"Culture is a set of beliefs and values. Are you setting those expectations of what you would like your ideal employees to embrace? …Talking only gets you so far. You have to measure and encourage innovation if you want it to take root."

• Scott Cattran

Episode Summary

In this special ElevateAEC episode of The Zweig Letter Podcast, Frank Lazaro moderates a forward-thinking panel featuring Scott Cattran, Vanessa McMahan, and Jered Morris. Together, they explore the intersection of innovation, culture, and strategy—especially as generative AI transforms the architecture, engineering, and construction landscape.

With candid stories and practical frameworks, the panel unpacks what it takes to foster a culture of innovation, assess ROI on technology investments, navigate the ongoing “build vs. buy” debate, and anticipate the workforce shifts AI will catalyze. Throughout the episode, listeners receive actionable advice on how to cultivate adaptable teams, implement meaningful change, and position their firms for long-term success.

If you’re seeking real-world strategies to elevate your firm’s innovation initiatives or facing questions about AI’s impact on organization, talent, or value to clients, this episode is a must-listen.

Key Takeaways

• Culture Drives Innovation: Creating an environment where open communication, empowerment, and “play at work” are prioritized is critical for sustained innovation
• Bottom-Up Meets Top-Down: Leaders must set guardrails and values, but real change stems from empowering staff at all levels to propose and experiment with new ideas.
• Strategic Investment in AI: Calculating ROI isn’t always straightforward—success comes from a thoughtful portfolio approach that balances quick-win automations with high-potential, riskier bets.
• Build vs. Buy: Rapid technological change often favors “buying” solutions, but hybrid models—where external tools are adapted with internal expertise—offer differentiated value.
• Talent of the Future: The next generation of AEC leaders will blend technical, creative, and cross-disciplinary skills, shifting hiring priorities and the emphasis of internal upskilling.
• Data Strategy is Foundational: Clean, structured organizational data is the indispensable fuel for AI-enabled innovation—start preparing now.

Listen to the full conversation on this episode of The Zweig Letter Podcast.

Links Referenced in This Episode

• Connect with Frank Lazaro on LinkedIn
• Connect with Scott Cattran on LinkedIn
• Connect with Vanessa McMahan on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jered Morris on LinkedIn
• Zweig Group & ElevateAEC Conference
• The Zweig Letter Website
• Flipping Book Version of the Newsletter
• Learn about the Zweig Letter and subscribe: https://thezweigletter.com/
• Connect with Randy Wilburn on LinkedIn

Get your FREE Subscription to the Zweig Letter Newsletter.

Call to Action & Next Steps

To stay updated on industry evolution and leadership, subscribe to The Zweig Letter Podcast and explore our library of episodes highlighting AI transformation and technical innovation. To connect with Puskar Regmi, visit his LinkedIn profile or the Stantec website. Stay tuned for continued insights into how today’s leaders are driving the future of design and construction—one conversation at a time.

Thank you for listening! Be sure to subscribe for regular updates and more enlightening content from The Zweig Letter Podcast.

Other Episodes You'll Enjoy

AI Transforming AEC with KP Reddy

Bridging Design and Construction with Dan Crist

Leadership Transition with Sondra Rotty

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Welcome to the Zweig Letter Podcast. I'm Randy

Wilburn. Today's episode comes from a special

series we recorded at Zweig Group's Elevate AEC

conference in San Antonio, Texas. For those who

aren't familiar with Elevate AEC, it's Zweig

Group's annual gathering of AEC industry

leaders. 3 days of keynotes, breakout sessions,

awards, and candid conversations about the

future of architecture, engineering, and

construction. The content we captured was

exceptional, and we wanted to share it with a

wider audience. So whether you're listening to a

keynote address or a breakout session, you're

getting insights from the people shaping the

industry. And if you want to learn more about

attending a future Elevate AEC conference,

visit zweiggroup.com. Now let's

dive in.

Welcome to the Zweig Letter Podcast, putting

architectural engineering planning and

environmental consulting advice and

guidance in your ear. Zweig Group's team of

experts have spent more than 3 decades

Elevating the industry by helping AEC and

environmental consulting firms thrive. And

these podcasts deliver invaluable

management, industry, client, marketing,

and HR advice directly to you free of charge.

The Zweig Letter Podcasts, elevating the

design industry one episode at a time.

Now we're going to explore innovation by looking at the curious

intersection of AI. Culture and strategy in

some of the industry's most impressive firms. Uh, the

accomplished leaders you're about to. Hear from represent firms driving

real innovation and getting real results. Our moderator

for this panel comes from. An organization that certainly understands innovation

through. The most important lens, Investment. Frank Lazzaro

is the Advisory Practice Lead for KP Ready Company, which is the. New brand for

Shadow Partners. Frank is a recognized leader in artificial.

Intelligence innovation and technology consulting, known for

delivering actionable strategies that drive growth and operational

efficiencies. He's also a bestselling author, keynote speaker,

and trusted advisor. He's a premier voice

on the practical. Application of AI in business. So

I'm going to hand it over to Frank. Who will facilitate the

conversation with our esteemed panel. Chad,

appreciate it. You know, this is an exciting panel. I think

when we, we talk to clients and I talk

to individual firms, innovation is one of those things that

tends to pop up. And more recently, what you find

is, is that AI has become more and more part of that conversation.

So I'm really excited about, you know, this panel here and the things that we're

going to kind of talk about in the next hour or so. So really

want to kind of take a step and, you know, let each of you kind

of introduce yourself and then we can jump right into it. And we'll start with

Scott. Okay. Good morning, everyone. My name

is Scott Cattran. I am freshly minted as the

executive chairman of Woolpert. I stepped out of the

CEO position about 9 months ago. Everything's going

well. Prior to that, I was running Woolpert for the

last 10 years. It's been a great ride and look forward

to sharing some insights with all of you this morning

on our topics. Vanessa? Good

morning. My name is Vanessa McMahon. I'm VP of

Innovation at Pape-Dawson, and my background is in

data science. And like our previous speaker, I was

from analyst to VP, so I've gone through a myriad of

different career paths. Well, good

morning. I'm Jared Morris, the EVP of Technology and

Innovation with Olson, where I've served for

just about 25 years in a very

circuitous pathway of getting here. I've been in this

role for just under 2 years, so still relatively new

in that, in that vein, but

licensed engineer by training. Done a lot of things, and

here we are. That's great. Well, I

appreciate everyone being here, and I think this is going to be great. So, you

know, one of the things that I see a lot of is that a lot

of firms struggle with kind of figuring out where to start. You

know, innovation is, is scary in some ways,

like there's risk and a variety of other things. And Jared, we're going to start

with you. You know, within your firm, how do you look at

setting direction around innovation, maybe even

particularly AI since that is a hot topic of the last, say,

36 months or so, while everything

continues to evolve so rapidly? Yeah,

that's, you know, when when I, I think about that, you know, really

it's, it all comes back to, to culture. I think all of this

change that's happening at a rapidly

changing pace, you know, I think of the, the

Greek letter delta, right? Delta

represents change, change of acceleration, et

cetera. And that's what I think's happening in our industry right now,

right? And so when we think about innovation

strategy, I go straight to culture. I think that's the

first thing. And a lot of that is related to how

we're empowering our workforce, our employees,

to think innovatively. I think as we see

the change in artificial intelligence tools and so forth,

that individual autonomy to start building

out things and that citizen innovation, as we like to call

it here, is a big part of what's

enabling our ability to execute on strategy

at this point. So a bit of a bottoms-up. Intersecting with top-down

strategy, if you will. Vanessa, know, you what's, what's going on with

you and how you see it within your organization? Yeah, when

we started this office, one of the first things we did is we went

to leadership and wanted to understand what are the guardrails. Like,

we know that there is a million different paths you

can take with all of the different things that are going out there, but we

wanted to have guardrails on— give us a path to where we

wanted to lead us to and get us to our vision. And one

of the key things that we focus on is what are the

technologies that we're bringing in that's not change for the sake of change, but

change that's also going to make our lives easier for our employees.

That's really been a key focus for us. Yeah.

Scott, what's been going on at Wal-Mart?

Well, well, as respect to innovation, again,

I think I agree with what you said. I think it's culture. I think

it starts with, you know, creating that

culture of innovation, of being able to explore, being able to speak your

voice, being able to kind of say, I think there's a different way of doing

these things. So really, our innovation gets kind of driven

bottom up rather than top down because, you know, they're working on—

if I come in and say, hey, we should be doing this, and I have

no earthly business doing that because I'm not working on the projects, right?

So I think, again, we continue to just try to create a culture of

open communication. We specifically work on making

sure that different sectors, different companies that we've acquired talk to one another.

You know, you bring that perspective from all the different groups and innovation just kind

of blossoms from there. And then it's about capitalizing on it, right?

You can't just give people a voice and say, know, you be innovative and what

should you do? You need to have a forum that allows you to kind of

say, we'd like to do this, we need a budget, we need resources, we need

time, we need breaks on utilization, all these types of things that will

allow innovation to prosper and flourish.

I think it's the role of leadership to make sure that

there is that kind of budget and there is that type of time that you

give people so that they can actually accomplish what they said they were going to

do. Yeah, that's good. It's interesting the culture conversation came up with during the

keynote. And that seems to be a very prevalent thing, which kind

of really spawned another question or kind of follow-on with that is

that when you start thinking about your innovation ecosystem, where do these

big ideas come from? Do you feel that the

proper culture within your organization, or are you set up

properly to kind of cultivate that ecosystem of innovation

within your organizations? Vanessa? Yeah.

We've set that up in a few different ways. So we do definitely get ideas

from leadership, but we've also established an innovation

award fund in our company. And so people from

any part of our company can submit their And, ideas. you

know, they come to us as just

an idea. Some of them have already developed the idea.

And we really look to that for an

opportunity to say, see what is actually going to be hands-on helpful

for people who are actually doing the work, because we can't be

everywhere. So it's been really great to get the ideas from leadership

that's going to drive, kind of support the administrative, to kind of get

the business in the door, invoicing, those kind of things, and

then also get the ideas from throughout the company. So that's—

we've done that. Jared, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so

our culture is

set up in that we have guiding principles, tenets.

One of our tenets is to the greatest extent

possible, maintain decision-making as close to our

clients and those problems as we possibly can. And

that translates into our innovation ecosystem here as

well. Those ideas, those problems, those things that we,

are identifying, whether it's with our clients or internal

opportunities, are really identified at that level.

But then having that space, that environment, those budgets,

those ways to centralize some of those ideas so that

we can be proactive in investing in those is a big

deal. Perhaps taking a step even further beyond that

though is how do you teach this way

of thinking across a workforce. And that's an area that we're spending a lot of

time and investment in building out. It's one thing to have

ideas and thoughts, but there's— it's another to build that

innovation muscle across an organization. And that's, that's a great

opportunity, I think, for our industry, quite frankly, to lean into. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's an interesting point you because, know, one of the things

when you study innovation, when you look at how people become more innovative, one of

the key key things is play, right? Play at work. And

we saw that Legoland picture, and I

think that that is definitely somewhere that's ripe for this industry to learn how

to play and think in broader, more

creative ways. And so it's definitely something

we're looking at. And I was even thinking, like.

You. You asked— asked the question, is your culture set up for that? I, I

still think people struggle to define what their culture is, right? It's like, so

how much is leadership articulated, like at least what they

believe are the values? Because to me, culture is a set of belief and

values. So have you articulated what the values are within your company? Are you

setting those expectations of what you would like to have your

ideal employees embrace, right? So we have 6

core values that kind of make up our culture. Progressive is one of those.

So we talk about that. Talking only gets you so

far. So we've put like all of our values as kind of part of

the goals of people in in our, our company so that

you you are, have progressive type goals. You have goals that you need to

further yourself, further your development, reach out, think outside the box.

So to me, a culture that embraces

progressive, embraces innovation, that encourages that and also

measures you on it. Will then allow you to have that type of innovative culture.

You know, it's interesting though, that at least the

organizations that I speak to, the more successful ones, also

embrace that concept of show and tell, right? Encourage the

organization to try new things, try new technologies, but then

also share it across the organization, because sometimes good

ideas just kind of stay within departments, particularly if

you're a bigger organization, and don't filter necessarily out.

So slightly pivoting a little bit, so that's good. So we talked

about the culture and just the motivation to do these things. One of

the biggest questions, and I think this is probably a question that

a lot of folks in here have, is let's focus on ROI, right? If I

invest this, what do I get, right? And go back to Chad, what Chad said

earlier about we're so hyperfocused on bad overhead, right? And we

don't know what the return is. So when you think about AI or

innovation investments, do you— What's your approach to looking

at those kinds of things? Is it like we want to try to fail fast

and be innovative, or are you taking a more strategic approach? Do

you set an innovation budget? So thinking thinking about, about

that, and Jared, we'll start with you on the end. So when you think

about Olsson, you know, how are you thinking about innovation

investment, not only in people, but also in the technology and the

platforms? Yeah, interestingly, the, the word budget

in our culture is actually kind of a 4-letter word because it

automatically sets a constraint towards something versus having that

opportunity for exploration. And so it's kind of an interesting

thing to tag into. We look at our innovation

portfolio as we would someone's 401(k). It is a

portfolio. You have some that are a little bit higher, higher

risk that have a propensity for potential failure.

Others that that are, are gonna be, you know, pretty easy to recognize an

ROI on. Most of those tend to be kind of in your core productivity

improvement, margin improvement type activities. What

I love is, is seeing things coming from our organization that

are very easy, what we call everyday innovations that are coming

from our workforce that are easy wins that we can

scale rapidly. We've had a few of 'em even in the last week just in,

some different conversations that are fantastic. It's very uplifting to

see individuals doing these heroic things and having

the opportunity to spotlight and highlight those at an

organization level and then leverage those into scaling

opportunities. When you can unlock that in an organization, there's a lot

of fantastic things that can take shape in that. So

that, that's, that's a little bit of it. you Certainly, know, there are

guardrails and, and budgetary attributes to that.

But when we look at how we actually measure

ROI, things that are more revenue-centric, we go through a

very robust lean canvas framework. I'm sure many of you have some context

in that. It's a great tool to

approach those types of strategy and then vet different opportunities

against one another, certainly. Yeah. Yeah.

Vanessa? Yeah, I think the ROI question, you know, it's one that

everybody struggles with, the AI ROI, right? It's a huge topic of

conversation across all the industries. And it's really

easy to calculate it when you it's, know, supporting automation of something. I

used to do it in 5 hours, now I do it in 5 minutes. You

know, that's really easy. The part where it's challenging is

how do you do the soft return on investment on

LLMs? Where you're getting ideation coming out of it.

And it's one of those things like, of course, that's really hard

to measure, but so is your investment in things like Teams and

Slack and things like that. So, but you wouldn't even think about

not having Teams. So, it's, it's, it's

that part of it is so soft. And it's also

where you're positioning yourself for where you're going to be in 5

years if you're not looking into this AI stuff. If you're not

doing these things that are innovative, where are you going to be in 5

years? Those are the soft things that are hard to measure, but if you don't

do it, then you're going to be left behind.

Yeah, I would say prior to the proliferation of AI, we just

had— it was innovation, right? And we had like an innovation

challenge and, you know, we let anybody submit anything and

we had judges and we reviewed Reviewed it. them, and then we

put time, money, and budgets behind those to, to develop the

concepts. So we're taking a similar approach to that, to your

AI, you know, and like you said, showcasing, putting up an

intranet and a website where everybody can kind of post their

ideas, talk about what they're doing, so to get

conversations started. And then as people apply to use new

tools, of course you start off with the whole stuff of

security and, you know, data protection, things like that,

but then on the more progressive side, it's, you know, is this

gonna help you? Is this gonna help your clients? Is this gonna

help profitability? Like, what is the ROI? Try to categorize

it. And then even more is to kind of say, and is this, could be

this done by you, or could this be done by your team, or could

this be done by your sector or your company, right? And then

you start to really gauge like what could the potential

potential ROI be. Yeah, yeah. So interesting, you know, from

at least from my perspective, when I'm having conversations or we're working on

projects, when we focus on solving one small problem

versus trying to replace a whole process, we see better success,

right? Because I think in some instances we've all experienced this hype

cycle to where we thought AI was going to do all

these great things and it does small things good, Right?

And it it hasn't, hasn't caught up, which kind of leads into this next

question because we kind of think about the investment side. And this is

probably something that comes up often as you start thinking the

difference between build versus buy, right? Do I build

my own AI solution or do I buy an AI solution or is

there some form of hybrid type of solution?

Vanessa, how are you guys approaching that, that build versus buy

thought process in terms of give people tools or do we

build our own tools? Yeah. So

for me, it's very clear, like if you can buy it, if it's

a tool that's out there, everybody already has it, it's so much easier to just

buy it. If it's a tool that you can't buy, it's not even available because

it's just really niche to your organization. Of course, that

means build. And that kind of goes along with what you were saying about how

AI is It's very helpful when you're looking at addressing small issues.

And I think that that's a piece where people are

still kind of learning, because I think there is this imagination that

you can just put AI on top of your

network drive, and then you can ask about anything in the network drive. And it's

just, no, we can't do it that way. So I think that

going back to the build versus buy, you

have to be realistic about what AI can and can't do for you.

And you have to be thoughtful about, do we have the resources? Do we wanna

take on the tech debt of building this or should we just buy it? So.

Yeah, yeah. Jared. Yeah, I completely

agree. And, and to build on that, I, I would say

in instances where there is an opportunity for

significant differentiation or to increase the size of

a moat that we have around a business offering, that's gonna be a more likely

environment where we would move into more of a

build space. Certainly that's

not always the case. And maybe the

twist on this is what's this look like 1, 2, 3 years

out? I think with the further emergence

of a lot of citizen development tools, rapid app

creation, things of that sort. What does that start to look like

with a workforce that has tools in their hands to

customize their workflows, customize solutions

in rapid time? We weren't even talking about that even a year ago,

and here we are talking about that. What does that look like? And I think

that's maybe the bigger question is what does this start to look like

in our strategies over the next several years? As we start to build

out some of some these, of these, some of our buy solutions where

we've had great success. Our best success is actually where

it's been a bit of a hybrid where there is expertise from external,

but we've been partnering and customizing and build out of

those things. That's been a fantastic model that's, that's worked out well for us.

Scott, how's Wolpert been dealing with the buy versus build?

Definitely buy to start. I mean, it changes so fast, right? You heard KP

say that, you know, 3 months throwing stuff out. Why would I build

something like that? You know, that's not gonna be, that'll be

redundant in, in that short of timeframe. So yeah, I mean the, the funny

thing that I'm kind of waiting to see is there's only, there's a lot of

tools out there, but I think there's specific ones that, you know, a lot

of firms are aggregating to. And I, I was asking a couple of my engineers

yesterday, I was like, so when do we start to see like proposals looking

the same? They all use the same tool to generate the same design. It's

like, well, I saw that on the other proposal. Did you guys collude on

this? It's like I'm waiting to see if there's going to be some kind of

almost generic-ification that occurs, where people's designs— but

it really does— I think it's a good— for anybody that's starting, I

think you should all build your tools out there. Just start building

them. That would be a good idea. Kidding. You've got to start

experimenting with what's already out there. Obviously as you get to

learn the tools a little bit, hopefully those tools have APIs that you

can program and you can customize, you can put your own proprietary

stuff in there. So that does differentiate you. Yeah. And keeps you

away from generic-ification. I I mean, think to Jared's point, this concept

of no-code, low-code is something of the last 6 months

that have, has really propagated out that allows you to develop those applications.

And typically when I'm talking to, to my clients, I focus on the buy,

And there's a variety of reasons. You start thinking, you build it, you own it.

And I don't mean it from the owning like, oh, this is mine. Like you

own the security, you own the maintenance, you own everything about that.

Do you have software developers on staff to maintain it? So

you have to kind of take that into account. It's just not getting a custom

solution. You actually own the whole app development going forward.

So yeah, we had that situation about,

A year ago, we did some beta testing with some app development

tools in the marketplace that were, at that time, we thought, oh,

this is a great solution, this is something we can build on. Well,

fast forward to now, we can do all those things in-house now. So even

in the last really 8 months, that's completely flipped where

we were purchasing something. Now we're recognizing that we you have, know,

50, 70 employees that, that can build all those things right now. Yeah.

And that's, that's a big shift. Yeah. The hybrid works

well because you, you don't necessarily have to start from scratch and everything you were

just mentioning, like we've built software products, we've built sensors and

things like that. It's a completely different business model you than, than, know,

architecture and engineering. And it's like, is your DNA set

up for that? Are you going to create different business models, different ROI

mechanisms? To be able to evaluate for that. And do you want that as a

distraction, right? It's like almost stick to your knitting. What are you good at? Are

you good at software development? I would say most of the firms in the room

are you not, know, like that's because we're not software engineers. So

if you've got a strategy where you've got some engineers and you can value-add the

existing product, that seems like to me like a more just reasonable

type strategy to take. And it's interesting, if you ever spend any time around KP,

you'll hear a lot about the ecosystem part. I mean, if your firm is

in a position to invest in startups, sometimes putting capital

into someone else's development and taking advantage of that

is important. So when you think about your ecosystem, it's not only internal

ideas and internal applications, but you also have to tend to look

externally. And that that is, is something that a lot of firms

don't do. Some of the more progressive firms, some of the bigger firms are doing

that. But I would encourage if you are in a position and you do have

the ability to invest in that, that is an opportunity to definitely

roll down the path of. You know, wrapping up the

investment side, because this was a question that popped up as soon as

everyone started talking about AI, how is that going to impact

people? So, when we start thinking about

your innovation investments, your AI investments, which

I also kind of find funny because we talk about we have a labor shortage

in our industry, but then we also talk about how we're cutting head count because

we're introducing AI. What are your thoughts about that

in terms of your continued investments in innovation,

efficiency, productivity, AI in particular?

How do you see that impacting investments in headcount or people going forward?

Jared, we can start with you.

So it refers back—

there's there's a, a really good Harvard Business Review

article called Strategy in an Era of

Abundance. If some of you have probably read it, others that haven't, I'd highly

encourage a read. It's it's a, a great

read in recognizing several questions of what, what does the

world look like when a lot of our knowledge,

the way that we solve problems, that, that

limited resource becomes abundant through through leveraging AI. We have

a lot of our clients now that are starting to leverage tools that are

automating or doing conceptual design before we even are at

the table now. And so really thinking about that, what does that mean to

our industry, businesses, et cetera, and, and really

tackling some of those things as we look forward here. And it comes back to

a question of value, you know, how we value, you know, most

of our businesses, especially on the public sector side, are valued by

Number of hours, utilization. This is becoming an age-old

conversation, right? Value versus utilization. But it really

is a big question. I think we all do need to ask ourselves is what

is the value we're creating and how are you capturing that as we're

moving into, into the space of maybe a little rapid, a little

more rapid pace and technological disruption here in our industry.

Yeah. Yeah. Vanessa.

You know, last night when we were having our networking

session, a lot of people talked about what KP talked about

yesterday and were like, it was scary, you know? And

I think that there's this idea that

we could be doing more to think about what do we want our

industry to look like, not just what our company— what do we

want our company to look like? But maybe we need to be banding together and

think about what we want our industry to look like. And if we

want our industry to leverage AI for our benefit, but

we still want to grow and build engineering expertise

in our individuals, we need to be thinking about

how the AI will be supportive of

that person, but not be taking over the engineering

expertise. So I think, yes,

we need to think strategically about that inside our company, but I think it would

be more interesting if we thought about it as our industry.

Yeah, I think our— I think it's an

interesting perspective to look at. I think our industry though is being

disrupted, right? And who is our industry now? Who

represents those firms, right? That disruption's not

coming from within AE. It's coming from in IT,

right? So it's like they have a different perspective of what that's going to do.

And, you know, regardless, I think of what we say, they're going to keep going

at it unless, you know, even KP was saying yesterday, it's like, I'm not going

to try to sell to the AE firms. I'm going to

partner up the AI guys and the IT guys and the VC guys are

going to get together and then we'll go find an AE firm that will buy.

You know, that's totally different. That's game-changing

different. And it is happening. And yeah, and we

can't even say what's going to happen to headcount. Like, AI is

already doing things that traditional job skills are being replaced

right now, right? It's not like in the future, it's not 3 years. It's

when we hear people say designs that used to take 2 weeks

are now taking 2 hours or 2 minutes, whatever it is, it's

different. The job functions are just totally different right now. And it's This is

Moneyball. This is adapt or die. Yeah. If you if you don't, don't recognize

that, then that's just, you're eventually gonna be like, well, why are we you

employing, know, 10 of these designers when we only

need 1 person with the AI program, right? So this this is, is an area

I'd love to build on that just for a minute here.

Many of us have been in the industry for many years.

There's a lot of aspects of our business that are,— I'll

say it, commoditized across different groups. You submit a

proposal to a DOT, sometimes there's 100 proposals.

Are they all able to perform that work to some level? Yeah,

probably. We're moving into

a phase that I think is highly divergent in our industry.

There are definitely going to be differences

in organizations that embrace this change and those

that do not. I personally think that's, that's a very exciting

time in business to actually have an

opportunity to differentiate in ways that maybe

we haven't had that opportunity in some time. A lot of blue sky,

but it's scary to some. I think that's a—

it's a, it's a question and a discussion that

needs to be had in a lot of different boardrooms and different companies of

what this starts to look like. 'Cause it is, I think it's a divergent

pathway that we haven't seen in a very long time. Yeah, it's like,

is this just another tool? Don't think so. Yeah,

it's the speed. Its speed is like what we haven't seen. Like

when we had cloud computing and we had whatever the past

things that have been that didn't have a dynamic change

effect on the jobs of the people that we employ.

It was just a different medium. This is directly

replacing the services that our people do.

So yeah, and it has to be bifurcated into— it can't be just

architecture and engineering, but what specific services in architecture

and engineering will be taken over, already taken over, and

to be taken over? And putting a plan together

for that, that's to me this intersection of culture, strategy,

AI is trying to figure out that and try to figure that

out as, again, it's happening so fast and

we're only getting bits and pieces of this because we're not spending all of our

time watching what's, what's being developed. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting.

I look at it very similar perspectives that it's not

necessarily reduction in roles, maybe in some areas, but I think it's re-envisioning

some of these roles on how you look at this. Your IT

department's going to move away from password resets to playing more of a

strategic role in not only your data security but also

application deployment development, maybe even software development, right? So you start thinking

about how many AE firms out there today have a data scientist

on staff or a software developer. Those are the things that— those

are some of the newer roles that I see coming into the future.

So kind of building off what Scott just said, because he mentioned something that was

interesting, strategic planning. How does innovation

in AI now play a role, or does it play a role

when you're thinking about your strategic plan? Is it is it a, a big part

of what you're looking at, or are you still looking at the more of the

fundamentals of what strategic planning is?

Vanessa, we can start with you. So I'd say for us,

we're definitely considering it part of the strategy, but it's not

the first thing. We want to think of our strategy first. But when we are

thinking about our AI strategy, we want to be positioning ourselves

for when things have matured a bit. Because we are— we're in

the place of AI where maybe we were at with

the internet back in the '90s, right? But there's— we're still

trying to figure out what to do with it. Facebook hasn't been coming— It hasn't

come in yet. We're still working with MySpace. And so we don't really

know. But what do we do now to

prepare for when it does mature? And that's about data,

right? AI is fueled by data. So if your

data strategy, if your data is not structured,

that's— this is the time to be focusing on your data and getting it organized

to feed AI. Yeah. Jared, what's your, what's your thoughts

on this? Yeah. So, you know, when I think of AI, I don't think

AI is a strategy. I think it is a tool, a way to

solve problems. When we think about a strategy,

who are we serving? Who are our clients? What are their problems? What are we

trying to solve for them? And then leveraging, whether it's AI

innovation, other, you know, other tools in our toolbox, right?

Technical expertise, those things. To help solve problems.

I think when we think technology or AI is the strategy,

I, I don't know that that, that really makes sense to me. I think it

is a, a part of

the strategy, but it is not the strategy. And so

aligning what, where you're going, the types of

problems we have, the types of clients and so forth with

how how you, you solve those problems through the use of this is maybe more

of our pathway at this time. Scott? I agree with what he

said. That's

awesome. Well, that's interesting. So like

kind of thinking about that, then you start thinking solely

around like the strategy, and I do agree with that. You know,

one of the things that we think about internally at KP Ready is

the big sky, the blue sky type of opportunities. And sometimes

the best ideas don't necessarily come from internal.

Sometimes it's coming to an event like this and seeing what

others are doing. When you start thinking about, like, if I had

a magic wand to kind of solve an innovation problem or

solution, where are where you— does your organization lean

into finding those types of opportunities? How do you not only

identify or find the opportunities but also kind of, you know,

vet it cultivate it, and then move it through the

organization? Jared, we can start with you on that.

So we do have a pretty

robust innovation framework that we've launched, which

helps to speak to a lot of those things. The idea is the

problem statements are coming from the edge, the organization at large,

and bringing those forward so that we can identify those that may

have that significant impact. I'll go back to something that, um,

that was said previously about is this an individual, team,

sector, or organizational problem. And we, we definitely look at

it in the same way. Those things that are organizational that could have a huge

impact on our ability to solve problems with clients, that's likely

going to, going to elevate. And looking at

an investment versus ROI metric, again, I'll go back to our, our

Lean, Lean Canvas approach. I, I think that's a, a a great model for a

lot of organizations to look at in terms of how do you define,

you know, what is that potential ROI on that? And some of those

investments may fail and that's okay. That's

part of this is innovation. I'll

just say this, this maybe goes astray with how some people see

this, but innovation at its core is not a part

of your operation. Your operation is to

generate revenue and P&L and the day-to-day and execution.

Innovation is a messy process. It's an exploration process.

There's a lot of things going on there and

it goes very much against sometimes when you think about the operation

and how you're executing on the day-to-day. And you have

to be thoughtful about that too and just your overall ecosystem of innovation

and how you approach that. And I'd say it's

evolving, right? As people are doing like vibe coding

and as there's more people that are tinkering with what

they can build really easily with these LLM tools,

they can be building something by themselves at their desk in an afternoon

that would be great to deploy across the company. And then there's the bigger

problems that maybe we do need a larger team. So this is evolving.

Evolving as the tools evolve too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think,

I agree with what you said, Jared, with the innovation is messy and it requires

a lot of trials and, and, and rework and stuff like that.

I think it's important to like kind of set some parameters so what

it kind of, if it creeps into operations, right? Like you can't let innovation just

continue on without seeing any progress. So it has to be right? So measured, you,

I think you establish a framework like you said, you establish a website,

You give time, money, budget, time, stuff to do that. You set some

milestones to see progress. Yeah. And if the progress doesn't get there,

you know, you got to shut it down at some It's— point, right? it's— that

could be stifling innovation. But there has to be some kind of ROI

because we, we only have certain levels of profitability, even though it seems to be

going up, you know, that we can fund all these different things. And then

there's a certain level of or competitiveness winnism like in

there, like survival of the fittest, right? So the best

innovations float to the top. You— and that's kind of like what the

VC strategy is, right? Fund 10, hopefully one works out. So you

apply a smaller-scale version of that within your own you company,

know, and then just see which ones float to the top. Fail

fast. Kind of building off what Vanessa mentioned around the vibe

coding, it's interesting you mentioned that. I know that KP's

running a vibathon, which is that building off that same concept of

bring a bunch of organizations together, see what sticks to

the wall, see what happens. But I think that opens up organizations' mind

to like, oh, we can do this, right? And

that's a challenge for some organizations because they don't— they think it's too

complex in a lot of ways. You know,

in the remaining time that we have, this has been a very good internal— what's

happening internally. Let's kind of pivot this to external now. Let's start

thinking about clients, thinking about projects, and thinking about our

partners. When you think about innovation,

how are you identifying— or are you identifying your

partners like, I'm selecting the most innovative partner, or are you

really just selecting them because you know they can do the work, right? And I

think that's been the mentality for a while. But think,

putting your forward-thinking hat on, do you think it's important to

have partners, subcontractors, etc.,

that have that innovative mindset?

Who wants to take this one first? It wasn't on the list, by

the way. Sorry. Yeah, no, I think

it's always good if you

have a fellow person that you can

go back and forth with new exciting ideas.

I do also think, though, it depends on the client.

So we have public sector clients and private sector clients.

And the private sector clients are hungry for

faster, more innovative, cheaper work. And the public sector clients are

a little bit more like, we need to make sure this is still OK and

falls within our protocol and procedures. So I think it also

depends on the project. So do you find that some of you said

the public sector clients, do you find that there's more reluctance when it comes

to, say, AI or not necessarily

innovation? Because innovation is kind of more of a catch-all, right? I find that I

hear from, from industry and people that I speak to that it's

our clients are reluctant that you're incorporating AI. Do you see

some of that? I think that there's

just historic

learned concerns, you know, like they've learned that they need to be cautious

around new technologies because they don't know how they're going to get burnt. So it's

very understandable, right? Um, and it's—

they, they do want AI, they do want to increase their use

of AI, but they also want to make sure their data is protected, right? And

I think that that's what they're concerned about is how do we start using this

and leveraging it and make sure our our data is protected and that we're still

complying with all of our regulations that we have to fall within.

So yeah, Jared, thoughts on that? I, I, I

would agree with everything that's been said. And if anything, I'd say

we have the full spectrum. We serve a lot of different clients in our,

in our business across, you know, public, private, and institutional

realms. And I'd say on one side of the spectrum, we have clients that

expect that we are applying applying every bit of AI to our

workflows that we possibly can. Like, it's no longer an ask, it's an

expectation. And we have others that have made it clear you will

not use any AI in any application, which, which

means we're getting out a pencil and paper and sending things in, in,

in the mail to, to answer to that requirement, right?

So, but it's all over the board right now. I think you're seeing more and

more trending towards the middle that are

more on the extreme end of not wanting the application of

these tools. But it's— I do think our—

generally speaking, I think your public sector clientele have definitely been

a little slower to react, and they have different priorities

comparatively. Well, I laugh about that because there is a county in

Georgia that still requires a printed hand-delivered submittal.

Yeah, you've got all different types of clients, right? And it doesn't

necessarily have to be public and private, right? We're always saying you

want to work with smart clients with money, uh, and the smart clients with

money want to see the best product regardless of how it's made, right? As

long as you assuage them of their concerns that they're not gonna— their

data is protected, there's no security concerns here, you know, they're

not— that's not going to be shared, their designs or whatever it is. Yeah.

So I think, I think if, if you have the conversations with them that says

our approach uses AI and it has, you know, these

protections, if they still say no, there's nothing you can do. It's like, all right,

well, they'll just charge you twice for it, you know. But like, if you

have that conversation, it should be, I think, well received. Yeah.

No, no, I agree. And it's, it's interesting. I, I still believe that there's

some misconceptions around AI. I

think the media and the hype have kind of

blown it out. Yes, it's not perfect, but if you're

implementing it and integrating it the right way

and putting those safeguards in place, I think that you have a

successful path forward when it comes to

deployments. So, you know,

we're getting close to the Q— we're going to open up the Q&A here in

a few minutes, but I want to kind of get your individual perspectives

around what do what do what do you, you, you

hope for in the next 12 to say 20,

36 months in terms of AI and innovation? What's on

your radar? What are you thinking about from a future state? Because we hear a

lot about AI agents and agentic AI.

And from my perspective, I'm like, oh, that sounds really cool. But it also sounds

like we're getting into another hype cycle that these things are going to be very

magical. And in some instances, then we get

it and it's not. But when you start thinking, when you start being, you

know, because we're all innovation people, we're all future futurists,

so to speak. What do you hope for in the next, say, 12 to

36 months when we start hearing these things like AI agents and

agentic AI?

Whoever likes to go first. Well,

maybe tag on you to, know, the overall Elevate theme that

Chad has here with this overall conference over the

years, right, is I'm hopeful that our industry, instead

of being a laggard in terms of quick progress and change

and transformation, is able to accelerate and able to

speed up here. Here, because I think it's an imperative

for our, for our industry at large here. And so if

anything, it's looking at our, our various

organizations and saying, what are those things? You

know, engineers, for those of us in the room that are in

that space, tend to be very analytical. We like process,

we like comfort, tried and true. And everything we're

talking about here kind of is going in the face of that in

many specs. Yep, you got to have some of those things, but

you also have to have that environment to experiment and

to allow for that space for a workforce to do a lot of

things that may feel a little bit uncomfortable. This

low-code, these ability for our workforce to have a lot

of autonomy to build a lot of things. You know, a couple

years ago, an IT department would have said that is

scary, you can't do that, we have to lock these things in.

How do we unlock these things across our industry. I think that would be

something I'd be hopeful for so that we can continue

to evolve and solve problems

for all of our clients and the industry at large. It seems like that's more

of an industry culture shift versus a technology or a

solution, which is interesting. And I want to follow on with

that real quick, Jared, because a thought popped in my head is how does that

evolve your hiring then going forward? Going forward, right? Are you looking

for that more like a Swiss Army knife type of person? I'm not looking

for someone that's a spoon that does one thing. Do

you think that changes how firms would hire going forward,

that I need someone that has, you know, a structural engineering

degree but has a minor in computer science? Does that

evolve? Does that even come into the equation?

Good question though, right? Certainly have thoughts.

Vanessa, thoughts on that? Yeah, it kind of goes— it takes my mind

back to the original things that we were saying about how

the industry is ripe to introduce more play and more

creativity and what we can do to foster that with

technology. So if we— low-code is not going anywhere.

It's just going to become more prevalent. Having people

play with it and build things and having that platform

that's secure from external threats for them to be able to

build things that's gonna help them and then easily be

rolled out to help the rest of the company. And when you're

saying like, well, does that change who you're hiring? I

think that it might not be computer science minors you

want. You might want art history minors or philosophy

minors. Designers, people that are thinking in a totally

different way. So yeah, I mean, that's, that's

a very fascinating way to kind of think about that. And I do know I

had a son that just recently graduated with an engineering degree,

and one of the first classes that they had to take was a programming class,

which was, uh, was interesting because a lot of the kids weren't

accustomed to that and they weren't prepared for it. But you can kind of see

how a lot of these engineering disciplines are now trying to at

least incorporate more technology into their platforms.

Scott, you have any thoughts on that, on future hiring? Well,

similar thing. It's— I almost take it back to my family. Like, my son wants

to be an engineer and business person. I'm like, that's great.

And I was like, but you should take some computer science courses because I think

that they're going to merge together a little bit more. And

Yeah, so I think it'll be a little bit different in terms of maybe not

the hiring, but that the people that are coming into the companies have

different skill sets. Yeah, I agree. Well, my other son who's

a business major, I encourage him to take up cybersecurity as a minor. I'm like,

you business major, you're going to just kind of blend in, try to stick

out a little bit. I really like, Vanessa, what you were saying

in terms of maybe having some

completely different pathways. That's one of my

concerns with engineering curriculums at this point, is there's

this continuous degradation of the, the

humanities and social sciences component of those

curriculums. And, and quite frankly, I think in the age of AI, I think some

of the greatest differentiation that individuals are going to have is the

ability to have breadth, have that

authentic human connection, and helping understand

people. That's a space that I think has a

huge opportunity in our industry to elevate

further from where it has been. And I do

wonder if we get too

narrow-minded in saying we only are gonna focus on this

versus building out that breadth. I think it's a great conversation.

I don't know if anybody has all the answers to this by any stretch, but

it's, I do think it's one that again, industry-wide we should be having

these conversations to tackle that. Yeah, it like, I remember when I did a

degree in English and my dad basically said, well, what are you

gonna do with that? And I was like, I don't know, but you know, it

didn't have a lot of hard courses, so I decided I'd do that. But,

English has helped me in terms of communication, right? And if you

think about like how a lot of the AI design tools are right now, it's

that prompt-driven, right? Speak into it what you want to see and

then poof, it'll give you the design. So if you had those people with

different mindsets, different perspectives, English majors,

whatever that is, they might be able to articulate things in a

different way than architects and engineers that are more

left-brained versus right-brained. You know, it might— you're

always going to need architects and engineers to do like the more

specifics, the calcs. and things like that. But it's hard to find

engineers and architects that are more designy, right? Like

there's— it's more— at least I've found that. So if you have people

with those different skills feeding into the AI prompts, you know,

you might get different designs. And that's one of the things,

honestly, I think that's going to be exciting in that 3 to 5 years is

the. —Right? Designs. Like, they're going to be cooler, more different,

I think, than ever before. Because you don't just do one

design or two designs or show it to a client. Now it's like, hey, here's

50. Which one do you like? And some of them are extravagant and wild.

What does that look like when it starts to show up in our cityscapes and

things like that? It could really change the dynamic. And it could bring a really

much more focus and attention on the industry, because we're

building— cooler things. Yeah. You know, one of the things

that excites me, though, is the whole concept of computer vision, using

computers and cameras to kind of help visualize the world

in front of us. And I look at it not only from

being able to create cool designs, to be able to visualize something and see it,

but also think about job site safety, being able to use cameras.

Right. Some of us probably seen job site cameras and we see construction

progress. But imagine being able to take that

to the next level, to be able to kind of go in and use computer

vision and AI to not only see progress in design, but

also identify safety issues and a variety of other things.

So we're getting close to the end

here, so I want to kind of give us an opportunity to open it up

for some questions. I do appreciate all the answers, but Chad, do we have anyone

that may have a question? We do. We've got 2 mics on both sides, but

we've got our first question. Question already over here.

Great panel, thank you so much for participating. Have

you found that clients are willing to participate in some

of the payment. Or is this a strictly overhead issue.

To develop the AI applications?

So, looking at mutual investment or co-investment with from

a client perspective? I think like if you have some

kind of your big top clients and you can talk to them

about, listen, you know, we've been like, one of the things that

we've found when we work with data centers is a lot of the times it's

hard to propagate the changes throughout all the design sheets. And we

use this certain AI technique to be able to do that a lot more quickly

and efficiently. And if you can kind of say we're gonna do 20 more data

centers with you. So let's, let's work on this. I think they're more

apt to be able to do that than rather than a one-off. And generally

there's not even like that much of a cost sharing, especially on the design side.

It's going to be a cost saving to to the, the AE firm. So there's

really not much that you're going to even have to ask them to. I think

the, the greater question is what we talked about before. Are they

willing and open to letting you use AI to give them a different type

of product? And if If you can get past that gatecheck, then, you

know, I don't think you really need that much co-invest.

I think that's manifesting quite a bit across our

business right now where there is a lot of those partnerships.

I think an interesting question that started to evolve

from that is when you're building out solutions, who

owns ultimately the IP in that solution? Such that

that can be leveraged across a number of different problem

sets that we have. I think that's, I'm sure other

organizations are tackling some of the same things, but

you know, these co-development problems, whether it's, you

know, asset management type strategies, otherwise there

are a lot of those things that are starting to emerge and we're starting to

see it happening at a rapidly changing

pace where that's taking place. And I think

part of the challenge we're going to have moving forward here is just

resources and the ability to

navigate some of those things. Does that dynamic change if you are

participating in a joint venture? So not necessarily investment from a client,

but investment from a partner? Do you guys see it that way? Because I kind

of hear that question and it's like there's multiple ways that investment can come

into that. That's a good question. Yeah, so that's another

thing to probably, uh, to look into. Chad,

do we have another question? Yep, got another question right here. All right,

thank you. Um, I'm curious, besides the sort of.

Things that a lot of firms are doing like AI

support for marketing proposal preparation and meeting minute

preparation, do you. In your firms have some examples of. Use cases

where you've built something or. Applied something that's been a success?

Yes.

No, we— so our current count is about 30

kind of tools that we, we use. And I'd say probably

half of those to maybe 60, 70%

are what you were talking about, like support functions things

that expedite efficiencies in HR, finance, IT,

things like that. But we certainly have some really great

improvements on the design side, on the

A, the E, and my company also does geospatial type stuff that

have definitely returned really great returns on

it. So yeah, we have examples on all.

Vanessa, Jared? Yeah, I mean, You know,

there is a big focus from, from our group on, on data.

And so we do have a lot of data that's across the organization.

It's in different spots. And so we've built tools to help

automate making that data input faster and

using AI to scrape the data out of the documents no matter what the

format. And that's, you know, part of the

building out of our foundation of data.

Yeah, I'd say most of our current solutions have been

more core in our business in terms of,

you know, things that are automating different workflows, different processes, whether

it's, you know, invoicing we do for

some of our field operations to a

lot of use cases where we've, we've built out

agentic workflows or, or large language model overlays

of SharePoint sites, you know, for knowledge management. We have a lot of those things

that have started to, uh, emerge across the organization

where I, where I think there's opportunity. And we have a few things I can't

speak about here today, but a few things that we're, um,

evolving here that are more on the revenue creation side, um, using

some of these tools, um, which I think is pretty exciting. But, uh,

those are early use cases right now. I think our, our greatest success has

been core at this point where we've seen direct

impact, you know, to our team

functions, whether corporate or technical at this point. And then from my

perspective, the clients that we work with primarily on report writing. So think

about inspection reports, field reports, things where it's kind of more

of administrative but not necessarily marketing related. We've seen

some really good success with clients working on that. And then

really around this concept of firm librarian. So you have a lot of information

and being able to use AI to, when deployed

properly, be able to kind of pull out technical information, find

information across vast data sets is some of the

success we've seen outside of the. Sales and marketing area. I'd say the, the

closer organizations get to having a, you know, very large amount of

their data moved into more of a structured environment,

environment that they can fully access. You eliminate

hallucinations, you create a lot more value in that. And I think I

think there's, there's tension from what I hear across a lot of

organizations in organizing data. That's a heavy lift for a lot of

companies, um, to having fractured and unstructured data across

many different areas. It's it's a, a tension that exists, um, and

it's one the more, more that data is structured and your data

strategy is sound, it's a foundation for daggum everything here

when we're talking about AI. The more robust that is, the more of

these, these use cases and the value that, that you're able to create

on those. Not to sound like a plug for, for data strategy and so forth,

but it kind of is. Got another

question right here.

Hi. I, I'm sensing that a lot of our

undergraduate programs, we've just got kind of flat-footed antiquated and

haven't changed quickly enough. And so

architecture, engineering, it could be biology,

you name it. And so, and then

throw in AI and, you know, we're

getting more commoditized, it's going to create more time to be

able to add value to clients,

but you won't have the skills for it because you're flat-footed

or you're in some stage of your career where

you're now needing more skills. And so

whether that's another degree in computer science or a degree

in business to bundle with your architecture and engineering or something

else. So my question is, what upskilling

initiatives do you have to address the skills

gap we're going to have in this business or have today? And it's going to

only get worse. Thank you. Well.

I'd say a lot of our focus is on taking some of the

administrative tasks from our senior engineers so they can

be back into that mentorship place where they can

be really supporting the younger engineers to help

them understand the fundamentals for design, fundamentals

of engineering. And once again, it goes back

to like letting them go back to learn how to be creative and think

outside of the box. And so it's really— that's why we're focusing on

taking those administrative things off of the senior engineers, and that's

really where we're moving forward with. I think that's a great

question. I think we could spend an hour and a half on another

talk on that, that specific question, because there's so many things that that

you can dig into here, but I'll focus on just two quick things.

Internal to organizations like ours, a lot of this is, yeah, your

training and upskilling. You know, right now we have a robust program to

train the initial understanding of AI.

We've done Copilot within our organization and teaching and training. That's a base-level

knowledge so that you can start building those skills to the next level, right?

So having that robust, inward

training and development. But before that even is really the

mindset. You have to have an employee that is

willing and interested in the learning to begin with. And that's, I

think there's a lot of work to be done in that space versus having

the training and so forth. That's a space we really need to dig into. The

other piece of this is educational, you know, for students

coming through undergraduate programs programs.

I have a son that's in an architecture program, third-year architecture student right

now. A year ago, they weren't allowed to use any AI

tools in any of their work in their studios, anything. This year, they're not only

allowing it, but they bought them the enterprise license so that

they can use it in everything they're doing. And they're changing their, their way of

teaching overnight here. And I think that's fascinating because higher education tends to

be a little bit slower to react to some But I'm witnessing that, and I

think that's a very promising, promising move. But

learning those fundamental skills, I still think

there's a lot of work to be done

in terms of what is that actually going to look like in higher education moving

forward here with the emergence of these technology

tools. But like I said, we could spend hours on that. There's tons of things

we could get into there. Yeah. Yeah, I also think

too, it goes back to the first part of how we started this, right?

The culture of innovation, right? If you're building that culture within your

organization, which includes training, which includes a variety of different

things, I think that helps a lot with getting people

focused on those upskilling, definitely. All

right, we've got a question back here. Thank you.

We are a very niche firm. We're in the hydropower sector.

And we have some— we've done some really great things with AI, with our

marketing proposals, data management, things like that.

We have some really brilliant people who are working

on developing AI tools to use in, like, fishery science

and things like that. The thing is, is, like, how

do you get a framework and a structure put in place of

implementing, giving these people the time that they need, you know,

because they're billable people, very highly billable people,

to give them the time or the motivation, like that

framework to give them the space to do these things and develop these tools

that they need to develop without impacting bottom line from

being billable. You know, how do you kind of balance that?

And is there some sort of framework, or is that something we

need to be looking and thinking about as an industry, as a framework for when

you have these people who have that insight, have the

motivation, they want to do it, to free them up to be able to do

it without impacting also needing them on project work.

So how do you guys create capacity for people that are billable to

focus on this? You just got to plan for it, right? You just got to—

again, I think it's how you set goals, right? You can't

give that person a 90% utilization goal and say be innovative. Innovative,

right? You got to balance that, and then prior to that,

again, you got to have a mechanism that allows those ideas to float up, and

then you can prioritize it so that not everybody in the firm wants to be

innovative. But to me, it's just about planning for it like you'd

plan for any kind of IT upgrade or anything else that you

need to do. It just needs to be part of your strategic plan.

It's kind of related to the question we had earlier about

Have you been able to find people, clients, or partners to partner with you

to handle these costs? It's all the same question, right? How do we pay for

this? We want to use our billable hours, and we know we need

to do this, but how do we pay for it? And so, I mean.

It'S what your palette is for investment, and do

you invest in some younger folks that can maybe do

the VBA coding Do you— I mean, you just have to be

creative and think about how you're going to do it,

and if you don't want their time to do it, you need to

find somebody's time that they can work with to do

it. I think it's an exciting question because I think

everybody in this room could probably answer that a little bit differently, and it

ties back to the unique and individual cultures all of our firms

have that are represented here.

One organization may be strategic and focus specific hours and time

and create a plan and a process around that where others

set the environment in place. If you want to learn these

things, we're gonna provide the environment and the space for that,

but it's not a top-down decision. It's something

that the individual has to choose. One thing we've recognized is

the people that are leaning in, that are coming forward at the

individual level that want to upskill, that want to learn,

they're accelerating their careers at a much faster pace than the person

sitting next to 'em that hasn't started yet. And they're starting to,

the folks that haven't started yet, they're watching that and they're

seeing what they're doing and the productivity that they have and how they're seeing

more of their supervisors around. I mean, it's, you can see it,

right? So I go back to culture again. It's the culture you set. Is

going to help drive the results that you want.

Great. We've got another question right over here.

Hi. So I do proposals at my firm, and a common question

I'm seeing more on proposals, especially on the federal or state side,

is, are you going to use AI in the generation of the.

Work that you win? And it's usually a yes or no question. And oftentimes that

could feel like a trap, almost like you don't know if they're expecting you to

say yes or no, especially when the word generative AI is being used. So

I'm just curious how each of you would recommend that your firm

answers that question.

Yes. I mean, if you're going to, you just say I yes.

mean, if you want to qualify it, I guess you could put an assumption in

there. But yeah, I mean, some— I think it's again knowing your

clients. Are they going to be receiving that well or receiving that poorly? And if

it's receiving that poorly, then say no, but then don't use AI.

Yeah, I mean, with the question so broadly written like that, I mean,

it's almost impossible to say no to that question in this time.

So if it's that broad of a question, then they don't get that

specific of an answer. Ditto.

It does make you wonder what— like, why they're asking the question. And are

they using it part of the decision-making process or not? I think they're starting to

try to gauge on how many how many people are using it,

which may make changes to their selection process in the

future. Right. A much better question would be, how are you going to be using

AI in the development of this project?

So, so the short answer is yes. You answer yes if you use it.

Yeah. Okay, we probably have

time for one more question. Anybody?

Got a microphone over there too.

Questions for the panel? Okay, well,

please help me give a round of

applause to our panel. Thanks for

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