How AEC Firms Are Turning Learning Content Into Searchable Knowledge

they realize it's going to be consumed just in time via AI search because someone is looking for information about adding people to the ACC/FORMA plan.

Right.

And I feel like there's another thing that can happen there, which is understanding that your course can be consumed by someone who has a problem and is just trying to solve it might change the courses you develop, might change the people who are interested in developing courses.

Yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah. So it's like both— I mean, here's the thing, beginning with the end in mind, right? So the end in mind is this might get consumed by AI Search. The end in mind might be people who aren't necessarily the target audience for this, but may have useful knowledge in here that helps them continue solving problems on their project. The end in mind might be the person who goes through the course but doesn't remember what it was 6 months from now. And in the old way, at the Lionoss example, they had all the recordings of all of those sessions, but they were, you know, as we talked about before, the long hour, hour and a half, 2-hour version, and people just didn't go back to them because they were very linear assets and they're hard to break apart and hard to find exactly what it is you're looking for. And so for Christina and her team, it's like, it's a little bit more of a lift in 2026 to redo this content and do it in this way versus just show up again in 2026, teach it using the slides we already have.

You mean in 2027?

Well, I guess they redid it in 2026, so like they could have come into 2026 being like, look, we've already got this stuff developed, let's just do it. Or they're like, nope, we're going to start over because we believe in '27, '28, '29 This'll save us a lot of time. And also once this stuff hits Leo, that's the name of their synthesis intranet, that means that knowledge is searchable for everybody else in the company. And so it's immediately put to work as an asset. So that return on knowledge is much higher, which justifies that short-term investment, which I would argue is probably gonna save them time over the long haul. And Christina from Linakis has also been working not just on the design technology stuff, but she was telling me about some of the practice bootcamps they're putting together and working with a subject matter expert who, once she told them his job was to show up, talk about his expertise for 10 to 15 minutes, and then go away, like, he's like, great, that's all I have to do. That's all you have to do. We're gonna handle the editing, we're gonna handle the packaging, we'll create a course out of it, we'll run it by you as a draft. And so in that case, you're increasing the return for the organization. You're lowering the investment for the subject matter expert and maybe you're increasing the investment a little bit for the org, but you still come out net positive when you think about what capturing this knowledge can do for the organization. So I think it's that calculus. I don't know of anybody that's actually— I take it back. Jess Purcell and the team at Shepley Boffins have actually calculated out the hours of doing it the old way versus doing it the new way. In her K Connect 2025 talk, she goes through that in detail. It's Fascinating stuff. But most firms haven't calculated, but they can feel it. They're like, yes, this is gut test. This is going to make us more efficient and more capable. And it's a good use of our investment.