In this segment, a speaker (Speaker A) discusses the common impulse among AEC firms to launch learning initiatives by creating a high‑quality, AI‑enabled onboarding course using a design‑build approach. They describe the desire to set up a professional recording studio, produce short, accessible video snippets, and raise the overall learning experience while simultaneously building the course. The speaker questions whether this design‑build starting point is optimal, wondering if firms should instead begin earlier in the learning pipeline—identifying high‑impact needs before investing in production. Christopher Parsons acknowledges the point, prompting a deeper conversation about the trade‑offs between early high‑production efforts and strategic pipeline placement for learning initiatives.
I'm gonna say where I think a lot of firms want to start, or people, humans want to start, and like, I may or may not be one of those humans depending on the topic, is with design and build.
Hmm.
It's like, great, I'm gonna create a course, or we want to create a course. We know that there's this new tool set, and generally I know onboarding should be better, so I'm just gonna create an onboarding course, see what it's like. I'm gonna get it in Design Build. And actually before that I might be like, And I need to set up a recording studio because I want this to be high quality and I want it to be in short snippets because I want it to be accessible by an AI and I want it to be modern and meet my new employees where they are. I don't want them to— I want them to have a good experience. So I'm going to like get the right lights. I'm going to write a script. I'm going to practice a bunch, you know, and then I'm going to record this thing. So it's not only design-build, but it's also raising the bar while you're doing design-build. Yeah, so I know I, I've talked with some of our clients who've started there. Yeah, I'm curious what your thought is on starting there versus starting, you know, more at the beginning of the pipeline.
Yeah, I think whenever you have a platform shift like this, and I do consider this a platform shift and a paradigm shift, there's always the kind of temptation or maybe even habit to go towards step 10, you know, versus starting at the beginning because you see the promise. And so, you know, in kind of a traditional— this may be a bit unfair, but like for a traditional kind of learning organization in AEC, the root, most atomic level of learning and development right now is the hour-long lunch and learn generally, or maybe an hour-long training session. Maybe it's not specifically a lunch and learn, but there's this hour thing that's delivered live or over Teams or Zoom or whatever. And then it gets recorded and it gets put on the internet or on a server, depending on what technology you have. And that's kind of it. It's kind of like if you were there live, cool, we'll give you some credits. And then if you missed it, you can go watch the recording. Or if you come 3 months later, hey, you should go watch this recording. The thing we hear again and again from our clients is those generally just don't really get seen, or they don't have the analytics to know if they get seen. Or maybe that hour-long recorded thing that was meant to be live isn't a really great learning experience for somebody coming to it after the fact. So that's kind of where people are starting. We show them the technology that we built around Synthesis and it's like, well, it's, you know, you can have these courses which have short lessons. Those courses can be assigned, people can discover them. We have full analytics to understand if people consume them or not. There's feedback built directly in. And oh, by the way, all that content is searchable in AI Search. So if someone just has a question about how to do a thing in Revit, or about a sustainability guideline, it can just answer their questions citing that course without you having to watch the whole hour-long thing. So there's this completely different paradigm that's become possible. And so then people want to run towards that and they think, first of all, we want to get there fast. But second of all, it's like we turn on the lights and it's like, oh wow, these existing ways we're doing it aren't going to meet the moment. And so we need to level up the quality. We've got all these old things, you know, and it's just, it can become overwhelming to the point like, Oh shoot, there's so much work to do. What started off as really exciting has now become dispiriting. Mm-hmm. And so I think you and I have seen that. And, and you know what I think we tried to redirect people towards is like, look, this is a journey. You're not gonna get there in 6 months. I mean, since you and I have been at Knowledge Architecture, we've always said you can't manage all the knowledge in your firm. There's too much of it. And so you have to prioritize. And what, I tried to do with the pipeline is help people go through a structured process to think about how to even identify what the biggest opportunities is to prioritize those and then right-size the learning opportunity that meets the moment. So for example, let's say you have— you said onboarding, so we'll start with that. That is an opportunity that you're going to onboard depending on your firm, 5, 10, 25, 30, whatever it is, number of people a year. You're gonna do that every year. It's something everybody that comes in the company goes through. So it's a high-impact moment to get somebody connected to your culture and awareness, and it's how they feel welcomed into the firm. And so you want to execute that really well. There's a huge ROI in nailing that. If you contrast that with somebody has a design presentation where they're introducing a new technology that can be used, maybe it's a new way of doing a structure like mass timber, or maybe it's a new kind of auditing framework, whatever the thing is, a new technology they can use for visualization. Maybe that one is like some people in the firm are going to use it. Sometimes it's kind of like almost more of an elective. And so you've kind of got this spectrum between really important strategic, this, this high usage, high volume thing all the way through something that'll get tapped sometimes. And so I think This pipeline was meant to help you walk through and realize not all opportunities are the same. Some of them don't really matter because they're not going to impact enough people. It's just kind of a nice idea, but it's not enough to justify the investment. And to help you systematically think through what matters and what doesn't, to what degree, how do we build something compelling? Who is our audience really? Involving learners and helping shape the content and understanding if it's working. It's really meant to help people not get overwhelmed and have a more methodical way to move through it, if that makes sense.
