Business Innovators Radio - Episode 42: Material Volatility: Building in Uncertain Times with Trevor Schick

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Construction Executives Live SeriesMaterial Volatility: Building in Uncertain TimesIn today’s volatile market, construction companies face unprecedented challenges as supply chain disruptions and tariff uncertainties force rapid adaptation. This episode explores how the industry is navigating material shortages, price fluctuations, and regulatory shifts to maintain project viability.We also examine how breaking down data silos and implementing AI-driven solutions creates a competitive advantage in this uncertain landscape. Discover the substantial benefits of centralized project information—from reducing costly delays to enhancing decision-making capabilities and improving budget control across all stakeholders.In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-42-material-volatility-building-in-uncertain-times-with-trevor-schick

Welcome to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live, brought to you by U.S. Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In The Zone peer-nominated national award winners. Here's your host, Jeremy Owens. Welcome back to Construction Executives Live. I'm your host, Jeremy Owens, owner and founder of U.S. Construction Zone and three generations improvements out in sunny, Northern California. Yeah. We have another great show for you today in talking to a lot of people around the country, both in my industry, which I do siding windows decking, but also in other aspects of construction. It's kind of strange. I'm feeling a little bit of volatility going on. Some people are as busy as ever, and others are telling me there's a little bit of slowdown their feeling. So wherever you're at right now, I think it's a very important time for us. to be together as a community, whether you're joining a group or you have a business coach or going to conferences, whatever that might look like for you. I think it's important to do so because what you hear in the news is always happening in your individual business. And so you really need to surround yourself with your peers to help you be more efficient in your business. Secondly, it's very important to surround yourself with technology that's going to make

you more efficient, especially in terms of data. Most of the technology out there is about, hey, you already have a bunch of data in your business. How about we use it to make decisions in our business as opposed to maybe the old school way, the way I was brought up is, you know, which way is the wind blowing? And then let's make a decision and change just for change's sake. So really it's cool time in the construction industry because we have so many great tools coming at us fast and furious. And really it's time now just to take a pause and start

introducing some of those technology tools to your business and see where it takes you. One of those tools were sponsored by the great team at Build12. Build12.com. Great CRM. Automate your business into

a revenue generating machine. Check out Build12.com. Mention less. I mention me and you'll get a free demo and he's a great person if you want to talk about a coach as well. Also sponsored by Builder PayPro. BuilderPoPro.com is the construction payment platform that saves you time, money, and get you paid fast.

Pay 0% credit card processing fees, accept ACH payments, and utilize a state-of-the-art invoice tool that integrates with QuickBooks. Visit builderpaypro.com for a free demo. Today's show is called Material Volatility Building in Uncertain Times. In today's volatile market, construction companies face unprecedented challenges as supply chain disruptions and tariff uncertainties for rapid adaptation. This episode explores how the industry is navigating material shortages, price fluctuations, and regulatory shifts to maintain project viability. We also are going to examine how breaking down data silos and implementing A. AI-driven solutions creates a competitive advantage in this uncertain landscape.

Discover the substantial benefits of centralized project information from reducing costly delays to enhancing decision-making capabilities and improving budget control across all stakeholders. We are joined today by Trevor Schick with a background steeped in technology and building expertise. Trevor brings over 30 years of operating experience across multiple industries to his roles as CEO of Slate. Most recently, Trevor served as the C.O. of real estate operations for Amherst Holdings, where he held all operations, technology, and marketing for the single-family rental and bungalow direct-to-consumer platforms. This role included significantly growing the platform while creating operating leverage across the acquisitions, construction, leasing, and sales teams. Prior to Amherst, Trevor held a role of president of materials and renovations at Katera,

as well as holding senior level supply chain roles at other large global organizations such as Hewlett-Packard, Morolla, EMC, and Apple. Please help me welcome Trevor Schick. Trevor, thank you being on the show. Absolutely. Good to be here. Awesome. So tell me a little bit about your kind of upbringing instruction. That's a lot of different hats. you've worn over the years. So tell me a little bit of how you got there. Yeah. So, you know,

it's interesting. I originally came from the high tech industry side of the world. So grew up in the supply chain. That's kind of been my background, most of my career. You kind of listed off a bunch of the companies that are out there. I was there in the early days of Apple. For those who remember the iPod, I was on the original iPod team long ago before the iPhone. So it's kind of one of my fun facts out there of getting that to market. But, you know, I spent 20 years in that industry. Moving up, my last role was with Hewla Packard Enterprise running the global supply chain for them. And after that, I went over to Katera, where I came in really to bring the material supply chain piece into the business.

The idea was we'd become very efficient on how we run supply chains in the high tech industry for the companies you talked about. How do we take some of those learnings and kind of expedite them into the construction? an industry where instead of going through multiple layers of distribution, you went and work directly with the suppliers. That gives you better quality, gives you better cost, and much better visibility in the supply chain. So that kind of got me into the real estate side of things, which was exciting. And then as I went over to Amherst, which is a single family rental platform, spent a lot of time where that was more of, I'll call it a factory and a business. You know, we did everything from buying the home. We then renovated the home. We then took that renovation, put it into lease up, and then we operated as a single family rental platform. And really, we treated that like a factory. The idea being is if one of those constraints was wrong, the whole supply came fell apart. And so again, bringing this mentality that I really grew up with in the high tech industry and applying that to a very different industry that really got me into the real estate side of the business.

All that was based on software that we put together and the algorithms that kind of linked all those pieces together to make successful. And then as you mentioned, I left Amherst and went over to Onyx Holdings for a while, which is a single family home builder, bringing over some of that technology. And it's actually interesting that I went to Slate because their AI technology was the best I saw on the market, started working with them. So I became a customer of Slate. And then after a little while, I got to know the board and the founders, and they, they asked me to come over and run the company. And so about a year and a half ago, I, I got over to Slate. So as you said, very background, but, but it brings a lot of the pieces we're going to talk together about today to the table because I've been dealing with a supply chain my whole life in different, different businesses. Yeah, yeah.

So what is that? I mean, obviously going from from tech to construction, right? I mean, two very different industries. What do you kind of, what do you like about the construction? Obviously, I'm a fierce, you know, loyal construction guy that, you know, I'm always kind of, you know, supporting us however I can. But what do you, what did you find the biggest difference was from that tech side to go into construction? There's a couple things I'd highlight.

One is, you know, in the tech side, we, I'm a relationship guy, right? And the relationships that we had with our suppliers was critical. And that was much more on the material side of things. Obviously, you have factories that built it, not. not the not the on site. So the materials piece to me was kind of the draw in for me. What I really had to learn was the importance of people in the construction industry, right? They are the most critical asset in this industry. So we can go solve the material problems. It's, I knew how to do all that.

Yeah. Coming into this industry and, you know, the people, you know, in the field that aren't, it's not the people that sit in the big office and write the checks. It's the guys in the field that make project successful. And so how do we enable them to be more successful? Because, you know, everyone talks about AI and how it's taking away jobs, especially in construction, those jobs are always going to be there, right? It's how do we get them the right tools to be able to go, you know, attack their daily problems and spend their time on the right things, but you're always going to need those people out there. So it's real kind of getting that mind shift change from those materials as the world, which is kind of how I grew up to really

that critical asset that we have in this business, which is the people in the field. The other piece I'd say is this, it surprised me up first how, disaggregated the whole value chain is, right? You know, again, I come from a place where, you know, if I was running the supply chain, I knew all of my suppliers, I knew the CEOs of those companies. And so when there is allocations, when there's issues, I could go right to them. You know, in the construction industry, it's much more of a general contractor working with the sub. The sub is working with, you know, the distributor. The distributor is working with the materials guys. And so, you know, the data gets so lost as it goes through that long, you know, that long chain of

people that you really don't know. So somebody would say to me when I got here is like, are your materials going to arrive on time? And I'm like, I hope so. Where in my previous world, I knew exactly what was happening. If I needed to hop on a plane and go to Korea to buy memory, I can know I could go solve that. So that disaggregation in this was the other piece that really kind of struck me. And it's part of what we were attacking at Onyx and really trying to then with Slate as I've gotten here, try to help people with that problem. Got it. Yeah. And with the many roles you've kind of had, you know, as you kind of jump around in the construction industry a little bit, what part of the industry has you most inspired or excited for the future?

Yeah. So, of course, I'm going to say what I do now. But I think it is, you know, the technology that's coming out right now, you know, projects are getting more complex. We all know that the data being created, you know, it is 2.5 trillion bytes of data, which these numbers are just crazy numbers, right? And it says, you know, on a daily basis in the construction industry. So it's not that there's a lack of data.

There's a lack of tools to be able to take that data, harness it, and be able to give you actionable things to go do, which is kind of step one. And then really, and this is where the AI piece comes in, and we'll talk about this more, is, you know, then how do you take it beyond that to the next step, which is not only point out what the problem is, but come back and start giving the solutions.

And again, it's not the machine taken over the world, but it is definitely getting to the point where, you know, we're able to highlight what are your biggest impacts. here's some recommendations what to do, and then jointly with the human side of it, you know, come up with those right actions to go do. And that to me, I think, is the exciting part of where, you know, AI, you know, but the software tools that, you know, Slate is bringing to the table in kind of our space. But there's a lot of the great companies out there doing some, you know, good work in this

spot with AI as well for construction. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And with your previous, like, experience with the supply chain, you know, what did we learn about the COVID pandemic in terms of our vulnerability. And have we made any improvements, changes there? Or are we still super vulnerable? Yeah. So my argument would be is we're still vulnerable. We always will be. You know, if I go back, there's always been supply chain disruptions. I used to joke with people. I run a global supply chain. I had 70 factories across the world, 10,000 people in organizations. Every day I woke up and I was just like, what is my problem

of the day, right? And it was all about supply chain disruption. So they're always there. I think what COVID taught us is that I can solve them when they're kind of popping up, right? It's a little bit like whack them all. I hate to oversimplify it. It's like, here's my problem. I need to go address that. We get that one fixed. And you can usually solve them. What happened with COVID is when all the factories closed down at the same time, it was just unprecedented, right? It was just like, I couldn't go just put all my time on these one or two big issues. It was across the board. It was the same people fighting for those allocations. And it's where I think we started to see the vulnerability, especially in construction with the data, right?

We couldn't, we couldn't figure out where materials were, were they on a boat, who were they allocated to when they got there just because of this multi-layer supply chain. And so, you know, COVID definitely brought that to the table. I do think, you know, my thing for the supply chain executives out there and I'm old, so it doesn't matter as much to me, but the guy's coming up is that, you know, you were suddenly the guys on the front page of the Wall Street thermal, right, which they never were before. It was just operations was expected to doesn't make it happen, especially in tech. It was all about engineering up front and the sales guys.

And in the background, the operations guys, just you flew under the radar, you worked hard and you got this across. With COVID, it's the first time this came to the top. And so I actually think companies then started investing more, both in people and in the software to go manage this. And so I think there has been improvements. I don't want to minimize the improvements. But from a vulnerability perspective, there's always going to be some vulnerability there. You know, the goal on, this is to keep knocking it down. Again, I think there's a lot of tools that are coming out that help highlight that earlier,

because that to me was always my surprise in the construction industry is everything was very reactive, right? Most of this materials that's coming from Asia is on a boat. So three months before it gets here, you should know exactly what's happening. But that information doesn't flow all the way to the subcontractor, the general contractor, and the guy at the end of the day who's paying the bills, which is the developer. He's this, you know, doesn't know what's happening. And so I think there's been a lot of work to try to get that piece better understood so that the one there is a issue, people can see it. But, you know, the more we can go get closer to that.

And if I go back to my time at Onyx, it was exactly doing that. How do you go and just build up that relationship straight with a supplier rather than doing it to kind of distribution into multiple layers on that? So more work to be done, but I think there's been good progress since COVID. Yeah. But again, if the whole world shut down again, I can guarantee we're going to go through some of the same issues. Oh, for sure. Yeah. We just, you'll never solve that.

Yeah. Yeah. So what's kind of creating the uncertainty today? I mean, obviously, you know, we could kind of point to the terrorists. But, you know, whatever it is, like I said in the opening, I'm getting a lot of feedback from my peers that, you know, some are really in a weird uncertain time. Maybe that's economy driven. Maybe that's the tariff thing. Wondering what's going to happen with material prices.

What are you seeing in today's market right now? Yeah, and so I'm going to take a step back. Hopefully you'll let me. I mean, I've dealt with tariffs my whole career, right? I mean, this is, there's nothing new about it. If I wanted to go sell servers in India, I needed to build a factory in India, right? Because the tariffs to move product into India was so high regardless of where I brought it from. And so Brazil was similar, right? So in my career, I've dealt with tariffs a whole time. What the difference is, and why I think there's so much, you know, fluctuations right now is those were pretty certain, right? I knew that, hey, this was the tariff impact. if I went and built this factory, I could go resolve that. And I had time to put that in because you can't do that kind of stuff overnight. You know, I think the uncertainty of the tariffs right now is probably one of the biggest issues and kind of what, you know, where people feel this thing is going right now. Because, you know, the one thing I can guarantee you is they're going to be different next week than they were today. And I woke up this morning and, you know, hey, maybe we're going to cut China tariffs in half, right?

Yeah. You know, all this just, you know, so I sit here and I have a small HVAC business. that we're building up and it's just starting to ramp. And I sit with them and I sat with them this morning and just said, hold all the materials in China, right? Because I don't know what's going to happen. And I'm better off letting them sit there and potentially airframing them over later, paying a premium than ever importing them to the U.S.

at a 145% tariff and running into the impact of that. And so I think people like me are sitting in offices all day just saying, if I knew what the real impact was, I could go make plans. I could go start mitigating that. without knowing where it's going to be and one month, two, three months from now is what's putting a lot of that uncertainty into the system. And so to your point, it's, you know, tariffs were there last year. They were there the year before.

They were obviously different limits. The uncertainty around them is what's really driving a lot of the fluctuations in the business. And I think to the point of, you know, there's kind of short-term, midterm, long-term impacts, just like everything in the world, right? Short-term buildings that are far under way and already have their materials purchased and sitting there, they're going to continue to as plow. these things out, right? Because they have the certainty in it. I kind of have the midterm guys that haven't brought all the materials in yet. And so now suddenly they're underwriting and the subcontractors

can't absorb all that if these tariffs stay where they're at. So they're going to need to push on that cost onto the builder. And then suddenly these guys are having to underwrite some of the projects. And I think that's where you're seeing some of the slowdowns right now, which is I need to understand this because I can't take a cost increase like that and still underwrite to the same level, and then you have the lenders and some others in the value chain looking and saying, well, wait a minute, I'm not cutting that next check until I understand what this true impact is. And so, you know, midterm, I think you're seeing some people slowing down some and starting to just wait to see, again, a little bit of what happens.

It goes to my uncertainty comment. Actually, my biggest concern is the longer term where, you know, you're seeing people not start projects, right? We're not going to feel the impact of that for a while because it takes a while to start doing the land work and getting the project started. but people that are sitting there saying, you know, my underwrite that worked last month, I'm about to start this project, hold, let's go redo the underwrite on this and see whether we can still make the, you know, the profits we need to to go to go get this thing going.

And so I do believe there's kind of, that's, you know, probably as you're talking to people, I talk to people all the time. Yeah. You're starting, you're getting a different feel from different people, depending where they are in the value chain. I think it kind of depends on, you know, what one of those scenarios are sitting in right now. Yeah, and is there any, the other thing I hear a lot, and I can definitely feel this in my own business, is price increases, right? I mean, the cost of everything, I mean, obviously, I'm in California, so I get that double fold with everything.

But, you know, the cost of materials, like every year we get two increases from our manufacturers, it seems like every year. And they'll cite something in the economy, right? It'll be fuels or charge, it'll be tariffs and certainty. But we don't get decreases. So we're all just kind of wondering like how sustainable is this? You know, if we look back two, three years, you know, we're up 20% in costs. It's like, how can we continue to do this? Especially because incomes of our people who are selling to are not increasing at that same rate.

Yeah, and, you know, that's where I was going to go. And I'm closer to the residential side of construction, just because it's kind of where I'm at. I mean, we all know the numbers, right? And you'll see different ones out there between four and six million homes short in the U.S. right now. Right. And the problem is the affordability side of it. At the end of the day, you know, we can't, you know, the average income can afford a home that's about $220,000 to $230,000. And the average home being built right now is a $400 plus $1,000 home. And so, you know, the supply demand in the different areas is off to solve that problem. And your point, at the way that it's escalating right now, it's only getting worse, right? That affordability problem. So my view on this is a little bit different, which is, you know, if I go back to the electronics, industry, and let's do a quick comparison here. In that world, cost increase, just like they do in the construction industry,

right? And that's just a fact of the world, right? Processors get more expenses get more expenses that they need to put more transistors on it. We don't need to get deep into the technology, but that happens. The difference is that industry gets more efficient every single year. Because I can tell you, when I worked at Motorola, I was making

cell phones, I had to release a product that was better functionality, better looking at a lower cost, or worst case, the same cost, or I was out of business. You think about Apple, their phones go up a little bit in cost, but the functionality and the style of that phone is so much better every time and you either get the same price or a small increase in it because it is built to meet that point in the industry and what it is from a price point. But what they're doing is getting much more efficient on how they design it, how they build it, and how they're working with their suppliers to get the right costs on it. That unfortunately doesn't happen very well in construction, right? And we can point to the data, right?

Again, lots of data sits out there. But at best, construction efficiency has stayed flat over the fast 50 years. Most studies would argue that efficiencies have actually gone down. Now, that's partially because of regulatory, right? A lot more regulations are put in when you build a home. You've got to do a lot more things and you need to do in the past to get to meet code. So there's that piece of it. But it's also, there's not a true incentive plan within the construction industry to go drive out the efficiencies like we have to do in the electronic.

industry. And I say that because it's very much a cost plus model, right? You got kind of vendors that sell into subcontractors. They mark it up. They add their labor market up sell to a general contractor. They do the markups. They then kind of sell it off to the developer, right, who's doing this. And so as long as that developer can pencil it, they move it on. And I don't want to say, there's some companies that are actually doing some really good things and efficiencies. But at the end of the day, you can look at the data, it hasn't kept up with the industry. And now going back to the technology piece, which is how do we start getting the technology? getting smarter and better about building so we can go drive some efficiencies in the model at the

same time that helps us reduce the cost even though our material side of things might be going up and by the way labor is always going to go up right and that's a large percentage of what what it cost to build a home or build a building because the labor and we know that'll always go up and so I actually look at it and say I don't think we can control that I think there'll always be continued labor will continue increase it's happened forever right minimum wages will continue to go up and trade labor that we deal with which is highly skilled is going to go up, but also can we get smarter about how do we prefab more stuff in a factory, right? You know, it's still people building it, but it's a different model and a lower cost

model. You know, not to say that we're going to build on a prefab, but there's a lot of things we can do so that we feed it to the site. There's less being done there. It's a different model. And then just being getting access to data and allowing you to then stop, you know, people focusing on trying to figure out what is the right problem to solve. I mean, the fact is there that 30% of people's time in the construction industry is spent trying to find data, right? What is what information do I need to make my good decisions? If I can drive that to zero, suddenly those people are now more focused on. How do I make sure I stay on schedule? How do I go back and work closer with my suppliers to get better costs? How do I make sure that I have the right number of people on site that, you know,

hey, if my windows are behind getting installed, I don't have my drywall guys standing around because these guys are already there. There's a lot of examples how we can get much more efficient in there, which allow us to offset some of these increases that you and I see every day. Right. Yeah. And I think to your point, like, instead of getting so stuck in the mud with the increases in trying to figure out what everything's going to do in terms of the tariffs or the economy or everything like that, I mean, construction is, if you look back, there's always a challenge.

There's always a hurdle in front of you. And that's kind of our norm. I mean, that's what we do in construction is we basically have, we pay. pivot every day. We change. We have to change because, like you said, the windows didn't arrive on time. Oh, crap. Now, what are we got to do? Like, so it's like our job is, is constantly trying to figure that out. So to your point, you know, instead of trying to figure out what's going to happen, it's better to just become more efficient in your own business, correct? That's the way we think about it. And that's exactly as, you know, going back to your original

question, what excites me about kind of what's the most exciting thing I see coming along. It is the technologies that are now supporting this, right? With energetic AI, with, you know, because it's kind of the next generation of generative AI, you know, now we're able to start doing that, which again, I say to people all the time, the human in the loop oversight is always going to be there, right? You know, there's a piece of that, but it's getting it so that while people are spending their time, they're doing it in a way to solve the biggest problems that are going to impact schedule and cost, you know, the earliest.

Because really the surprises are what costs you money, right? it goes back to. If you have extra people on the site and you're not ready for them, you still get a bill for that. If I can then, if I can three weeks ahead of time, excuse me, no, I need to do some rescheduling. I can then save some money and it's better for my subcontractors as well. People want to work. They want to be doing value. They don't want to be standing around. That doesn't add value. So I think as we as we get into this, it's really about what do we do from a technology standpoint to help that? Because the data is only get more, right? With all the tools that are out there, there's just more data thrown at people.

And I loved your starting when it was just like, hey, we kind of, you know, shoot from the hip a little bit, right? And there's always, always some of that has to happen because it is so hard to harness the data in a real-time way and make decisions. And that's where we can, you know, slates bring in our value, which we'll talk about. But, you know, there's a lot of the guys in spaces outside of the scheduling side that we really focus on that are also doing it. Yeah. And what are you seeing? So with all these disruptions that we kind of laid out, you know, what are some of these construction companies doing, you know, especially to stay on schedule and on budget? What are those early things you're seeing? I mean, like I said in the beginning, like some

people are still way behind all of this and they're a little bit hard for them to adopt technology. And a lot of it's because we have an aging, you know, management base that doesn't really adopt it. So what are you seeing some of those early adopters like going, taking advantage of these things? Yeah, and it's interesting to me because you kind of get a mix, right? I mean, we do with a lot of the big construction companies because they have more embraced the data side of things, right? A lot of them now have CTOs. They have data scientists. They're very focused on this.

But that's expensive, right? Your smaller shops, that's an expensive set of people to have on board. And so, you know, part of this is the way I think about it is a lot of these tools are being built for some of the bigger companies because they understand them. They can help implement them. You can use their data to really build the models. I mean, because again, the only way you get learnings is from data, right? Right. There's large language models out there for multiple industries,

but you only get a large language model construction when you're getting real construction data into the system. And that's one of the things we've been very focused on is how do we bring the data in? We've created a proprietary large language model, LLM, to go build that out. The hope here is, is that once we build that with the bigger companies, we can then start going more down market and make this easier for kind of the, mid-size and even the smaller companies they get to implement, even if they don't have a large technology team within their office. And so, you know, the downfall of this is there are so many AI companies out there, right? I joke with people because we kind of got going before chat

GPT made AI the thing that everyone talked about. And so like everything else, there's some AI whitewashing out the market right now. Like, we'll call up somebody we don't know. And they say, well, you're the third guy that called me this week and said, you have an AI solution that's going to save me money. Right. And my comment. is give me a half hour. Like when you actually see what my tool does versus what they're doing it. There's some other good tools out there. I'm not picking up.

But I think is, you know, we're bringing a value level that, you know, is five years in the making versus, you know, one year in the making that's just using kind of a, I'll call it an off-the-shelf LLM to try to go solve some of these problems. But I do believe, got back to your original question is I think some of the bigger companies are starting to implement this. They've come up with some really good ideas on how to use AI to go solve some problems. It really started in risk and safety. But now where the real dollars are, again, safety is important from people perspective. And it gets expensive when you do have problems.

But, you know, as you start thinking about schedule, schedule impacts, cost overruns, that's really where we came in and said, you know, we're going to put our flag in. And we do that by linking multiple data sets together. Right. In today's world, as you know, a big contractor who uses P6 for the schedule. They use ProCore to manage all the RFIs, all the work orders. They're using BIM 360 to manage the design side of things. Some are using Microsoft projects. Lots of people are using Excel.

And you have all these different sources of data. What is hard to do is start saying, how do I get all this together into one place where I can literally go into my catbot or into my system, ask a question. And I don't need to know where or what system that data is coming from. it's going out answering my question, but then using a genetic AI to say, not only am I going to tell you what the problem is, here's three things that you can do, because I've already seen these problems happen before and these were the best ways to go fix them. Now you're getting to, again, now the human piece comes in because now somebody looks at that and says, all right, I think this is the right way to go. I need to talk to this subcontract and start working with them or from a scheduling perspective. Hey, I'm not going to solve this window problem. My materials are going to be late. I'm going to have to go reschedule my, sub for Windows, but that also then has kind of a stacking effect. Getting all that data and information to them at once is where, you know, I see the value coming to them and you get more efficient as a company to do it.

Yeah, I mean, at least we have the data now, right? I mean, this thinking back, I'm third generation, this thinking back of my grandpa and my dad, there was no, nothing. There was, everything was pen and paper. And like, so at least we have that now to be able to make those decisions. And, you know, as we get more into the technology here, you know, one last thing on the terrace. Like, how do you, if you had a crystal ball this thing, how do you feel this is going to play out? Are we looking at years, months?

What are you thinking it's going to happen? And then maybe what industries are really going to feel this pinch during this time? Yeah. That's funny. I was at dinner with a customer last night. And he asked a very similar question on my crystal ball. And I said to him, the only thing I will guarantee you is things will be different next week than this week. And I'll go farther than that just, but I mean, that, you know, that's the reality we're in right now.

But I do think it's probably months. You know, again, I think there'll be iterative pieces along the way that impact it. I think the solution is probably a year, probably even more. They're not going to go away. It's just going to be what's the impact, right? And once companies could start, and this is more of the material side of things, once companies start to get comfort in what is the real issue out there, you know, is it going to get to 25% and that's where it's going to stay?

And we start to feel confidence in what that's going to mean, you know, then we can go start redoing our supply chains, right? I can move, I can go take stuff out of, you know, China and move it to Mexico, right? But what I need to know is that suddenly the tariff on Mexico is not going to go through the roof and I'll just waste in my time doing it. Yeah. Right. So to me, it's like, you know, we have 10 risk mitigation plans in place.

And again, I'll go back to the HVAC example because I'm close to a number of one. And if you read Pulte's, Pulte did their earnings report, and they actually called out HVAC specifically because there's such a big component of China in that, right? And so anywhere between 30 and 40 percent of an HVAC system, we assemble ours in the U.S. We assemble it here in Texas, but 30 percent of my components come from China. And so you put 145 percent on 30 percent of the materials. Well, that just went up almost 40 percent as a total cost, right? And that is impactful to the build of whether it's a single family home, a multifamily, or to a stadium, right? And so I think, you know, the year I say is once the tariffs get sorted out, it's the time

then it takes people to start to rebalance their supply chains. And again, this is stuff I've done my whole life in that technology world and it will happen here. But what I don't want to do is start moving that supply chain around and then realize, wait a minute, they, you know, they've changed the game on me again, right? And it's just a, and so it's a little bit of weight. now to see where things settle a little bit. I do think that's settled. It will come quicker. It doesn't we see what's happening in the markets.

You know, the second part of your question is who's impacted, it's across the board. I mean, it's, you know, electronics and I still know plenty of people in that market. You know, they backed off a lot of it on electronics, but, you know, are they going to come back and put it under the chip side of things? If they do, that one goes nuts. Automotive, you know, obviously Canada and Mexico, we got a resolve, though, she dependent on those supply chains. HVAC, some of my background, you know, there's got to be some relief there. There's no way we can pass all that onto customers, you know, because it will just make

the housing more affordable than it is today. And that's the way we don't run this place. Yeah, the tech sector is an interesting one. We're in Folsom. So Intel just, you just release a statement that they're going to be releasing another 20% of their staff here on the Folsom campus. They're already starting to lease out a lot of their campus here in Folsom, which used to be just giant. It used to be what the job you wanted out here in Northern California. And dang, they've had some struggles. And it seems like it's going to continue to do so. So, I mean, I think the good thing about the construction industry is that, you know, we have so much demand.

It's about fixing all this crap that we have right now. And that's kind of what, you know, what we're talking about in the technology piece now. You know, obviously we kind of talked about why, you know, why our industry is a little bit, you know, slow to adopt these things. But are you really seeing the shift now? Because, you know, depends on who I talk to. I get a different answer here. Are you starting to see a shift where it's like, oh, crap, I have to do this. So otherwise, I'm going to be left in the dust. Say yes and no. I think there is a little bit of the big guys starting to, as I said earlier. You know, we call it FOMO in the Bay Area. You got like use a termout full somebody else for you're missing out,

right? And so, you know, there is a certain point where these guys say, well, wait a minute, I see other people leveraging this technology. And if I leverage that as well, you know, then I can get the same benefits. Otherwise, I start falling behind. And so I think we're starting to see some of that, again, in the bigger players right now. And I don't want to minimize. There's some mid-tier guys that are doing some pretty impressive stuff as well. I mean, but, you know, on the larger companies, I think they are realizing there has to be.

You know, if you look at, you know, use a company like Suffolk out of the Boston area, right? They created a venture fund. They're investing in startups to go, you know, solve the problems that they see. And if you listen to their CEO is one of the very smart guy in the industry, right, they are out there talking about there's not enough labor. So how do we get, you know, how do we use technology to help on the labor and material supply chain is one of the biggest issues we have? How do we use technology to go to go resolve some of this? And so I think you're starting to see that.

I mean, DPR has an investment fund. So you're starting to see a lot of the bigger construction companies, actually raise a fund so they can invest in startups. You know, and the good news with them is they have all the data, right? So if you're, if you connect and get, you know,

get invested in that, one, that you get access to some data. And number two is they're actually helping you get on your initial projects. And so I actually think you're, you're starting to see more and more of that across the big companies who have money to go invest, which will help the industry,

you know, get better companies in quicker than they did in the past where, you know, a tech startup would get funded out in Silicon Valley. They try to go in, talk to 30 different general contractors, finally get lucky with one of them. And then they'd say, well, let's wait until a few buildings are built, and we'll talk to you about the next one.

So I think there will be more rapid adoption because of the way, you know, people are thinking about it with venture funds inside of the construction industry. And you've got brick and mortar and some other just stand-alone funds that are doing some of this. So I do think we're going to see the adoption faster. Is it going to be, you know, overnight? I wish it was because then my company would go through the roof. But it's still a grind getting in there.

And it's, you know, for us, since you get in there, you say, hey, let's prove it. Let's do a pilot with the project. Okay, let's move that to three projects. And then continue to kind of move up and try to get across the enterprise. But it's still slow to adopt compared to some other industry. Yeah. And let's speak to those small, medium-sized companies. You know, a lot of in the remodeling sector, especially in talking to a lot of those folks,

they're adding little pieces here or there. I think their problem is it's kind of, like too much at one time, right? So they're just kind of paralysis by analysis, right? It's like, which tool do I use? And some of them are said, like, hey, I have three different software set on my shelf that I have not started using yet. So what would you say to them?

What's a good starting point, you know, to figure out, hey, what integrates well together? What's going to work with our business? You know, what's a good starting point for them? Yeah, Jeremy, you might, no, I used to, I used to, as part of, of Onyx, we had Renew, which is a renovations company. So I spent a good amount of time. I was Steve DeLeon, who's CEO over there, and I knew each other well. And so, you know, we spent a lot of time on that because you're 100% right, right, trying to implement this. And most of that work is

field work, you know, every project you go into is a little bit different, right? You know, it's like, what's the level of work you're going to do there? And trying to, you know, trying to find lightweight tools because, you know, you're getting labor in the market that, that needs to be able to have a simple, simple way to do it. So, You know, my view on those is find one or two packages that are that are lightweight. You know, you don't need some. I tell people all the time, but we did at Slate. And originally before I got there, they were, they were trying to go in and be almost a full ERP implementation.

Right. We were going to go and say, hey, we can take over P6. We can take over these pieces. And my answer was, we will never get a deal done, right? Because P6 has been around forever. It's got some really good parts to it. What we can do is sit on top of a lot of these platforms. So if you look at the renovations, a lot of people use SAGE in that market or they're using Microsoft project to be fair.

You know, there are tools out there that can adjust that data? You know, are you ahead or behind on, you know, if you're doing multifamily renovations, the renovations, right? And gives you some pretty simple insights without having to do a heavy lift to put it in. And I think that is where a lot of people need to start because once you get it overly complicated, people don't use it. I mean, it's kind of that simple in my mind. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true. You know, we talked a little bit about AI, and obviously AI is definitely the wave of the future. You know, how are some guys using it, especially with the price and supply fluctuations?

How are they best implementing that right now in their businesses? And so I'll give you some examples from my world, just because I think it's, you know, they're the real world ones. I mean, you know, we have a couple tools inside of Slate that we bring to market. One of them is what we call Slate generate. It's generative of AI that uses computation. can design. So you, you know, rather than somebody going in having to draw up a, let's go with a data center, right? That's kind of a later example, but one of our customers is a data center where you can go in instead of having to draw that up, hand it off to an

estimator. The estimator then has to do his estimates on all the materials that go into it, hand it off to a scheduler. That schedule then has to try to figure out what the schedule is to go build that thing. And then you go back to the customer and say, here's what it looks like. Normally it goes back and forth a few times, right? They push back and say, well, what if we did X? What if we had less power coming in or we had less servers inside of that? So what do you do? You go back to the design. You redo the design. You hand it over to the scheduler. You hand it over to the estimator. And you go through those cycles. Slate really comes up and says, I understand how you've built these in the past. Right. I can go through

your spec sheets and understand how to build a data center. Right. And again, this is just data can get through very quickly. And then it can start saying, what are the parameters? How much power do you need coming into the building? How much compute? How much storage? All these parameters, is that really came from the brain of the people that were doing those data center designs, but they put them into more of a menu-driven opportunity where you pick, hey, for civil, we need to do these, this is the inputs. For mechanical, these are the inputs electrical. And after they're done with that, we can go out to generate their design, right?

So then we can go back and say, this is what that design looks like. I can then go out to their ERP system, get their cost because now I've built material, tell them what the estimate on that would be. And then I can say, hey, I've looked at projects and how you've built them over the past, I can actually come back and say, this is what your schedule is. And by the way, this is the highest risk areas in that schedule. Very quickly. So now we're talking an hour versus weeks.

And then you handed the customer. He comes back and says, guess what? Let's take down the amount of compute we need in there. This is too expensive. That next hour, I can hand them back that new update, right? This is where you start seeing those savings. And again, it's taking, you know, work that redrafting a data center to have a little bit more isn't the most interesting work in the world.

And it's kind of pawned off a lot of times offshore anyways. For us, it's all about how do we go do those pieces right? Because really what we want to get to is a quicker time to get that done and then be able to hand it off to production. The interesting piece then comes is when you start linking these pieces together. So now you load P6 with the schedule. You load up your BIM 360 with the design. Your cost obviously came from your AP because your sourcing team is getting those.

But now as you're building it, you start learning. Hey, what went well in that design? What went badly in that design? You can now take those lessons, learn real time and feed them back into your computational design pieces of this. So next time you go in and they say, okay, now we're going to design the next data center out in Kansas, you know, you learn from that last one you've built. And so now you're feeding that back into the design piece of it. This is where truly the machine learning comes into play. And, you know, now we're talking about, again, taking things that is this a little bit mind-numbing from a work perspective and turning it into, you know, a design perspective that AI is driving and then the

machine learning is feeding back and getting better and better. So that's how I think about kind of the real benefits of it. And then on the back end of it, again, I'll use it slate examples because I love to pitch my product, plus it it's a real life example of it. But, you know, we have something called progress where now somebody can go in and they can literally look at the look at what's been done in a room from a MEP perspective on a handheld. We download the BIM model. They can just touch what's done. Now I upload and I have their progress reporting them, right? I can also then feed that back into their insights and say, hey, you're behind here, you're ahead here, you're missing some materials and start giving them insights and recommendations to fix that. And I can take that

and feed it all the way back into their original computational design because if they're behind, next time I build that schedule, I actually want the schedule to be better than it was the last time. So you start being able to link these pieces together and get those learnings. And we do that right and it just starts getting how do we stay on schedule it starts to see the problems earlier it goes back to what we talked about earlier if i need to reschedule subcontractors i'm rescheduling them and and what gets very i don't know interesting to me maybe i geek on this stuff a little bit but is that you know we're also bringing in things like weather right so if i know you're going to install windows when i'm loading your data my my language model actually flags all the trades it can be impacted by weather so if i see there's

going to be 60 mile per hour wins or 50 mile per hour wins on that building next week, I'm actually going to tell you you're not going to hang your windows or the X percent probability that you're not going to be able to do that trade. So we either try to pull it in or make sure you're rescheduling the other trades behind it because you're going to have issues doing that. And that's where you can start pulling in the other pieces where, again, can people figure this out if they can. But when people walk into the building and have a thousand problems in front of them every day, it's like, what are the most important ones me to fix today? And then what they normally can't get to is like what's going to save me next week and for the next month.

And that's what we're really trying to do is say, hey, when you're walking today, here's your biggest five things to do. If you're a field person, go address these. If you're a scheduling person, and this is where we kind of do a persona based, this is what you need to focus on. These are your issues kind of going out, even to the point of, you know, five RFIs open on that window, you know, that window system. Normally it takes you five days to close an RFI and you're supposed to install in six days. Well, you better get on top of the, things or you better start thinking about you're going to redo this. And again, it's all stuff people could figure it out, but they need to go to about three different data sources to

pull that information together. Yeah. And I think that's what I hear a lot about our industry is that's a stressful piece. Is that piece of walking in in your office and having five different fires in front of you that you've got to put out, right? And most of them are coming via email. Or text or whatever, right? You're sitting there trying to, I mean, I have three different text systems and need them. It's like, which one of these are I focused on? Yeah, or yeah, the worst is a text in all caps, right? You know, it's like, you know, but it's true. It's like there's so many things that, you know, obviously our job is never the same every day, which is for a lot of people, that's great. But for a lot of other people that the lack of predictability and the stress that

comes from other angles saying like, oh, you know, they're mad because you're not on schedule. And It's just, it is, it's difficult. It does feel like you're, you know, you're drinking out of a fire hose sometimes. So, you know, having that, that AI piece to be able to help guide you, like you said, here are your top three things today that you really need to focus on. Dang, it makes me excited about becoming more efficient, like you said. How can we bring some costs down? I'm not worried about the people aspect of losing people.

We need people in our industry. Exactly. I've never seen that as an issue like, crap. Let's replace, you know, that 10 to 20% delta that we need with AI. That makes a lot of sense to me. But where do you? But I think the important part to me also, just sorry to interrupt, is it also becomes you skill these people up better, right?

Because a lot of people that are out there just doing stuff again, a guy that has to redo the estimate for the fifth time or a person in the field is doing rework for the third time because it wasn't communicated to him that there was a origin on the windows. Nobody likes to do that work. That's it. You know, they want to be doing the work that's adding value. I mean, I think it's just, at least I know a lot of people, and inherently people want to work and they want to work in things that add value. When it's like, all right, go replace this window for the third time.

You know, it's just, it's no value ad. I mean, it's just people don't like to do that. So skill up the people to do those things that are really important to make sure we're getting more efficient. And instead of being negative efficiency in the industry, moving to positive efficiency in the industry, I think people are happier workers as well. And then to your point, we can't get the labor we need today. So let's go get these guys skill them up better, which means they get a better salary. They're able to provide a better life for their families. That's the stuff that gets me excited.

And on the exact opposite of most people, which is this is bad for an industry. I'm like, this is like it gives people better skill sets to go attack it in an industry where we can't get the labor we need already. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I think it's what our industry needs to close the gap. So I don't see any other way around it for us, especially when you look at our aging. industry and our lack of new new blood in the industry, especially with young folks, they're not pouring in, man. So we got to figure it out.

So another crystal ball moment on the AI side, you know, where you see it five to ten years in our construction industry. Yeah. So I do, I continue to believe that kind of this computational design will become more and more important, right? So again, the architects who come up with these, I don't know, depending who you talk to, great ideas or crazy ideas could probably use the term, depending on what building you're looking at a certain time.

You know, those people are always going to be the guys out there on the forefront doing the design. But the, you know, the drawing of a lot of these subcomponents and those things, I think, can get automated very quickly. So again, let's focus our time on the things that we can't automate. That's, again, probably the stuff that's a higher paying area. Because I do think a lot of what we see in these buildings, you know, whether it's multifamily, whether it's data centers, power, you know, a lot of this stuff can

be operationalized and put into, you know, as I said, computational design. So I think that's a big piece where AIL sets some value. I do also think we're going to get, and it's probably not the five years, it's probably the couple years where, you know, there's cameras now that can do a lot of this, where, you know, people have cameras on sites. They can find safety risks. They can find, you know, issues of materials that are sitting there by flying a drone over. There's some nice technologies. They're not robust enough right now where people kind of, you know, put all their money in, into that basket right now. But, you know, what progress that I talked about, I mean, when I started this, it was like,

hey, I just want to walk him with a pair of goggles. I can look in that room. It'll immediately take what I see through the goggles or a camera and flash it against what the BIM 360 model is and come back and say, yes, this room's done. You're on time. All is good. Or no, you need to get this person down and start seeing failures. Right.

To me, one of the biggest things that we see more and more of this is the warranty side. So one of the things that we've done with Slate is now we, we, we, we, we, we, we, get the warranty data. You know, there's builder, there's other, there's other systems that hold that. But not only are we looking and saying, hey, what's impacted the project in the past on the build side of it, but what are those things that then happen to warranty and start giving the feedback while those trades are going on. So when somebody's going in and they're doing a certain task within mechanical, they are actually in there saying, hey, you need to go do this inspection or, hey, verify this happen because we've seen that in the warranty. And we've done those with

customers now where we've said, give us 10 old projects. Let us get all your lessons learned from your 10 old projects. And now that first project that we're using slate with, it's not like I have to go learn. I already learned from those projects that had their issues. Now I start layering that in on top of it. And so day one on the new projects, I'm already able to give them some lessons to learn to build those in and pulling that warranty piece in so that it's not just, hey, what did my schedule to optimize, which is interesting. A lot of us do that. But let's start looking at what are those cost points? Because, you know, warranty and rework is such a big number to these projects. Again, it goes back to if on a home, I'd zero warranty and zero rework, you're probably five or

10 percent lower cost than that house day one. And so how do we get the AI to give you that? Because right now, the guy's doing your warranty work, aren't going back and saying, hey, project team, here's a few ideas, why you go do those? Because it's just the value chain's not set up that way. So I think there's a lot of places like that where we can start tying these disparate pieces of data that today don't get brought together, bring them together, and then taking it to that next layer of technology, which is bringing in all the materials, right?

How do I get it so I can start looking and knowing, you know, they call it called 40, then 5D and them, right? You start bringing those pieces in where now I'm using AI to start really diving into the supply chain. Yeah. From the materials perspective as well. Yeah, no, that makes total sense. Now, this other piece you kind of mentioned a couple of this, this data fragmentation.

It's a long been initially. you in our industry, you know, what are the risks of continued to operate in these silos and how can centralizing data change the game for us? So, you know, I think the silos do do cause friction, right? And it goes back to the wasted time of people trying to find data and do they, you know, if they don't find it, then they have to make decisions without the data. And so, you know, that is where, you know, the first thing we do from a data standpoint is, you know, if your silos are scheduled, well, it's called P6 ProCore, B360. The first thing that Slate can do is we can

bring all, ingest all that data, right? So literally from InSlate, you can log into those systems for that project. It brings all the data in. It then links the data together. So we call this our auto-linking. This is our secret sauce, right? I mean, so next thing, very quickly, I can start saying, you know, how does that RIFI impact my schedule? Or how does that cost increase on this area impact my overall budget? Because what we're trying to do is bring those pieces together. And as I said, When I came to sleep, we were trying to go in and say, hey, just use this as your ERP.

We can do your schedule. We can do your forms for RFIs. We can do your forms for labor and do all these pieces. But people are very ingrained for good reason in the tools that they have because it's part of the movement. And I told people, as a startup, if I walk in the door and say, I want to do a new implementation of your schedule, that conversation was probably over at that point with any major. And so our point was, is let us sit on top. We're not a heavy implementation. once, you know, and it takes AI's learning, right?

So we have a very good language model that can get data linked together. But as you probably know, within every general contractor, they have a little bit of different lingo. And so we link one project together and it does pretty well. It might be 75, 80 percent of the links work. And then you say, okay, what data couldn't it link? And then you go in and you teach it, right? And then once you teach it on that first project,

we're up in the mid-90s on the second project. Right. Because very quickly it says, hey, understand the industry side of it. Now I just need to kind of get that little bit of learn. learning on your side of it. And then once you have that data together, literally you're in a chat spot right now. This is where the ingenic AI comes in play. And you say, what revision my windows are 13.2? What are the cost of those windows? This is your cost. When are they going to be installed? This is date. Are there any open RFIs? Yes, these are the open RFIs. Do you want to email them

to the person that owns them? Yes, emails off goes to those guys. The person doing that doesn't need to No, well, I wanted to understand the cost I needed to go to SAP. I wanted to understand whether open RFIs had to go to ProCore. Where is the schedule and what's the date of the install? I go to P6. They're just in one system being able to ask questions. And just like all of our friends who use chat GPT, the next question you ask builds off your last one. Right.

So if you say, hey, how many open RFIs are there? There's five of them. Here they are. What's the most impactful? Here's the answer to that. What is my normal longest time to close an RFI? and all that it can go do with the AI where you're not having to sit there and understand where to go get it.

And that's where the 30% of people's time is being wasted on finding data goes away. And now because you have the data at your fingertips, you're making smarter, better decisions, right? And that's how we go get efficiencies. Right. Yeah, definitely. You know, kind of we talked a little bit about this, but, you know, these AI-driven platforms, you know, what can companies do to make an impact over the next 12 to 18 months in there have been? business. Where would you recommend they go? I mean, obviously, Slate's a good place to start to

just get a recommendation. But, you know, I think a lot of the problem I see is just starting. How can we start? Where do we start? Yeah, you know, it's a fair question. I mean, there's plenty of people out there that are offering all the time. We can, we can get you implemented. I think part of it was interesting in your opening, right? Finding trusted people who understand it is pretty important. You know, there's plenty of database. you can go out there and find, hey, what are the different tools that solve a problem? Now, they're going to be, you know, they're going to list 20 of them. Okay, with those 20, some of our enterprise, some of them are smaller.

You can probably limit it down. And so I do think that there's there's a bunch of ways you can go find it. But getting trusted advisors that can kind of help you is pretty important. I would also say, and our CTO is just a, he's an animal in the AI. I joke with people. My biggest problem with them is I got to keep my speaker. panels because everyone wants them to come talk about AI in construction or AI in general just because of his background. But, you know, it's at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who make

big promises that we're going to solve all your problems day one. It's not going to happen, right? You got to go in, as I said, even for us, we go in, we do that first run of a project. We got to teach the model some, right? And there's kind of an iterative process to get better and better. And so I think people need to understand that as they get into implementing tools within AI. It's not just, hey, day one, everything's going to be perfect. And I had a very robust discussion at dinner the other night with a somebody of a general contractor. And her point to my was, at the end of the day, we understand at kind of the technology level that because you use an AI, it doesn't mean everything's perfect. It's not 100% right. It's using past to predict the

future, right? And it gets better and better. But she's like, what you're going to see is on the project side, they're always looking for the one problem. Right. So you give them 20 recommendations, 19 of them are perfect and really a lot of value. You're probably not going to hear about those. What you're going to hear about is the one that was wrong. And that's where you got to, it's almost a different mindset of companies is you can't go in thinking everything's going to just be perfect day one. You got to go in saying, I'm going to use this as a human in the loop, that it's going to come back. It's going to say, here's what the insight is.

Here's what the problem is. I'm going to make you three recommendations. And then you need to kind of look at those and understand them. once you teach the tool and you say, hey, this is the best way to solve that, and it actually goes and solves it, the tool says, okay, you said to do this, I see that it worked. Next time, it'll come back and make that your only recommendation. And you can then get to a point where those learnings happen. But as you know, then there's going to be 15 different problems in the next project that it didn't see before. And so there's always kind of that piece that brings in.

So I kind of skirted around on a few different topics there. But I do think it's important just as as people get in this and understand, you know, every tool is a learning tool. You know, they get better and better the more they do, but there's still a little bit of project or company-specific pieces that need to come into play. And having that mindset going into, it's going to be very important. Or you end up with people that are disappointed because they said, hey, I got rid of 10 people because they told me that I'd not need to do scheduling and estimating the first week. And, you know, that was a bad idea. Right. And the last piece that I hear a lot of is regulations and compliance standards.

Obviously, they're rapidly changing all the time. and Quinger, right? So there's more coming at us. How can technology help with that piece? Because that's another one where we don't have time to know all this stuff, right? So how can technology help us? Yeah, and I think the good news there is, you know, more and more municipalities are getting digitized, right? In the past, this was harder, right?

Because you'd go into the – I'd build a deck in Maine 20 years ago, and I'd go into the office and get a piece of paper that told me what code was, right? Now you're able to, at least in the bigger municipalities, be able to manage that as well as kind of government ones. And so, you know, the good news about AI is you can go out and pulse at every night, right? You can come back and start saying, hey, here's new regulatory. And within tools, you know, you can start then highlighting it, which is, hey, you know, this building was designed to X.

There's new regulations coming down the pipe. You need to do, you know, you need to be aware of this as your building cell. And so I think the good news on it, to your point is there's so much data out there. It's hard for people to keep up a lot of times, like a new code rep comes out. What AI can do is start looking and saying, what is changing the code and then be able to come back to your specific project and say, hey, these are areas that you need to be aware of as we go into this project. And again, what AI does to me in a lot of cases, it says, I'm taking sets of data that are

just too big for humans to get through and have to do that on kind of a monthly or quarterly basis and automating it so I can get through all that data and then come back and give you highlights on what the problems are going to be. And then as you say, as you get to more genetic AI, not only highlight the problem, but then start bringing some recommendations to the table. Yeah. Yeah. That makes total sense.

I appreciate you being here, Trevor. This has been a wealth of information. If people want to learn more about Slate, connect with you. How do they go about doing so? Yep, best ways slate. AI is the website out there. We got a great set of folks that keep their eye on that. You know, our process is pretty simple.

We love to get on. Demos are the tool and love folks out there. I mean, we're doing some great stuff that we can help with. And, you know, we'd love to talk to people about it. Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here. Great. Thanks. Yep.

Thanks again, everybody for joining us on another episode of Construction Executives Live. We'll see you in a couple weeks for our next show. Thank you so much. Bye. You've been listening to In The Zone and Construction Executives Live with Jeremy Owens. Be sure to subscribe to In The Zone and stay in the know with the best minds in the construction industry. To nominate an innovator or change maker in the construction industry, connect with your management peers and stay up to date with construction industry news. be sure to visit us construction zone.com.