AI in Construction with Adrian Smith | Pt. 1

Hey, Construction Legends. So today we've got an interview with AI expert Adrian Smit. He's been in AI for 7 years, which in AI is an absolute lifetime. He spearheads the development of an unparalleled AI conversational platform called RunGo4 and also consults with organizations, helping them to integrate AI into their daily operations. This is part of a series that I'm doing, which is basically free consulting for you. This is something I'm looking at developing into my business. And as part of it, I have loads of questions that I needed answered, and Adrian has helped me get up to speed on those things. I thought you'd be able to benefit from it. So it's a two-part interview. Part one, we're going to talk about what is AI, why it's scary, and the benefits of AI and the layers to AI. So enjoy. Adrian, how are you?

Doing pretty well, mate. Yeah, pretty good.

How are you? Delighted to have you on. Giving you a bit of an introduction there and a bit of context for our listeners to understand who you are and what you do, let's dive straight into AI. Okay, so what is the big picture for AI? I've got my own, and then this is— I am not an AI expert, right? And I've got my own preconceived notions about what it could be. But what, in your view, is the big picture of AI?

I should preface all of this by saying the term AI expert is pretty intense. I'm not— I haven't studied big language models. I haven't developed my own. So whether I would class myself as an AI expert at this stage.

In comparison to me, mate, absolutely. I think you are.

Exactly right. So I always tell people like this, like, AI from my point of view is— and the image I have is if you've got 100 tasks to do in your day, and I said this in a video recently in a masterclass, is that pretend your day is like a hallway which is 100 meters long, and there's a bunch of decisions that needs to be made throughout your day. So every meter there's another door. So you've got 100 doors to navigate, right? And you look down imagination and you've got 100 keys on this massive key ring, and each of those keys is for one of those doors, but you don't know which one. And so you need to ask the question, how do I get from this end of the hallway to that end of the hallway as quickly and as efficiently as possible? So you could stand there in your own, like, figure out which key— not wrong key, try that key, try that key— or AI in this instance will tell you that key matches that lock. And so you can efficiently put the key in, turn the door, and move on to the next task, the next email, whatever it might be. So the big picture of AI is really how do we make our lives more efficient? How do we be more productive? And how do we do things that actually, you know, we enjoy and we don't have to do the things that we don't enjoy so much. So that's probably my big picture of like how AI actually operates or how it works in a very simplistic form. Again, someone that designs this probably would go, that's very simple, Adrian.

Look, I like the way that you've explained that. And there's a lot of people that like, you know, I mean, it's funny how AI has come in and most people thought AI and automation would replace blue-collar workers in the first instance. And it's actually turned out not to be that way. It's kind of coming for more of the white-collar stuff, which is interesting. But my view on it is, correct me if I'm wrong, right, is that from a business perspective, Yep. Right, is that we're gonna move to, you go to a service provider that has all the expertise or you go to a new service provider who has the AI for the thing that you want and you pay to use that on a subscription.

Yeah.

That's kind of how I think it'll, things will pan out over the next 5 to 10 years and who owns the AI is, is who owns the information and yeah, it'll start off free like everything starts off free and then all of a sudden there'll be a subscription to use the thing and then that's kind of how it'll work. I hope that's the case. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I, I mean, AI is data. That's all it is. And so the person that can accumulate the most amount of data wins this race. And it is a tech race in many ways because everyone's trying to find, everyone's trying to solve a problem. And each AI model is trying to consume as much data as possible to solve a particular problem or multiple problems.

Mm-hmm.

And so you're exactly right in what's gonna happen is people are gonna be paying and you're just gonna have bolt-on services. This AI product gives me that outcome. This AI product gives me that outcome. And so it'll become on how do you actually start to look at what AI, what problem you're trying to solve, and then what products out there to actually make that as efficient as possible. Yeah, I think you're exactly right.

And so like the— I was chatting about this last night watching the Formula 1 as it happens, right? Because if you remember, we all had— it depends on what country you're listening to this, but like, you know, there's Fox Sports, there's Sky Sports, there's all the different sports channels. And back in the day, you had to buy that whole package. You couldn't just buy the isolated sports package. Do you remember that, right? And then it was like, oh, I just, I don't care about all the other shit, right? I just want this sport thing, right? And so now that's come alive a little bit, but these guys only do this thing. And then these other crowd only do the other thing. And so you end up having to get 3 subscriptions. So you end up paying what you were previously paying anyway at the end of the day. But now you kind of have direct access and it's changed, it's more efficient, you can only tune in into the stuff that you want to do, but it's not all on one platform.

Exactly right. Yeah, no, it's— you're going to get to the point where, like, people are going to find more and more ways to actually be able to find these things. Because the issue at the moment is, is where do you start, right? Like, most people are going, I've heard about AI, or ChatGPT seems to be the main one, but where the heck do I start in this kind of journey to AI, and how do I actually implement this into my business? And like, nobody knows.

Hey legend, just quickly, if you got any sort of value from this video so far, the only ask I've got of you is we don't do any advertising, we don't make any money from this channel, is that you just hit the subscribe button so other construction companies, people in construction can find the videos, save themselves money, avoid disputes, and be contractually better as construction companies. Let's get back to it.

And so as time goes on, there's going to be more marketplaces that allow you to go, yeah, I want this, I want this, and I want this, and I want plummet into this solution for that outcome. And so it will get easier. At the moment, it just feels like there's all these AI products that have just been released very quickly, very, very quickly. But it's hard to keep, you can't keep up. And every day there's something else.

And then there's also that, you know, the first adopter sort of thing is like, you know, sometimes you are the first adopter, but then the kind of second adopter, the slightly later adopters learn from the mistakes that the first adopters make, you know, and there's quite a lot to it. It's very, very interesting. And then some people would say a little bit scary. What do you say to people that think that AI are coming for their jobs?

Yeah, I mean, the internet was scary, right? And before that, cars were scary for those that thought that horses were the only way. Like, it is scary because it has changed. Like, that's probably what people are feeling, like the way that I used to do things is this way, and now this is saying that I'm actually not needed in process anymore. And that, that's pretty confronting in a lot of ways.

It is. It is.

Um, I would try and help someone reframe this to go like Stanford just released a report, it's called the AI Index Report, and they look across every industry, they look across basically anyone that's writing journals about this, anyone that's doing investment into it. It's— they release it every year and they said these like alarming stats, which I just put up on LinkedIn just recently, but I just said 88% of the people that went through this When I've adopted AI into my actual organization, I'm more productive. So it's not about replacing you, it's actually about how do I help you be more productive? 74% said I can now focus on more satisfying work. So it's, it's actually trying to take the stuff off you that you don't enjoy. Imagine if you could do that in your day. Yeah, fantastic. 60% said I feel more fulfilled with my job. So it's actually helping the culture of an organization more than anything as well. A bunch said I'm faster with repetitive tasks, 96% in fact. 88%, I complete my task far quicker, and 73%, I'm more in the flow. So AI is not about trying to take your job. It's about trying to take parts of your job that you could actually outsource and go, well, I don't actually want to look through Excel spreadsheets. I could just get something to do a formula for me and actually just give me the outcome. So yeah, it's scary, but it's also really exciting. And so it's just really how we approach this and how we frame it and how much we're willing to actually dive into it and go, how could this actually help me in what I do?

So yeah, it feels like— I think it's a challenge for some people, Adrian, in that, you know, years ago, if you were on a, you know, large construction site, yeah, and you were a truck driver of some kind, well, you know, and they said we're bringing in driverless trucks, it's coming, right? They exist. And so you're confronted with that situation, which is kind of a situation you're confronted with now, depending on what it is.

Yeah.

So you could continue to drive a truck and make no changes to your life whatsoever, or you could adopt the change and all of a sudden you're, instead of being in a remote location, you're driving 5 trucks from an air-conditioned room in your own house or an air-conditioned room in, in the city. So that's kind of the way I think construction people should, should look at it as well. And then also there's a very good book by a guy called Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time. Yeah, and it made me think when you said it, it made me jump into my head because most of our listeners are owners or like senior management of construction companies. And so a lot of what you're trying to do is buy back your time. And so by hiring people, I need someone to do my marketing, my delivery, or a supervisor here or whatever. And so those people allow you to not do that and then push the business forward. So the way you described it to me, was fantastic in that you can use— that's an AI tool that you can do. You can get AI to do these little things for you so you now have more time.

It's fantastic. Yeah. And that, that is key. And I think trying to keep that big picture in mind too, as a business owner or someone in senior leadership, it's trying to understand what are the blockages in this particular task or this day or this job in construction? What are the sticking points that I know are going to come up where if there was a tool to help me assess that ahead of time could really help the site, it could help managers, could help our bottom line. Like, so it's trying to understand that AI is actually just like another hammer on the belt to go, how do we actually use this to be, you know, a hammer to a nail gun? Like, it kind of feels like that is the adoption of AI into an organization to go, well, I could just keep hammering this nail with a hammer, or I could just use a nail gun and just get that sucker in and move on. And so I feel like that's how you would reframe it and how it you would look at AI in an organization.

Yeah, I agree. To try and get it into our organization, I mean, ChatGPT has only been around like not very long.

Yeah.

And to try and get it in our organization, we gave a $1,000 bonus to someone who could implement an AI thing into the business to save the business time. And we had a marketing girl who does the video editing for the podcast and clips that we put out there. And she was able to find a tool that saved her 4 hours every single day.

That's—

so that was that, like, you know what I mean? That's basically half, like, she has now 50% more time, like, full stop, to do more stuff basically, which allows us to propel the business forward, which is, you know, fantastic. Adrian, what are the layers of AI?

Yeah, I think, I think when I talk about layers is I talk about it from, let's start with an individual first and how do we actually have AI in our own life or actually start to embed it or to take hold of it in our own life, whether that personally, you You know, what does it look like for budgets and finding tools that help us actually allocate our own budget and whether we're on track, our grocery lists. And so when I talk about AI layers, I talk about it in layers of approach. And so as an individual, what does it look like to actually have this in our home? And how do I actually use this to do the stuff that I just don't want to do? And that could be budget, could be shopping lists, it could be, you know, making sure that we've got alerts set up and what are the themes. And it kind of feels like when you get in the car and you connect your phone to Bluetooth it knows that you're going to a particular destination and it's like you've got 13 minutes to get there. It's super helpful. So how do we actually do that as an individual in our own house? Then we talk about it from a team, whether you lead a team, whether you are part of a team, what does it— whatever it looks like. And so the next layer is, okay, well, from an organizational point of view, how do we embed AI into a team? What does it look like for the team that I manage on site or in an office or whatever it does? And then it starts to move up into like your entire organization. And so the reason I say it in layers is that we need to make AI approachable because at the moment it feels really unapproachable. It feels really daunting. And like I said before, there's just so much out there.

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