coordinate northing and easting and elevation that can be fed over through the cloud to the topography station to set that point out at two millimeter accuracy.
Speaker 2:So as an example for Claridge's, we were designing all of the high-level pipework inside these big steel frames as one big unit and these frames had six fixing points that had to be sort of marked out. And even the time taken. If we had fabricated the item the lateral and brought it to site we would have had to stand and measure all of the friction points and transfer that to the underside of the slab, which would have took a lot of time. And then the anchors themselves were resin set so they required time to set. And then you actually had to do a pull test, a load test, to make sure that it was going to hang, because some of these frames went up to a ton. So just for safety reasons, you know it had to happen.
Speaker 2:So we brought the, the laser satellite system in and we used it on the first few lateral frames to pinpoint the exact center points of all the fixings and we just did a dry run and said well, go for it, we'll see what happens. We brought the guys in and they set these 12 points out. Um, we set the resin anchors and did the pool test maybe a week before the lateral arrived and it meant that when the lateral arrived it was literally dropped down the shaft, brought across the position and hoisted straight up and fixed to the site. So where we envisaged it might take three or four hours per lateral to do the measurement transfer, it was done in 10 minutes. You know what I mean. It was a phenomenal success. So the laser sat night system was another big advancement, um, and we've rolled out it across all projects. Now we actually use that system now to use a color-coded system.
Speaker 2:So when we go and say a residential floor plate, we will mark out all of the high-level services, fixing points and routes of services so that the guys on the ground can install pretty much 75% of the first fix without a single wall being in place. There's no datum to measure from. We're not measuring from chippy's walls. It might be 5 or 10 milliliters. There we are as accurate as we can be. You know what I mean from the first go. So that forms the three legs of the student. For me it has to be remove golden tolerance. Your model has to be absolutely perfect.
Speaker 1:And you have to remove the human element of measurement out of the sites. Amazing, this is really impressive, and it is so great that you have something nobody else in the world has and you are applying it to your projects and you see those fantastic results as well. Thank you for sharing, Gary. Could you share some examples of how AI is being used in your workflows and what specific tasks does it streamline or improve, and what impact does this have on project timelines and outcomes?
Speaker 2:Coming back to that topic of efficiency and future orientation, yeah, well, it's still very early days for us with AI. Obviously, I've been doing a lot of research and development into it. We really haven't applied it to many cases, but where I see it having the biggest impact is for the likes of. There's several key areas that I've identified. In the business, our designers work with huge amounts of data specifications documents that run into hundreds and hundreds of pages and extracting data from those can be quite tedious at times. You know you expect the designer to sit and read a 700-page specification. It's not going to happen. Do you know what I mean? And that's a problem the things get missed. So we've looked at AI systems that will ingest PDF documents and provide consensual summaries or give the ability to a natural language like chat GPT type interface where you can ask the AI system a question about the document and it will find the answer in a second and give you the actual page reference and highlight where it is in the document, whereas it might take someone even 20 minutes, to be realistic, to browse through a 700 page document and find what they're looking for. If you do that five times, ten times in a month, and and you know, the savings in time are immense. So that's the sort of one aspect of ai. We we're using it as a, as a assistant for technical documents. Another one that I'm looking into is for automatic drawn recognition and checking. So at the moment we have a decent team squad of document controllers and, as I said in our previous podcast, there is an insane amount of documents that go through Key and Group in a week. There can be 500 plus drawings produced by our team and easily 500 to 1,000 technical documents in support of those drawings. So our document control team have to manually check all of them for spelling mistakes. You know even the file naming convention, for example. You know we work the ISO 19650, so all of your documentation has to be named in a certain way and have a certain data field. So the checking of a document can be quite cumbersome at times between its own name and format. So I see AI being a huge tool for our document control team to let them increase their output. Rather than replace anyone Certainly not. I'm hoping this will be a tool for them to automatically check documents and give them a concise answer. That will then help them process much more documents in a week.
Speaker 2:Health and safety is another one we've been looking at. I recently seen an AI there that if you simply walk around a building site taking a video and then you feed the video into the AI, the AI will find all of the problems on site, it will see all of the issues, it will see danger, it will make comments on the video. So it'll watch the video in 30 seconds and provide you with an Excel table of a numbered list of sequence with actual photographs captured from the video as thumbnails to say well, look this, this guy, he's far too. There's. There's no barrier on this open. You know you've got cables suspended here that a digger could hit. It was a phenomenal system that I've seen.
Speaker 2:So that's another thing that we're trying to candidly looking at um, how ai can help us on site inspections, both for health and safety and GA. For example, if we have someone walking with the camera on the site, the AI will be able to do almost like a take off for us and give us like a project report update. According to the program, you should have this much ductwork installed, but according to your video, you've only got around about this much installed. It's phenomenal, you know it's. It's gonna revolutionize how all aspects of construction are done in reality, um, but I I really do hope that the focus is that this ai is is just a another tool in the tool belt for people and not a replacement for people. That would be the absolute worst thing, in my opinion, could happen. I don't ever see a replacing a person. Um, I would only ever want to see, as I say ai will not take your job, but someone using ai.
Speaker 1:They definitely will that's true and what you are sharing. It is absolutely amazing. It's hard to grasp the level of those technologies and how they are introduced in our life, in our processes, and how they are going to develop and evolve within the coming years as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, for 20 years I have watched technology accelerate to massive heights and really at the start, when, when we started, that was the problem the computers weren't fast enough. They weren't fast enough to render, they weren't fast enough to be real-time lighting. You know, now, 20 years later, we have hardware and software that is capable of absolutely amazing things, and the bottleneck now is actually how quickly the person can use the computer. So if I asked one of my bin technicians to pull me out a schedule from the model how many flanges, for example, are on the floor, that could take them maybe half an hour to go into the software. Generate a schedule filter. It give me the output.
Speaker 2:The AI now becomes a natural. You know. It relieves that bottleneck. Now it's a natural interface to the computer. Instead of typing, you can just speak to the computer and ask it a question and it can go and do it in 10 times the speed, 100 times the speed that a human ever could. So I think the big thing for AI is now that it's going to eradicate the bottleneck of human interaction with a computer, which is the last frontier, and I really think.
Speaker 1:That's true, but doesn't it also reduce the headcount needed in order to perform the same tasks?
Speaker 2:If you're cynical, yes, I believe so. If you have that mindset of replacing people, that will be all that you see. But for me, I look at it from perspective of output. I can get two times or three times the output of that person, um, and it just lets us do more work. You know, keynes have grew exponentially over the last 20 years and the amount of people that have worked in Keynes I mean, when I started in Keynes, there was maybe only 10 or 15 of us and now it was 250, and that's a sort of linear graph.
Speaker 2:As the, the amount of projects we're involved in, increased. We needed more people, but there's a, there's a cap to that. You know, there's a point where you can't just keep employing people and doubling your free fall and your amount of people, for many, many reasons. Obviously, there comes a point where efficiency is the driver and efficiency is the key, where you want the people.
Speaker 2:We want to develop our staff and we want to develop them and make them better at their role, and I would always encourage anyone if I am looking at AI, don't be worrying, I'm not looking to replace you. This is just another tool for your belt. This is how this is going to make you better and faster and quicker and have better output and less errors, for example. You know a lot of that is good because people, when you're working on projects that are multi, multi, millions of pounds, there's a lot of pressure on you, there's a lot of sort of stress and am I doing the right thing? Have I made mistakes? Quite a lot of people spend a lot of time checking their own work almost because they're scared of making a mistake or they're scared of costing the company money. So if we can remove that worry and that there's a system floating over the top of us which is almost watching us for mistakes and correcting them as we go, that will help people's confidence and help them push forward and work better and work faster.
Speaker 1:I absolutely love that perspective and it is so important that we've got a chance to highlight that as well, because that is exactly the future as we wanted to see. As we wanted to see, how do AI and XR complement each other in Beam and BDC, for example? Does AI-driven data or predictive analytics feed into the extended reality experience, making it even more precise?
Speaker 2:Hard to say. I haven't really seen AI and XR cross paths yet, but obviously they will at some stage. I think AI will be really good at data management in BIM models. At the moment it's rubbish in, rubbish out. Quite a lot of models have redundant data, useless data. So all of that metadata is available in XR. If I'm in an XR environment and I click on a particular element, it will show me all of the metadata that's involved. But if 80% of it's garbage, I don't really want to see it either. Do you know what I mean? So I'm hoping that AI will help us curate our models and enter data. At the minute, data is killing us. It's all manual entry, it's all manual seeking and searching. You know if? If one of my clinicians doesn't have the information for a particular element at a time, they will go and draw a square box or something, a placeholder in place and that does the business for them at the time, producing their 2d drawings and stuff. But later in the project, when it comes time to deliver the data that's appended, I'm left with a model full of boxes that I don't even know what they are. So I have dreams that an AI will be able to come in and read a schedule of equipment and go and find them all and correct them and add the data automatically and then that will flow through to the XR experience.
Speaker 2:I'm good friends with gabe paez, who's the head of xr at autodesk. I I torture that man, I really do. I'm in his ear every week giving him ideas. But a lot of our most recent podcasts we did together. I sort of challenged him to say that when I am an xr and I'm in anR experience I would like to see a digital assistant in the model with me, almost like an avatar which is the AI itself that I can have a natural conversation with in the XR experience. Who would give me the answer? So again, why am I clicking on an object and reading words on a tablet, a virtual tablet in my hand? Could there not be an avatar of a man or a lady standing there to speak to, to ask you know how many meters of paper on this floor, and they just speak back to you and answer you.
Speaker 2:Can you give me that in a report? Yes, the PDF report is nice to see to your headset. Can you show that for me? Send it to this email. Here you go, that's nice. So I see a ai integration into xr, possibly a few years down the line now, but it's like. It's like the iron man films where he has the the jeeves and his and his headset talking to him. He can do things for him. That's, that's kind of what I want to see in in the future xr experiences for construction. There's absolutely the capability and the technology is there today. We could probably do it today if anyone would bother to go and try it. But I think that definitely is how AI and XR will merge together.
Speaker 1:Amazing. It is so incredible how it's going to change the landscape and make your job both easier and more enjoyable as well. We've been talking so much about opportunities and latest technologies and all the bright things we have on the horizon, but what were some of the biggest challenges King Group faced in adopting these technologies? How did you overcome them, and what advice would you give other companies looking to implement AI and XR in their own BIM and VDC processes?
Speaker 2:There was a lot of the technologies that I've implemented over the years weren't um sort of accepted lightly, should we say. It wasn't easy sailing. I did face quite a lot of resistance internally, um from people, cynicism, people doubting that the system can do what it did. So I, actively, I I'm the kind of guy that will go and do you know what I mean? I don't, I don't sit on my seat and and posturize, I will physically go and prove my point. So much like the xr experience where I told you that I literally had to bring my computer in and put the headset on the tractor to force him to look out. I've kind of had that brash attitude with everything you know. I will go and speak to the technology developers. I will get access to the system. I will take it apart and look at it. I will show everyone in the company how it works in its simple layman's terms, and it always has to be in context of of reality. You know I've had so many technology people across the world come to me trying to sell me solutions for x, y and z, and what I say to them all is you need to come to one of our sites and show us this working on a cane site with a cane model, with cane processes. That's the only way that the people in this company will understand it and take it on. There's no point showing me a building that's on the other side of the world, that has absolutely no context to anyone involved. It has to be familiar, especially if it's a new concept. If you show someone a new concept on a completely unfamiliar setting or scene or model, it doesn't have the same impact as to, perhaps, a job that someone has been on for three or four months already and are invested and they know the job and they can see the problems on site and they can see where they're struggling. If I come on the site with a new technology or a new process and show them it's actually physically working, it's an automatic. Yes, you know it's. Yes, let's go, let's take this on. And I've just been very fortunate. Obviously I know that I'm not every company can do that. Um, I've been extremely fortunate, uh, with the directors of kane, uh, the mcmullen brothers who have had faith in me over these last 15 years.
Speaker 2:Um, to sort of go with the ideas that I have now. Again, it's not been an automatic. Yes, every time there's been a there's been a proven process each time. But at the same time, they're happy for me to spend time looking at these things. Um, it's not all during work hours. Quite a lot of the research and development ideas outside of work.
Speaker 2:You know I I do quite a lot of work in the evenings and and weekends just researching and developing, partly because you know I have a genuine interest in these things and it actually does interest me and excite me, but also because I have that drive and that focus to, to to lead. You know what I mean. I I don't want to follow anyone. I've never been a follower, I've always been a leader in every aspect of my life, always kind of a bit of a show-off. But um, it's just, it's how I am. I can't, I can't change how I am internally. You know what I mean. That's, that's what it is. So you need someone like me in a company to to drive this with that same level of passion and focus and and willingness to to go above and beyond what's required I admire your approach and the type of personality you are sharing with your company.
Speaker 1:I'm myself like that, so it's always 24-7. Just because you like what you're doing and you can't follow. You need to be that trailblazer to run five miles forward, bring the new solutions and see how they can fit into your company and create new processes and update everything and upgrade your people. So of course, it requires a lot of engagement, dedication and passion and I really have a lot of respect to those leaders who are like that. So it's amazing that you are like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:Gary, looking ahead, what role do you see AI and XR playing in the future of construction? Are there emerging trends or innovations that Kane Group is excited to explore next?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the most recent technology that we've looked at in the last sort of six months was augmented reality, which is kind of the next step in the XR family. Obviously, virtual reality is when you're totally in the model and you're in whatever virtual model that you're in. Augmented reality uses it's known as a few different things there's mixed reality and there's augmented reality, which are kind of one of the two same things. Mixed reality is achieved by overlaying a digital virtual model on top of an actual real world video stream or even onto a holographic heads-up display that's placed in front of the user's eyes, and what it does is it mixes both worlds together. It mixes the virtual world and the real world into one system. So, um, we demoed uh gamma ar, which is, um, one of the leading ar solutions on the market, has massive bim integrations with autodesk, which worked really well for our workflows, and we we took it to uh one of our london sites there recently, woodworth uh, where the basement was pretty much all pre-fabricated, and when I went on the site and took one of the iPads and calibrated myself in one corner, I was absolutely blown away by how close the actual install was to the real, the digital model. Excuse me now, that's a combination of a lot of things. It's our, it's the three-legged studios I talked about. You know, I would expect nothing less with the system that would put in place the. The building was scanned, we prefabricated all of it and it was put into the laser sat-nav system. But when I stood on site with the ar tablet and I looked at all of the stuff together, it was, it was almost a bit overwhelming because it was a culmination of probably 15 years work of of me, of research, development, building the system, meeting all the people, understand all the technologies, bringing all these things together, training all the staff. You know, it was a it was a eureka moment that this is, this is, this is the way this is right. What we're doing is exactly right and it's phenomenal technology.
Speaker 2:Uh, in itself, it can be used for so many different things Verification of built services, pre-construction considerations of empty spaces, qa, checking of installed works by ourselves and others, for example. So that's a really exciting technology that's sort of emerging and at the moment it's all being done on tablets, for example, or phones, and the next step that I see is for people to actually put a mixed reality headset on, like a apple vision pro or a quest 3 and to actually be walking around the site, inspecting the site through a mixed reality device. Um, there's other problems with that, you know. Can you imagine anyone walking around a built-in site with a vr headset on? There's inherent risks and danger with that to fall off things. But what I've seen in my and my plans with the technologies is that these headsets are constantly scaling and tracking your outside space. So it'll be very easy for the an ai system to be much like the health and safety video that I spoke about just recently there earlier on. That headset could be scanning your surroundings in 360 degrees and warning the user in their headset oh, be careful, they're getting very close to an opening there, be careful, there's a, there's a machinery moving behind you. Uh, watch out, there's. There's no services here. You might bang your head, things like that. I think that will remove the barrier to that technology making its way onto the building site and what that will do is the augmented reality experience on site is phenomenal because when demoing the Trimble XR10, we were able to do a Teams call to someone in the office and I was able to pin that chat to the wall and then I was able to ask the person on the other side to look at the video stream from my headset and they were able to see exactly what I was seeing on site. So the possibilities for that are endless. You know, if people are struggling with installations or commissioning, it's very easy to teams call someone live from site and get them to see exactly what you're looking at and give you the solution. So it's all about efficiency. It's all about, you know, speeding everything up again.
Speaker 2:That's my prediction for the future is AI will be doing sort of mixed reality headsets and, if you want to extrapolate even further, robotics would be the next big thing. Do you know what I mean? Robotics we're already seeing robotics on site. We're using robotic token stations at the moment for our precision, setting out that that machine is a robot itself. It'll point the laser wherever you want it to go. We've also seen the autonomous reality capture things from leica, like the boston dynamics spot, the dog that has a scanner on his back and that wee guy walks the site every day and stops in the positions that he needs to stop in to scan the site and if there's obstacles, he's able to make his way around the obstacles and he can climb stairs and you know, and that dog will do that every day until the job is done, with no input from anyone, you know it'll walk itself back to its charging station and charge itself and transfer the data to the server automatically. So robotics for me will be a big thing. Maybe in 20 years time we'll start to see. We've seen the robotics come out from tesla. You've seen the recent sort of tesla robot there that was starting making drinks for people at this party. We are there, we're very close to being there.
Speaker 2:I say 20 years. It could be 10 years, could be five years, who knows? But I've already seen videos online of robotics robots building walls, for example, and putting plasterboard on the walls and doing it so much faster than a human could do. So that side, I don't know how I would feel about that, because I'm a humanist more than anything. I don't want to see 50 robots on a site and one guy looking after them. Don't want to see 50 robots on a site and one guy looking after them all. I'd rather see each person have a robot companion or something. So whilst I'm excited about it, I'm a bit cautious about it too, at the same time.
Speaker 1:The future is bright, but it is important to be realistic and see that it depends on us as well, on our choices, how we apply those technologies, how it's going to develop in the future and what we're going to get out of it.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:What do you think about the singularity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, scary thought you know. What do you think about the singularity? Yeah, scary thought you know. General superintelligence is something that can go either way.
Speaker 2:I'm a big fan of Elon Musk and I watch a lot of his podcasts and his interviews and he's probably one of the leading experts in the world in AI and he's very cautious about how it's going to work. We've all watched Terminator. We've all seen Skynet. There is a real possibility. There is, as I think Elon said, there's probably 10% or 20% chance that AI could go bad.
Speaker 2:Everything that we live in, the whole world, is digitally connected nowadays. It would be very easy for an AI to start turning off power stations and opening dams and doing real bad things. If someone can control the AI and make it bad, it could be bad, but there needs to be checks and balances put in place to mitigate those risks. I think I think it's worthwhile pursuing these things, even though there is a risk attached. I think benefit the humanity far outweighs the risk at the moment and I would sort of agree with Elon.
Speaker 2:But certainly it's a scary. It's a scary thought, especially for a kid that grew up in the 80s. You know what I mean. I remember growing up watching Night Rider with David Hasselhoff when he had a talking car and I thought it was the most space age thing. And here we are in 2024 and we all have Alexas in the house and we all have cars that can talk to us.
Speaker 2:It's quickly, how scary, how quickly it has came. I honestly didn't think I would see it in my life. I thought maybe my children or my grandchildren would see that sort of technology. But it has. It has arrived very, very quickly, and the rapid pace of advancements in AI over the last five years has also been quite scary, especially for the videos that we're now starting to see. Deepfaith videos is concerning, you know, misinformation, disinformation. That kind of thing is a problem which needs to be ironed out pretty quickly too. You know what We've seen AI lying as well. That's another problem. Whoever makes these AIs can't lie. Truth is an absolute importance in an ai and in this world that we live in today.
Speaker 1:The ai needs to have to have trust in the ai that is telling us the right thing I agree, and it is amazing that we can highlight both potential advantages and disadvantages and still we do all we can to introduce those technologies, develop them, apply them for the better of humanity and the use cases and projects for the future you have at Kean Group. They are absolutely mind-blowing and it would be impossible to introduce them without that technological development. So I'm so grateful to have you here today and I'm really impressed by all the stories you shared. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your insights with us 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 am 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. And explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.
