Do AEC Firms Still Need to Organize Information in the AI Era

Another thing that, you know, you and I had talked prior to the show about, I was curious what trends you were seeing. And of course you came back with a list of, like, all the trends, which is awesome. But maybe if I could pinpoint two of them in particular that I think that are really closely related was you mentioned seeing the trend in the way that we organize information is actually changing, and then the idea of kind of recording knowledge in the flow of work. And I think those are seem to be related in my mind, but maybe talk a little bit more about those two trends.

Yeah, so just to give some context of what you're referring to, so I started a newsletter back in May called Smarter by Design, which basically argues that AEC firms should spend as much energy and time designing their businesses as they do buildings and infrastructure. Like, that business is a design problem. And so the. This is kind of issue six, which I guess by the time this podcast probably comes out will be out of Smarter by Design. It all came from a question that I got at the end of a webinar I ran about a month and a half ago, which was, how is the role of an AEC knowledge manager changing because of AI? Which spun off like a bunch of interviews and surveys that I ran within the AEC knowledge management community to say, like, really, like, how are AEC knowledge management teams changing to evolve and thrive in the era of AI? Like, that was the big picture question. So you picked two of the trends. So from an information architecture perspective, what I kind of have teased out, because anytime something new is like this happening, people will stake out kind of wild takes on either end of the spectrum. And it's fun to kind of hear the wild takes and then figure out where things ends up being. So one argument that was being made was, look, AI is so smart that, like, it doesn't make any sense to put any effort into organizing information anymore. It just all goes in one big bucket and just AI is going to be able to find it. And on the other end of the spectrum, you had, you know, we have people in our communities who have library science backgrounds or research backgrounds, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no. In the era of AI, information architecture is even more important because that context and the metadata and the taxonomy and the structure and, like, I can use all that to help find what it's looking for. And if you don't do that, AI is going to get confused and it's not going to understand what's more important than other things. And so it was like, we had a call with like our research council, which is kind of our, you know, some of the leading firms that we work with. And they was a really rigorous debate here. And I think the consensus view is it's both like at the very kind of top level of information architecture, level one, level two, level three and organization, that that really matters. Not only because AI will use it as context, but because you still have humans working in your business and humans will still browse, right? Humans will still navigate that way. But more than that, your information architecture tells a story of who you are, what you value, what you put up at level one over level two actually says something. Or are you organized by market sector, or are you organized by department or service? All of those decisions? Information architecture makes that explicit. And so as people, whether it's on your website or whether it's on your intranet, as they interact with it, they learn about what matters within the company. And so the thought was you have a very kind of like top level structure. You still put a lot of intentionality into it, but lower levels than that, that's where AI can really shine. You're getting into the long tail of information at level four, level five, level six, maybe just let AI work on finding that out. So that's kind of where we got that information architecture is changing, but that it still is important.