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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, workplace management, solution consultants, physical assets, facilities management, HVAC systems, AI integration, data sources, real estate, pandemic impact, proactive maintenance, customer feedback, innovation team, data insights, connected company

00:00

Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go all right once

00:21

again. Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates you industrial professionals all around the world. I say it all the time. You are bold, brave and you dare greatly. You're changing lives, and therefore you are changing the world each and every day. That's why you are just loved on this platform? Absolutely. We're broadcasting on site. It is Accruent, and it's their insight. Now, let's say their user conference. That's what it is. I was going to say user meeting, but it's a conference. Absolutely. San Antonio, Texas is the location, and it is a collection of problem solvers. They're milling about the place. You know what they do? Well, here they feed you. Well, the food is phenomenal. I don't think I could fit in any more food, but I'm gonna give it a shot. That's for sure. In the Hot Seat Dave Harrington, he's with Accruent, and he is. We're gonna be talking about work place management solution. There you go. Look at me. I'm learning

01:25

having a good conference, excellent, excellent conference. Lot of good interaction, a lot of good conversations with customers, a lot of people I've worked with in the past. So it's great to catch up with. How come I didn't meet you last year? I was there. I know I was there, yeah, because

01:39

it was the Gaylord, and it's the size of us the state of Rhode Island.

01:44

And I don't know, maybe I, you know, it wasn't as important last year, right? I don't

01:51

want to hear that. Yeah, for the listeners out there, Dave, give us a little background on who you are,

01:57

yeah. So I am one of the solution consultants within, within accruing basically my role, I work with a lot of our our current customer base, our prospects, really showcasing solutions that that they're interested in implementing in their businesses, and kind of showcase and demo everything that we can do and provide value for so I've been doing that for the better part of 10 years, and still love it, still love doing it, still love meeting with our

02:24

customers, keep up with all of the changes that are taking place. How do you you learn you you're the you're the tip of the sword that goes out there and tells these customers, look at this. This thing is. This thing's fan, that phenomenal, and you need to do it and look, let me show you. How do you keep

02:40

trial by fire. Now I think our internal teams do a really great job downloading to us what's new, what's coming, what's what's new and innovative and going to be valuable for our customer base. And so they do a really good job internally training us up and getting us ready to be in the field, and just delivering that value to our customers. So it's that, and it's just the repetition, just doing it day in and day out, is just how you kind of perfect it. So

03:07

yeah, all the conversations that I've had so far, I my head starts to swim of all the things that are taking place and things that are evolving and growing and and we're going to attach this, and we're going to add that, and yeah, it's amazing. Ever changing, ever changing. So let's talk a little bit about workplace management system. What is it?

03:28

So within within our business, it's essentially a collection of solutions that help our customers manage all of their physical assets, their buildings, their stores, their clinics and hospitals and educational facilities, but then also all of the critical assets that sit inside of those places, HVAC units and chillers and boilers and anything that's important for a facility to run properly. And really my role is to showcase the solutions that help support that journey for our customer base to show them that Accruent has platforms and solutions to help them with every aspect of that, of that workflow.

04:07

Why? Why is it important? Well,

04:10

I mean, it's, it's

04:11

important real estate. I look at, I look at this particular complex, yeah, and I see the lights, and I see it's it, the temperatures comfortable, the windows are clean. Yeah. You know, things just happen. So, yeah. Why is it important? Important?

04:26

Number of reasons, right? You know, you when you talk about just the life cycle of real estate, not only the building that we're in, but how did, how did they acquire the building? How, and what are the the agreements in place that allow them to operate and have a conference of this magnitude in a space like this, you know, being able to to really focus in on the facilities management aspect as well. So, you know, it is comfortable in here. But what if, you know, with 500 600 people, what if the HVAC were to break down? Right? Gets real uncomfortable real quick. So especially in San Antonio, it is. Not seasonably cool here yet. Yeah, I've noticed that a little bit. But it's really just all of the different aspects of the building that we're sitting in, all of the pieces of equipment that operate the building. To make it comfortable and enjoyable for people to be here, you have to have systems in place to make sure that everything's operating smoothly. It's going the way that it should. And if anything were to happen, you know, we need to rectify it as as quick as possible to make sure that there's no impact to the people that are, you know, occupying the venue. What do

05:30

you see changing out there? I mean, once we've been through COVID, yeah, we all of a sudden working from our home, yeah, the buildings are sort of, well, they're buildings and not occupied?

05:42

Yeah, I think I've seen over the course of the time, you know, coming out of the pandemic and getting more into a face to face venue again and a face to face event. I think there's been a lot of like you mentioned, since those places haven't been occupied. I think there's been a lot of, you know, not lacks, but not keeping up with systems and making sure that things are maintained properly as as they would pre COVID. So I think we've seen a really kind of influx of people trying to get things done rather quickly in regard to making sure that systems are right and everything, just because, you know, all the events now are obviously getting more face to face again. And I think the other big piece of it, too is the whole hot topic of AI, I think that is a huge, huge conversation within the real estate world, within the facilities and asset world, you know, learning machines, making sure that the machines can tell us what's going on and let us know when, hey, there's potentially a problem here, with this is definitely been a big change over the past couple of years. So

06:44

you did touch upon it, sort of expand a little bit of where do you see the application of AI within, you know, the property management real estate

06:56

world. I think it plays, it plays a part within our entire workplace management life cycle, more specifically with the asset piece of it, you know, having sensors and telemetry data sent to us to let us know, you know, we have an HVAC unit that that has this type of vibration, or it has this type of heat coming out of it, which is projecting that possibly it's going to break down, and just kind of being a little bit more predictive, more proactive, generating premature alerts to let us know, hey, this might be a problem. It's not a problem yet, but it could be in a day or two or three, and just allowing people to kind of proactively take care of those types of things before it comes to critical mass and runs into an issue that's a real big one that we've seen a lot of as of late with a lot of our customers here, and I think where a lot of folks as well are starting to see it is in the real estate world. So for our customers that are evaluating properties, trying to figure out, Hey, where's the next location that I want to move into, or I want to build out, using and leveraging AI models, just to let us know what, what does it look like? You know, what is the what does the market tell us? Is it a good space? What other types of things do I want to evaluate, where I want someone to tell me that, or some system to tell me that, rather than me have to do all the research on my own? So that's definitely been a big hot topic for a lot of our customers here,

08:17

because AI is the it's a learning platform. You've got to feed it with data. You have to feed it so it continues to sort of learn and learn. Yeah, in the world of the real estate, where are you getting that data? How are you training that model? Yeah,

08:33

it's coming from all sorts of different sources, a lot of different real estate sources that are out there that house a lot of this type of information, whether it's occupancy percentages or if it's market rents or things like that. So there's a number of different data sources, things like Green Street, things like costar real estate management and those types of things that are all open source database technologies that you can research and find that information. So it's pulling it from those types of systems, others that are out there as well, just to continue to build that language model. You know, with more and more robust information,

09:09

it would just seem to me that being able to have that insight where quickly I can make better or faster decisions, is there a level of confidence that I need, or do I need, as with any learning model, you know, you know, it gets smarter over time. Yeah. But where I'm at in that whole, you know, journey, I might not be as smart as I need to be, right,

09:36

right? We're definitely at the very early onset of this as well, no doubt, and I think you're absolutely right, it's going to get more and more intelligent as we go on and as we feed it more. But yeah, I think with all of our customers here, there's definitely a level of confidence they have to have in what that feedback is for them to make really critical decisions on a huge part of their business, which is. Their real estate portfolio. So I think we're really in the early stages, but you know us as a business, are taking some pretty important leaps in that journey to bring that into our platforms and have it work and assist our customers where it makes the most sense. Are you leading the way

10:17

on that? I guess you're Yeah, I say the Ford of family, I mean, leading the way and being able to take that information and drive to a a reasonable

10:29

conclusion. Yeah, I think we definitely are, you know, as part of Ford, of which is a great, great organization to be a part of, they have their own dedicated innovation team called the fort that have been working with AI models and large language models and other types of AI technologies for the better part of a year, year and a half, just testing what's out there, seeing how accurate it is, seeing what applications there are for it and where it would fit in our portfolio of systems. So you know, while there's probably not a ton of that available in the platforms yet today, I think we're really leading the path and kind of leading down the path of kind of doing the right thing and figuring out where it makes the most sense, not just to have AI for AI sake, but making sure that it's reasonable it makes sense for our customer base, but it is accurate, and it is providing kind of that real, confident insight that that our customers need to make decisions on on these types of items.

11:25

Yeah, I think it's, it's only going to get better. My, my, my questions would be, how do you develop the guard rails around it? Right? Yeah, because you know you want standards associated with so you have to high confident that okay, they're within the guardrails of what need to need to happen. But I think because of Accruent, and companies like Accruent, they recognize that, yes, AI is going to be there, but yes, we're going to only apply it to what is it's reasonable and makes sense, yeah, from from a customer's perspective, but I'm sure you're hearing it from the customers all the time. We

12:05

are, we are and, you know, and I think it happens in different levels, right? I certainly don't think you're going to be able to, you know, wave the magic wand and have an AI learning algorithm, be able to do all your work for you.

12:17

I know that there's probably people that want that? I think so,

12:21

13:17

and I think that it is here to stay. If you're a connected company, which you want to be, you want to gain those insights into your operations, and I'm chugging through data, the only conclusion has to be something that can help make meaning out of that data and not have it, or it just goes to waste, right? So you need to have something in there that can do that, right? Yeah,

13:44

yeah, you do. It's a saying, right? That data is the new oil, right? So it's, it's, everyone is data focused on data. A lot of folks here are talking about, you know, I have my data, I want to be able to do more with that. And I think AI is just a small component of that to help tell you what the data means. Pardon me, and help, help, help you make decisions on what to do with what the data is telling you. So I think that's definitely a big piece of it, and it's all kind of going to work together, right? I think it's, it's we have the the solutions that track the data, that that provide the data, the AI piece of it is going to help us make sense of it and help us make decisions on what do we actually want to do with this, you know, based on the information that we know. But let's do it in a quicker way, so that I'm not spending hours upon hours trying to sift through information and figure it out.

14:35

Yeah, no, it makes, makes perfect sense. So with all that said, with the AI around the corner and doing what AI does, is there anything else that you can see that is really impacting the business going forward?

14:52

Yeah, I think certainly the people right, I know for a fact that. So again, with with the pandemic happening, you had a lot of folks on the whole real estate side of the business, whether it was in facilities maintenance or if it was somebody on construction project management, in a lot of folks that have been in the business for a long time, and when the pandemic came along, it was kind of the reason, or a reason, for them to get out of the business and retire and or move on to something else. And I think what we found is that post pandemic, we haven't had a huge influx of resources to take over and and kind of continue that knowledge that those folks had. So I find like we're doing a lot of not reintroductions, but re education, of just the market itself and kind of showcasing to the newer generation of users of real estate tools, what is out there, you know, what's available, what what can we do, and what are we able to do with our our softwares, and what do we have for customers and how they use it today? So I think that's been something that's been pretty, pretty common.

15:57

Yeah, it's pretty across the board.

15:58

Yes, it is.

15:59

Anyway, well, hey, if somebody says they want to get a hold of you,

16:04

what would be the best one? Yeah, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, all the way, yeah.

16:08

We practiced that before the he nailed it. He has an A and a gold star. Well, you were absolutely wonderful. A lot of information. I felt like I was drinking from

16:20

a fire hose. My friend, always, everyone I talk to is like

16:22

that, like, oh my gosh, he's passionate about his stuff. It's all good. All right, listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information from Dave out on Industrial Talk. We are, once again, broadcasting from a crew and insights here in San Antonio, Texas, and it is great. The bottom line, you get people like Dave. Dave's Great. Appreciate it. In fact, that's, that's a bumper sticker. Dave's Great. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

16:47

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

16:57