TRXL

Arc 3 of the Next AEC Tech Stack series is about your data. Most firms are sitting on years of project information, and every company in this arc says it can turn that into an asset. This first episode asks what that history is worth, and why so little of it gets used again. Marty Rozmanith at Skema starts with lawyers, whose old cases keep their value for a whole career. Randall Stevens at AVAIL...

German Aparicio, Jr. of Trimble joins Speckle's Virginia Senf, Neuron Factory's Salil Pandit, and Pelles.ai's Yael Meretyk Hanan to talk about Trimble's equity-free 0-60 Challenge and what it takes for startups to build real integrations inside a large AEC platform company. We explore founder time versus accelerator upside, Trimble as a system of record looking for systems of action and intelligen...

This is the last episode of Arc 2. The first two asked what these tools can do. This one asks what happens when they get it wrong, who is still on the hook when they do, and what that means for the people coming up in this profession. Mike Soldan at Egnyte says the bigger risk now is reference content that's five years old, not a hallucination. Randall Stevens at AVAIL points out that running auto...

Espy Harper, David Spehar, and Anthony Hauck join the podcast to talk about data-driven design for healthcare, where a missed clearance or a misplaced outlet stays built into a hospital for decades. We explore why firms treat every project like their first, how as much as 90% of room requirements can be templated and reused, and how a live link between a room-data database and a 3D planning tool l...

I asked the same partners you heard last episode two questions back to back. When a vendor says AI, do they mean autocomplete, a copilot, or something that acts on its own, and does the distinction matter to you? And further out, can you describe a building in plain English and get something real back? Oliver Goldman at Autodesk isn't sure the three terms mean much beyond branding, and explains wh...

Every company in this arc has AI in their marketing. So I asked all of them the same question: in a real firm today, what can it actually do, and what can't it? Michael Jansen and Prasanta Bose at TwinMaster open with why firms resist adopting new tools at all, and Roderick Bates at Chaos separates real capability from social-media hype using a story about his son and a magnet-fishing YouTube vide...

Two questions close out the BIM 2.0 arc. When a tool generates a design for you, where does its output stop and your judgment start? And what does interoperability actually deliver once you strip away the vendor promises? Roderick Bates at Chaos draws the clearest line anybody in this series draws about what a generative tool should not be allowed to do — his team won’t let AI touch geometry or ma...

Episode one ended with the pitch: new tools give architects their day back. Episode two asks the harder question. If a firm stops running one platform and starts running ten, what happens to twenty years of muscle memory while that shakes out? I put some version of that question to nine voices building and using the BIM 2.0 stack. Gavin Nicholls calls the sunk cost a serious blocker and describes...

The first episode of The Next AEC Tech Stack opens on the number nobody wants to say out loud. Randall Stevens of AVAIL puts the mundane overhead of an architect's day at somewhere near fifty percent, and he admits it's hard to measure because it disappears in seconds and minutes at a time. Looking for a file. Marking up the same PDF three people already marked up. Waiting on a license. Across thi...

Phil Read joins the podcast to talk about where human judgment belongs in an AI-assisted design process. We explore his case for the infamous sawtooth diagram (the thing BIM was supposed to eliminate) as the place where experience gets injected. We get into AI as an intern rather than an oracle, why firms are using it to study materials and lighting instead of generating building form, and why aut...

Garrett Reynolds joins the podcast to talk about UpCodes' decade-long fight to keep building codes free and public. We explore the string of lawsuits UpCodes has faced from the International Code Council, ASTM, and other code publishers since 2017, the Supreme Court and circuit court rulings that established no one can own the law, and the Pro Codes Act, the industry-backed legislation now trying...

Marlene Chen and Blair Payson join the podcast to talk about how a firm known for design, not technology, actually puts new tools to work. We explore the office-wide crit they ran to surface friction points across every role and experience level, the shift that took their visualization team from three people to effectively 150, and the messy reality of adoption: rogue folders on personal desktops,...

Håvard Vasshaug joins the podcast to talk about what happens to building data after the architect hits save, and why so much of it dies inside the authoring tool. We explore why it makes no sense to force construction, cost, and scheduling data into Revit, how live model changes can flow straight to contractors and owners without a BIM license, and why six-week-old information is the reason projec...

Mariusz Hermansdorfer joins the podcast to talk about turning an internal tool into a product for the whole profession. We explore how he spun Jifto out of Henning Larsen as the firm's first ever tech spin-off, why letting go of corporate control was the thing that made it possible, and how a Rhino plugin can put wind, stormwater, and microclimate analysis in the hands of architects who never had...

Tatjana Dzambazova joins the podcast to talk about why the AEC industry deserves a brand new tool, one built for AI from the ground up instead of bolted onto software designed 25 years ago. We explore the end of what she calls the terror of technological expertise, the difference between hoarding artifacts and capturing the process behind a building, and why she believes AI could bring joy back to...

In this special partner episode, Jack Sadler joins the podcast to talk about the phase of a project where architects quietly lose control: construction administration. We explore why CA became a cost center instead of a profit center, what happens when architects run their work out of someone else's software, and how AI can automate the routing, logging, and paperwork without ever touching the pro...

Keith Gerchak joins the podcast to talk about the double life he's been living for thirty years: designing spaces for storytelling as the Design Principal at TheatreDNA, and inhabiting those spaces as an actor and filmmaker. We explore what makes performing arts buildings unlike any other building type, the surprising parallels between directing a feature film and managing an architecture project,...

In this special Campfire Series episode, Jeff Mottle joins the podcast to tell us the full story of CGarchitect — from a side project launched in 2001 to a 21-year platform, a sale to Chaos Group, and everything in between: the 3D Awards, CGschool, the evolution of archviz from expert-only technical gatekeeping to storytelling, and what COVID revealed when it stripped away all the travel and in-pe...

Steve Burrows CBE joins the podcast to talk about why the construction industry keeps rewarding dysfunction instead of fixing it. We explore the gap between selling time and creating value, why startups keep failing to change construction by trying to change all of it at once, and what the collapse of Katerra actually taught the people who were in the room when it happened. This episode is especia...

Rachel Riopel joins the podcast to talk about why enterprise transformation keeps failing in AEC and what it actually takes to make it stick. We explore the gap between running pilots and operationalizing technology across an organization, why the industry's obsession with productivity as the primary metric is a race to the bottom, and how cybersecurity is quietly becoming one of the biggest frict...

Charles Portelli joins the podcast to talk about what you learn when you leave architecture to build software, and what you bring back when you return. We explore the gap between how buildings are designed and how they're actually fabricated, why the most valuable work inside a large firm is often the least glamorous, and what it would take to build an AI-powered project assistant that actually kn...

Antonio González Viegas joins the podcast to talk about the open source infrastructure layer he's building for BIM software and why the barriers that have protected legacy vendors for decades are collapsing faster than most people realize. We explore why every BIM company has been forced to reinvent the same foundational technology from scratch, how That Open Company is giving those pieces away un...

Martyn Day joins the podcast to talk about the forces quietly dismantling how architecture and engineering work gets done, and how it gets charged for. We explore how AI-driven solvers are compressing months of project coordination into hours, why BIM 1.0 is becoming a drawing conduit as open SDKs erode software moats, and what layered cloud and AI token costs mean for firms reconsidering where th...

Pablo Zamorano Mosniam joins the podcast to talk about what it looks like to build a technology practice around design values rather than the other way around. We explore the “door scale,” the intimate layer of texture and touchable detail that most firms skip and Heatherwick obsesses over, why tools leave recognizable fingerprints on the buildings they produce, and how the studio's most-used inte...

Mirco Bianchini joins the podcast to talk about where AI automation is actually headed in AEC and why the industry is likely focused on the wrong problems. We explore the gap between Grasshopper prototyping and real product deployment, why LLMs are about to democratize computation far beyond the specialist niche, and how MCPs could finally connect a construction industry that has always been fragm...