Inside Synthesis: Firmwide AI Search with Christopher Parsons | BIM Pure Live #100

Sam.

Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of Bimpure Live. I am a host, Nicola Catalier. I am an architect, a BIM specialist and the founder of Bimpure. And this is bimpure live episode 100. So thanks to everyone for tuning in all the way and supporting us for 100 episodes. Pretty cool, right? So if you are watching live today, June 11, 2025, you can type in the chat where you are watching from. So I see we have Isham from Kamloops. So keep saying where you're watching. That's always interesting. Before moving to the guests, a couple of things to mention. First, thanks to Peroes for sponsoring this episode and season of Mimpure Live. This is a detailed management system for Revit and in fact last week we've had an episode with Peter and Alexander from representing a client that use Pro so we can check that out. And the feature of the week is updating details. So we already explored how to upload new elements and in this case let's say that you want to update the details and you want to review it. You can go to the platform, tag a teammate and start annotating the drawing on the cloud. So you can see here we for example we select this dimension and and the detail master, which can be a project manager or just a detail expert that doesn't use Revit, can tag it and tell that user to modify it. So the user can go back to Revit, find the detail that has been annotated on the cloud, enter the view, make the necessary changes. You can see in this case it adjusted dimension so it is 9 inches as indicated by the markups and they can sync to update that specific detail back to the cloud as you can see here. And that user can also include a message to say what exactly has been changed, in this case changing the dimension to 9 inches. And then users will receive an email telling them that this detail has been updated in specific projects and they can decide well do they want to update it, keep the old one so they can go to the platform, update it and sync it back to the Revit model. So this way if you have the same detail being used in a lots of different projects, it is extremely easy to replace all the details or you can keep the old one if you prefer. So it lets you Piros lets you decide what you would rather do. So check it out@piros.com I am thrilled they're sponsoring the season of Bimpure Live. And make sure to check out last week, two weeks ago in fact Episode with Peter Exander where we really went deep on all the features. All right, that's the first one we've got. Also Randall from New York and Andrek from Madrid and breaking Bren from Winnipeg and. All right, a couple more things to announce the season finale, then we'll take a break for the summer. Episode 101 with Altaf Ganihar, the CEO of Snaptrude, an emerging BIM modeling app that is being fully redesigned. We had an episode with Altaf, I think that was two years ago, but now the hat has changed a lot. There are a pretty big team, almost 100 people working on the redesign. So that should be fun. That is in two weeks from now, on June 25th at same time, 3pm Eastern and. All right, almost done, guys. And finally on Monday, we're going to release a brand new mini course on Vimpure. It is called Create Gorgeous revit images with D5 render. I've been a longtime fan of Enscape, I still am, but I've been really blown away by. Someone says the audio is quiet. I hope it's fine. I've been really blown away by D5 render. And we've created a mini course with ND Cristoforu of KPF and Archviz expert. And yeah, it is out on Monday and we take a project from a Bimpure reader and create an amazing render image in one hour.

And.

Yeah, so give me a sec. All right, I hope the. The mic should be better now. Right. Okay, so introducing to the show, Chris Paulson is the CEO of Knowledge Architecture. Welcome, Chris.

Hey. Thank you. It's great to be here.

All right, nice seeing you. So just quickly, just to fix that, get that out of the way, some people mentioned that there was some audio. Do you hear me?

Fine, Chris, you sound great to me.

All right. Yeah, you too. So if there's any issues on YouTube, please let us know. So, okay, I want to hear about a bit about your background. And you ended up being, before being CEO of Norwich Architecture and phoning it, you were the Chief Information Officer at Steinberg Architects. Can you tell me what is a Chief Information Officer and how did you end up with this position?

Yeah, I'll go back one, one step further. So I started as I was an IT director at smwm, who is an architecture firm here in San Francisco and New York, did everything technology related. So from kind of servers and network to design technology, it was cad, it was archicad, and then it was becoming Revit. So like really when that BIM Revolution was happening. And then the part of the thing I love, which was called knowledge management, so that could be like an intranet or it could be learning and development, it could be a CRM. So there was all that stuff. So to me, that's what it is in architecture. It's those kind of three buckets of kind of core IT design, technology and knowledge management. And so I went to. I was there for about five years. It was like an 80 person firm. And then I went to Steinberg, which was bigger. It was like 150 people, like three offices, three and a half offices. Yeah. And so a chief Information officer is just reflecting that, like you want to put someone that's looking over technology at the C level and recognizing that, you know, this was kind of 2006ish, that people really understood our future in architecture is reliant on being competent in technology. And so we need someone at the table who knows how to move the firm forward with technology. So that's generally what a CIO does.

But originally you were not an architect. Right. What did you study at the time?

I was a history major.

History major.

I was a history major and I graduated in 1999. My plan was to go to law for law school and become a lawyer. But the 1999 that. This might be history for some of your listeners, but like there was the dot com boom happen.

Yeah.

And what that was was just the explosion of the Internet. Almost like what we're seeing with an AI boom now, but for just the Internet in general. And so anybody who knew anything about technology and had a heartbeat could get hired into technology consulting. Like it was like there was just a talent shortage. And so I took a job before going to law school. I took a year. I said, I'll take a year and I'll go work. And I got into technology consulting, did that for a couple years. And then dot com thing exploded and busted. And I was in San Francisco and there were no jobs in technology, especially for somebody with only two years of experience. So I took this job in this architecture firm to help them with technology to ride out that recession and hopefully go right back to Silicon Valley and tech on the other side. But I fell in love with architecture and never left. So I love the application of technology to architecture. But I went to all of our crits, I went to all of our learning sessions. I like took all kinds of courses on architecture and materials. So I can speak it pretty well because I really loved it and worked in those two firms for about eight years before starting Ka so what did.

You like specifically about architecture? Why did you fell in love with it?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, our firm did a lot of work in the city and so there's a project in San Francisco called the Ferry Building, which is this beautiful food hall, but it's also the Ferry Center. And it was, I could go on the history of that building, but it's just like a central part and like our firm led the design of that, which I thought was really cool. Like there's all these places I go in the city and like the company I worked at like made these spaces happen. So I liked that. But like I liked the way that technology was changing in architecture. I like the science aspect, but it's also an art, you know. And then, you know, when you do public work it's also kind of politics, you know. And so then there's historic preservation. So I just found the problem solving and the coordination of these huge teams of specialists to deliver a custom thing. I just thought it was endlessly interesting to me.

And why did you start Knowledge Architecture? So that was 2009 and I find the year interesting. You just mentioned the Internet bubble in 99 and then you had the financial crisis in 2008, 2009. So I don't know if there's a link between these two. Yeah, lots of things happening in your life while there are recessions or bubbles.

It's true, I mean, I think so the reason I started it wasn't related to the recession, although it ended up being a part of the story. I tried to do knowledge management in both of those companies I worked in. And two things were really hard about that. The technology wasn't there. There weren't, there just wasn't software for doing that, specifically for doing it for AEC firms. And then there just wasn't like a community and there weren't lessons about how to do knowledge management. Like knowledge management was a term getting used in like NASA and like the army and like you know, big, huge corporate America. But like we weren't using that in architecture. But I'm like, but we are knowledge based businesses. Like we should be really strategic and intentional about how we steward and manage the knowledge in our companies. So after kind of like struggling with it on my own, I'm like, I could either go to one of the big firms, big architecture firms, and try and become a director of knowledge management or I could start a company and help kind of more small and mid sized firms that I grew up in with knowledge management. And I chose the Latter path. And yeah, I didn't really know what the business was going to be. You know, I'm like, am I a consultant? Like, do I go in and help firms like one client, get four clients, go one day a week and help each client and then send bills on Friday, or do I build a software thing? Like I really experimented for about a year and then we figured out that we, what we wanted to be was a software company because I had built kind of really crude versions of what has now become synthesis at the last firm and my peers in IT and AEC saw it and they're like, we need something like that. So that, that kind of like pulled me into it. It just so happened that that coincided with a recession which meant that I had to go rt our company was starting to cut back on jobs and do reduction in force. And I'm like, look, I'll go part time. You know, that'll save one of the guys on my team's job. And then in the part, in the time when I wasn't at the company, I started the, I started Knowledge Architecture. So like on Thursdays, Fridays, weekends, Saturdays, I was just like all out, like getting the company off the ground. So I worked both jobs for about 10 months and it was intense.

Really. Okay, so it was a part time.

Project at first it was, it was a part time project. Well, it was a full time project and I also had a part time job. Yeah, so it was an intense year, but it got us off the ground.

Okay, so soon we're going to demonstrate synthesis. But before getting there, I just have questions or I think we should talk a bit about the idea of, of knowledge in the industry. And maybe I should go in my little rant that I became a full time BIM consultant four years and a half ago now. And so clients hired me to help them out with revit and set up their BIM and check out what's, what's going on. And I've realized working with many firms that said, hey, things are not really working out, we're not being as efficient as we want to. So I would go in there and their team was competent. The rivet template was actually fine. You can always pinpoint things. But then I ask, so where are your standards? How do you manage onboarding? How do you manage information training and so on? And they're like, oh, we have an old PDF somewhere that is like 5 years old that no one reads because it's completely out of date. And how do you deal with knowledge? How do you explain the workflow to your team, it's like, well, they just ask the BIM manager. So it was like, that's the problem. And I went into this rabbit hole of trying to understand how to solve the issue and the best practices to take knowledge and put it out there. So I guess my experience comes from working with small to medium firms, certainly not larger firms. But I realized this is critical. And in fact now whenever I work with clients, it's always part of the deal to check out how to manage knowledge. So I don't know what the question is at this point. It's just my little rant to how managing knowledge, it's crucial. If you don't have it, everything can fall apart.

Well, I pick up on like. So you gave a big BIM example. Yes, Project management.

Exactly.

Marketing, project history, HR stuff. Like there's we are not, we are, we are swimming in knowledge in aec. And I, I think the degree to which firms are able to be intentional about making it easy for people to find, keeping it up to date, sharing it, onboarding people, grooming the next generation. Like there's all these practices in knowledge management that recognize that you're, once you kind of see that you're a knowledge based firm, you know, it's kind of like a fish that's in water but doesn't know it's in water. Once you become self aware, then it becomes overwhelming because you're like, oh my gosh, there's knowledge everywhere. Like, where do we even start? And so a lot of knowledge management is just about being strategic and prioritizing what knowledge that lives in somebody's head or does has never been written down. We don't even have like what knowledge is the most important. How do we get that documented, delivered to the right people, made accessible and then you just keep going, right? You just, you can't do it all at once. You can't boil the ocean. And so a lot of knowledge management is about prioritization. And yeah, it's a really. Most firms are doing knowledge management. They just don't call it that. You know, you have to, you can't grow from being 30 people to 100 people without transferring some knowledge. But a lot of it happens in a reactive way and doesn't necessarily happen proactively and intentionally. And so it could just be easier. Like because firms go through a lot of growing pains usually as they get larger. And you see that you probably get brought in when there's a growing pain. Right? It's like these, like five people know how to do this but like everybody knows how to do this. Like that's knowledge management.

Yeah, for sure. There's still a growth point where like the way they used to do things where it was pretty roughly organized, it doesn't work anymore when there's a bunch of new hires. And I guess for many people it was just. Well, we have this PDF documents that explains how to deal with it. And it seems that you were pretty early in this idea that in your case it's an intranet, but an online platform where everything is there and you can search through it instead of flipping through trying to find the right PDF somewhere. So I guess my next question then we can move to the demo of Synthesis. So mostly I recommend client check out Notion or check out other tools in that vein. What is the difference between Synthesis and Notion? So in your case it's an AC specific tool.

Yeah.

So yeah. How do you see this?

Sure. I mean it's interesting that you brought up Notion because we, we kind of compete like so most of our firms are 25 people or higher, Many of them are larger than that. And so on the smaller end of the scale we compete with Notion, you get much further north of 25 people, we compete with SharePoint. So it's the kind of same idea like you've got this non industry specific platform that a lot of people use. And so there's a variety of ways to answer your question. I'll just try and do it at a high level. So we're an intranet, we have an AI search component built in. We are building a learning management system into the platform. So it's kind of knowledge and learning in one place. But we have deep integrations into systems like Deltec and Uninet and Open Asset and New Forma and other kind of common technologies that allow us to understand that you have employees, you have projects, you have data about them. We understand what the language of these firms is. And so even as we're building our learning management system, we're handling continuing education credits. So we take kind of like a few different pieces of software which are usually separate, we integrate them into one system and then we've made it AEC specific through kind of functionality, but then also through integrations. And then we provide a community that you're part of if you join. So you get with other AEC firms to learn about doing knowledge sharing. We do online, you know, we have a conference, we have an online community where people can ask questions. So it's like it's not just the product, it's also the community and the best practices and all that stuff too. So that's my short answer. I think it was short.

All right, so I think people are eager to have a look at the platform. So let's switch to your screen so now we can see what you're sharing. So this is Synthesis. So the name of the company, Knowledge Architecture, the product is Synthesis. Right?

Right. Yep, yep. And we're looking at a demo environment that's completely unbranded. But this is pretty representative of ways that people use the product. So I'm going to go at like a high level and if you want me to dig into anything or if anyone in the comments wants me to dig into anything more, I'm happy to do that.

Okay. Maybe I just have one final question before we get to the demo about the intranet. So what's really the difference? Why does it matter for people that it's intranet or Internet?

Oh, okay, sure.

How do you see this?

So think about an intranet as a website for your firm, like an internal website for your firm. So only people in the company can see the information that's on the Internet. It's got security to like you can even kind of permission within, even subsets within that. So if your principals want to have an area on an intranet or your marketing team needs a specific area that only they can see, you can do that. So it should look and feel a lot like a website. But the scope of it is just your knowledge and the people that will see it as just your employees.

Okay. And is there. So what's the difference for example, with that or having like a platform where like notion where it's on the Internet but everything can be through kind of a login wall to prevent.

Oh yeah, sure. So this is cloud. This is cloud based, you know, and it's login one. Yeah. So we integrate with Microsoft's authentication platform, Azure.

Okay, so it's intranet, but like the experience pretty similar that if you were using the platform. All right, now let's go for the demo. You're to see more. Let's go.

I'm going to kind of go at like kind of high, kind of three areas. So I'll talk about the knowledge base piece, I'll talk about internal communications and I'll talk about learning. So from a knowledge based piece, and this is all customizable across the top we have what we call communities. So this would be like a home community where you'd find things like orientation and about our company, different things than the offices that you might need in like an HR and office community, you might find something like human resources. So I can find all my benefits, the handbook, how I get promoted. So I can just kind of like drill down and I've got availability to all that kind of basic HR information, you know, that I would need as an employee or in, you know, professional development. We've got different items there, like role descriptions, so I can learn. All right, so I'm like a project manager. What does it mean to become a senior project manager so the company can write all like a lot of times, as you were mentioning, this stuff is all in people's heads, it's never been written down. And so on an intranet you can just make it explicit so that everybody can get access to it and find it. And then if you have offices, like multiple offices, you can have different landing pages for each of those offices and address and phone and who the office manager is and all that kind of stuff. One of the core areas that gets used is around supporting projects in practice. So for example, a standards library that can be organized by like CSI division or standard type. And so you can kind of just drill down and find, you know, the standard or specification you're looking for. A lot of our clients build these things called guides in synthesis. So this is a sustainability guide. So I can see the authors who wrote the sustainability guide and then I can drill into our office's approach to these different sustainability topics. Right, and so like how we kind of talk about embodied carbon, what are some of the strategies that we employ for reducing it and kind of so on and the same kind of approach for something like project management. So, right, this is again writing all the stuff down of how your firm operates, like the way that it works, like anything from billing rates to like how we start up projects to how we break down our work. All good stuff in technology. This heavily used part of synthesis in most of our clients. So you kind of document all the different applications you use. So because we're on Bimpure, maybe I'll go to Revit. And so you can see who are the kind of key points of contact for Revit. What resources do we have, like a standards guide or a content library or training videos. It's got a strong knowledge sharing component. So you can see recent posts that were written about Revit on the Internet. So you know, again, if I drill into standards, you know, I'll see kind of like how we talk about levels of detail and BIM execution plans and how we set up, do model construction all these kind of things. Am I going, Is this a good pace? Should I keep going like this? Is this working?

It's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. Over. You keep going.

Marketing. So you can imagine the kind of things that are here around brand guide and letterheads and templates, proposal libraries, resume libraries, project sheet libraries. And again, like, I can find all of the kind of project sheets for our firm and then I'm going to come back to learning at the end. So one of the things I jumped over in home is an employee directory. So this pulls data in from systems that I had mentioned before, like Azure, Active Directory, Deltec, Uninet, Open Asset, whatever your kind of like sources of truth are. And you've got kind of like an easily searchable directory of all your employees. You can kind of filter and drill down on different fields that you bring in. So if I just want to see people in San Francisco, for example, I can do that. We can set up different views of these directories. So for example, this is a licensed professional view. So I can say, hey, I need to see who's a registered architect in California, for example. Easily done. Or skills and experience. I'm looking for somebody who knows energy modeling in our Oakland office. Great. I can see that Brianne is the person. So part of knowledge management is connecting people to knowledge and another important part of it is connecting people to people.

Right.

How can I find the person in my firm who knows this skill, who's worked on this project type, who's in charge of this kind of technology, or who knows how this sustainability topic works? A lot of the magic and knowledge management is connecting people to people as well. One more thing I want to want to hit on while we're talking about employees is the same thing is true for projects. So we have project directories. I can filter by project type, you know, by state. I can even look at this on a map. So I want to see. Okay, I know we worked on this project kind of around Chicago. Drill in a little bit more. Yeah, it was up in Evanston. Right. It was a Northwest University performing arts center. So making that project history available to somebody so that they can find a project they're looking for, whether it's for a precedent or they're trying to figure out like, look, we're going to do a project like this. I want to see who the project manager was. Okay, that's Bert. Now I can go to his profile or I can get him up on teams or column or whatever I want to do. So I see like who worked on this project? I can see images of the project, construction costs, square footage where it was located, the different consultants that worked on it, project descriptions. So it's really like if you imagine kind of having like a LinkedIn inside your company for people projects, we do this also for like consultants and contractors. And so you've just got a really robust kind of knowledge base around not just the company's firm wide knowledge and the policies and procedures and standards, but then also the people and projects. All right, I went really fast. I still want to come back to learning and knowledge sharing, but like, I wanted to pause there to see if you had any questions or if there's anything from YouTube that I should address.

We've got one question from Oakplank. Can developers add their own pages to the site?

Can developers add their own pages? Users can add their own pages, meaning if you're an administrator in the platform, you just click add, you click page and then you kind of write pages. So it's like a notion or WordPress or a Squarespace if you've used those technologies. It's a really simple process for adding things. I don't know if that was the question or if like you want to add custom, custom parts and customizations into pages. We also support embed blocks and we support CSS and JavaScript. So if that was more of the question, then that would be the answer to that one.

All right. People are saying it's a good pace, so I do have some questions, but I can let you keep going.

Okay, cool, I'll keep going. So I mentioned learning. So right now we have video libraries in synthesis. So this is an example of a software training library. It's grouped by application. Again, I've got filters and I can drill down like before. The thing that's important about synthesis is that we transcribe all the videos that get uploaded to synthesis and we do so using an AEC specific video transcription model that we developed. So it's been trained on AEC jargon and terminology and product names. So it understands revit, not Rabbit or Ashray, not Ashtray. And so that's been really useful for both accessibility purposes for generating captions, but then also for search, which I'll come to. So all of the videos are fully searchable within the platform. Same with the documents we looked up before and the pages. Everything we've seen is fully searchable in the platform. So today this is part of how people are supporting learning programs. Some of our clients use our tools to do something like build courses. So they'll insert a video, they'll add a lesson summary or maybe a handout. There could be multiple modules in this course. So this is how people are doing learning management now, which is good. What we've heard from our community is they want it to go even further. So, and I'll talk about this a little bit later in the, in the session. We're building a proper learning management system in a synthesis, which means you can assign courses, you have a transcript. We can get people continuing education credits if the course has been approved for continuing education credits. So that's a whole nother can of worms are going down. But this is the way that we kind of support learning today. In addition to. And maybe this is a transition to talk about knowledge sharing. We have blogs basically within the platform. So you can just write a post like there's a video here about introduction to revit schedules and you can just share that within the firm. You can use hashtags. I'll click back to the home community.

And like people can comment on the.

People can comment. Yeah.

So on.

So there was a town hall that we just ran. Put the post up. We've got chapters in the videos as well. And then people can ask questions or they can kind of fill in, you know, more, more points. So like in this example, the CEO M wrote an update on the strategic plan she had. Here's some questions about our strategic plan. And then in the comments people are like chiming in and asking more questions. And it's a, it's a social intranet, but people use different. Oh good. Yeah.

I'm just curious, are these real people, I was wondering. Or it's kind of a made.

No, these are, these are invented people.

Invented people? Yeah.

A lot of them are based on real people. So yeah, people share project tours and new software and news and announcements and you know, it's a very visual industry. So they'll go out on the site and take some photos and share those back or award winning or. Jeffrey wrote this post about clash detection and so this is the kind of stuff that you might find in terms of knowledge sharing in the platform. So I want to talk about search a little bit, but did you have Nicolas Essenzo? You're queuing up a few questions so you want to do that before I jump?

All right, let's do a couple ones. We've got one of the chat from Mark Wessels. This looks great. Once it's set up, how much time, effort does it typically take a firm to get started?

Yeah. So it's interesting. On average, historically, it's been about four to five months. A lot of that depends on your firm size though. So some of the smaller firms go faster and they're also going faster. Just because companies are coming a little bit more organized these days, they're able to get value much more quickly out of the platform. So we've seen firms go live in six to eight weeks. But it depends on the state of your content. If it's the firm that you were talking about before, where you came in, and they're like, we just have this PDF and that's it. So part of implementing synthesis might also be documenting and writing content so that when it launches, you have new content. So the state of your existing content and how much energy you can put towards it, that determines how long it takes. But yeah, I gave you some averages.

All right, that's good. In terms of firm sizes. So typically you work with some of the larger firms. What is the average size firm? Are we more on the large size?

I think average is like 200, 250, somewhere in that range these days. But Interestingly enough, like 70% of our clients are under 300. So there are like some large firms that kind of skew the numbers, you know, so we work with, you know, the HGAs and Dewberry's and DLR groups and those kind of firms on the high end. And then we work down with a small, you know, 25 to 50 person firms on the low end. But like I'd say the average client is multi office, somewhere between 100 and 250 people. Like that's the majority of our client base.

All right, I see. Do you think this can work also for really smaller firms, like 20, 30 people or.

Yeah, I mean, we have clients that are that size right now, so we know it can work. But I don't think you have to have synthesis in order to do knowledge management. You know, I think, you know, documenting what your firm knows, getting in good habits of managing information and sharing information like that can be done with a variety of different tools, whether it's Notion or Basecamp or Google Docs even to get started. I mean, that's a pretty primitive tool. But like.

Yeah, yeah. I think for me, when I speak with firms, the number one thing is sometimes they're like, oh, if I document it, it almost has to be perfect, right? Everything is this neat little document. Everything's in order, the text is perfect, no typos, like, no, you can just start doing a draft and put it out there. If you have a bit of time, you can come and clean it up. But the most important, at least it's in there, especially if you can search it, right?

Yes. Yeah. And like search these days has become much more tolerant of typos and understanding semantic meaning. So the perfect spelling isn't as critical as it was. I understand that like people have a pride in, I mean we're designers in this industry so like you want things to be beautiful and well detailed. But you know, the cliche of perfect being the enemy to good can be very true in terms of knowledge management, where it's better to capture it and get started and iteratively improve than have everything dialed in and perfect all of your knowledge ready. Like it's much better to move quickly, create value and iterate.

Yes. Well, you know, I used to do PDF guides from the old architecture firm I worked at. It took a while and nowadays what I like with notion or I guess is similar with synthesis. You can just quick screenshot or even an animated gif, just paste it, copy, paste, copy, paste. And within like 10 minutes you can have a basic how to do this, a series of steps in revit setup. And you don't have to have the perfect PDF document to print ever again.

Yeah, and I think there's so many problems with PDFs. Like just you can take that project management guide we were in. Like if you want to update this 100 page PDF that used to be this project management guide, you know, then you have to like get out whatever your authoring tool, indesign Word, make the changes PDF it, upload it, get it to somebody. Now you're an end user so you want to get to the thing that's on page 75. So what you're doing, search within a PDF like it's just really cumbersome. So breaking these things down, this would, instead of being a PDF, it's just a series of pages and if I want to update it, I just edit the page, make my fix, add my gif, whatever it is, and just move on. So it's, it's a much more fluid way of like using documents, like using pages. Especially if it's like a collection of pages like this. It is a much better way for users and also the people maintaining the content and.

Okay, I got a couple questions from Thomas. Information about the pricing models, please.

Cool. It's price per hundred employees over 100 and then it's like 0 to 49 and then from 50 to 99. So it's based on employee bands is how Pricing works, but if you want to email us, we'd be happy to kind of take you through that. Okay.

Yeah. Thomas also asked, is there edit history and can you see who edited what?

Yep, yep. So right here you can see on the top of this page that I was the last one that edited it. And then if I edit the page and I can go into version history and I've got, I can see the whole history and I can even, you know, I can preview it and then I can roll back and go to a previous version if I need to. So. And you can also have pages in draft mode, you know, as you're composing them. So a lot of editing tools there.

Thomas also asked, can we link to specific paragraphs?

That's a great question. Yes, you can. If I went to, let's go to sustainability guide, let's go to, I don't know, embodied carbon. So I'll skip down. So when I hover next to one of these sections, I get an anchor link. So I can just copy this, send this to somebody will take them right to this section of the page. I can also build those links into the platform or into a post. So I can link somebody straight to a part of the page. And we can also do that with video. So because those videos have chapters, I can just link somebody straight to like chapter five, that's 35 minutes in. So we can send them right to that part of the video that might have the, you know, the revit works it tip they need or something like that.

Okay, other questions?

Actually, do you think I should do. Maybe I'll do search for a minute because expose some of these. So I'll start with something I'm going to, I'm going to cover like different kinds of search. But the newest thing we just put out is what we call advanced employee search, which lets me do something like this. So registered architects in California. And so it's searching across all the content in the intranet. It filtered kind of like down on the employee directory. And then it's going to generate an AI generated search summary that tells me like okay, we've got six registered architects in California. I got it by filtering the licenses by registered architect in states by California. Then everything in AI search is cited. So I can always drill back and understand where this information came from. I can ask follow up questions which I'll show in a minute. I can rate all of the searches. If I do that, I can say how accurate it was and I can give feedback that goes back to the knowledge management team. Who's running the intranet. So they understand if something was missing, if something was out of date, if something just needs to be removed. It's a really powerful way to get your knowledge kind of improved. So here's a search on who can help me with revit container files. And so I see that it's Brianne Walton, and I see that that came from the Revit Container files page. So if I click on that, I can see that the reason why we knew that she could help us with Revit container files is because she's listed as a contact on that page. So this kind of ties back to that thing I said earlier around. What you want to do is connect people to knowledge, but also connect people to people. So similar questions like that. Who can help me plan a flexible wet lab? We're citing her employ the wet labs page and her employee profile. Or who is our mass timber expert? So it's Julie. We're citing a post, we're citing a video about mass timber basics that she was mentioned in. And also our carbon sequestration page, who's our patient centered care expert? Who can I ask about reclaimed structural steel? This one's interesting because it's ada. And the reason we know it's ADA is because of this work she did on this Dropbox San Francisco project. And that's kind of citing this post. If I click on that, I can see that in this section it talks about ADA and her, you know, kind of what she was doing on reclaimed structural steel, like, kind of, etc. And like, how we delivered it. So what's interesting to me about this example is that here, like, Brenda was writing a project tour update, talking about, like, what happened on the project tour. And then downstream, somebody's looking for someone that can help understand reclaimed steel. And we're able to like, pull that social post in as a citation, as a way to get an answer. So I think that's a really powerful thing we've done.

I do have a question about search. So what part of it is AI and what part of this is just kind of a good old search? Is it the part that it creates the summary for you? You're right, I guess. Are you connecting to an LLM through an API like OpenAI or something like that?

Yeah, so I have a couple of diagrams to go in this more detail. But, like, at a high level, we're using a technique called retrieval Augmented generation or RAG for short. And so what that means is retrieval is we're doing search, so we don't Train a model on your data. We do a search. And so we go find, for example in this example search on Dropbox, which is a project in this company. And it did a search and it found things like Heather's profile, it found Holly's profile, it found a project record, it found a PDF in the marketing library, it found a post, it found a video. And so it sends those results to AI. And then that role of AI is to kind of figure out what was the question, what's the best answer? And it summarizes what it found in that content to generate the search summary. So it's an AI generated search summary. So the retrieval is the search part. And then augmented generation means the retrieval augments the generation. That's the AI part. And so yes, we're using OpenAI via Microsoft, so their enterprise offering, so this specifically for the nerds out there is ChatGPT 4.1 mini that's powering search as of today, also then puts in these citations so it knows it can prove where it got its information from.

Interesting. So that's from the OpenAI model. So how do you deal with hallucinations? Do you have any times that it invent people that don't exist or just provide the wrong information like ChatGPT sometimes does?

Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the reasons this retrieval augmented generation architecture was developed was specifically to counter hallucinations. So because we're rooting in your data like that does a lot to eliminate hallucinations. Because one of the problems with training models is they become out of date because they're just, they're only as accurate as the last time they were trained. And so I could add a page to synthesis right now as we're talking, do a search and that page can get referenced in AI search because we do the search first before we do the generation. So that really helps with hallucinations. Now if you have inaccurate information in your content, somebody might consider that hallucination. In my view, that's not a hallucination. That's just a wrong answer based on inaccurate content. The other thing that we did have to train synthesis on how to handle though is like if this post had cited ada, but ADA was no longer with the firm. We had to teach synthesis to understand and check the employee directory first. And if she's no longer with the firm, include that context to say that she's a former employee. But generally the hallucination rate has been pretty low. Sometimes it gets confused about what your question is, but over, you know, the Models keep improving underneath our product and that has really become less and less of a thing.

Yeah, but often the hallucinations are when AI cannot find good information, so it just makes stuff up. Right. So what happens if you search for something and there's just not good information about it? Will it say, sorry, we don't have anything to offer?

All right, I'm going to try something like this. So why is Steph Curry the best player ever? We're going to search the Internet across all the content and it cannot be answered. Nice.

Yeah. ChatGPT never says that. Right?

Never says it's. I don't know. So our product is a little more humble and it will tell you it doesn't know things.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. I like to use ChatGPT, especially if you try to use it with the Revit API, for example. It's very confident. Here's the code that you should use.

Right.

And it obviously doesn't work. Sometimes you do back and forth and it ends up working, but it never tells you, sorry, I don't have enough information to accomplish.

It wants to be really helpful, I guess, if we want to be. Well, like, it just really, you know, it really wants to help.

Another question from Oak Plank. Are the search multimodal? For example, does it have access to drawings?

That's a good question. So it can access. It can search pd, it can search documents. Right now it searches documents based on text in the documents. It doesn't understand. It's not doing like vision search or understanding imagery. That's something that we are evaluating for the future. That technology is getting much, much better really fast. And so we're kind of watching that to see if it's something to invest in. It's not just drawings, though. It's like imagine there was a presentation that somebody gave with a bunch of charts and graphs in it. And so right now, AI search can't understand the meaning of those charts and graphs. But there is emerging technology that looks like that's going to be possible, so we'll understand. You know, window wall ratio went down 5% and then therefore this happened. Like, that is like emerging technology. So we're hoping to get that into the product when it becomes more commercially available.

Yeah. Or what if you upload a screenshot and say, do we have any project that look like this or.

Yeah, exactly. So like kind of some image matching stuff. Yeah, that, that technology. There's a company called Open Asset that has an image database for architects and engineers that does some pretty cool AI generated Image search. So that's definitely worth checking out. One of the things though, on a kind of a multimodal. So not so much on the drawings, but like in this example you can see it citing a video and it says it came from 12 minutes and 36 seconds in. If I click on that, it will take me right to that part of the video that was cited in the search results. So it skips me right ahead. So you can imagine this example. Obviously I was trying to learn about the Dropbox project, but it could be we did an hour long training session on Mass Timber or we did an hour long training session on advanced Revit workflows. And users, instead of having to watch that hour video, they can just do a search and be taken straight to the specific part that helps them with the problem they're working on right now. So in knowledge management we call that putting knowledge in the flow of work so that someone doesn't have to stop and do like a research project in order to just solve the problem that's right in front of them. So the video search is something we're pretty excited about and our community loves.

Yeah, for sure. And I see you have chapters, kind of a YouTube style as well.

Yep, we have chapters. Exactly. Yep. And those are the ones when I mentioned before that you can link people. So you can, you know, when you're kind of including a link to the video, you can just pick what chapter you want to send somebody to.

All right, so that's AI Search.

Yeah, that's AI Search. I don't think there's. I had a couple more in here, but I think we've kind of covered the basics of it, so I think that's good. Oh, I didn't talk about follow up questions, so maybe I'll just do that. I just did some of these preloaded. So let's do Revit work sets. No, let's do why is my Revit model slow? So I like this one and so it'll give a lot of reasons from the content that it has on why it might be slow. But if I'm a novice, like maybe I don't know what design options are. So I can ask like, what are design options? And so it's going to do the same thing. It's going to do another search. Right. It's going to summarize that information and it's going to bring it back to me with citations. All right, so then it's kind of drawing back from a Revit terminology page and a model upkeep to Tell me more about it. And then again it's suggesting I go to Brianne if I've got more questions because she's the person that Synthesis recognizes as the go to person for revit.

So is that entirely based on this database or it also goes through Autodesk help page?

For now it's just based on the internal knowledge base. For now. We've considered doing what you just suggested. We have not done that yet.

Yeah, well, you know, I've tried ChatGPT for Revit questions or BIM and most of the time it's pretty good. But sometimes it just makes stuff up again. The algorithm problem, let's say, use this tool to fix this problem. It turns out the tool doesn't even exist or, you know, it's way off. So yeah, I like that. There's no way hallucinations here.

We've had people like. There's a guy named Corey Squire who some people in this community might know. He's the director of sustainability at Bora in Portland and he wrote a book in 2023 called People Planet Design and he just uploaded his whole book to their intranet. Right. It's like it's a full length book on sustainability. And now people are able to ask questions and get answers. Not only the content on their Internet, but that book that he uploaded as well. So I've heard other people doing that with some CAD and BIM books to like just upload that to get like a bunch of knowledge in the system. So it's kind of an interesting approach.

Do you have like building codes or things that are more general?

People will put building codes and upload those in. We don't have, we don't bring any building codes.

Like there's nothing preloaded by default.

We don't do anything preloaded, at least not currently.

Yeah, but it's, it's not that long. It's like building a custom GPT right, where you can just upload a bunch.

Of PDFs, you just upload some stuff and then it's searchable right away. Yep, it's a lot like that. Go ahead. Sorry.

Yeah, well, a few more questions from Thomas. Is there a kind of web hook so a bot can pass a message in Ms. Teams if there's a new content available?

We do have. I should just say I won't get. If Thomas, you want to reach out to me privately, I won't go in all the details on it, but like there are ways that you can get access to Synthesis content and return it back to something like Teams. So feel free to reach out LinkedIn or whatever it is.

Thomas, again, is there a newsletter option so people can be notified about specific topics?

Yep. So there's kind of two multiple levels to your question. So for example, if I want to see anything to do with projects in practice, if I click follow, I'll get notified when there's new content. We also have hashtags, so it's same thing. So if I want to see anything about digital practice, I can follow that hashtag and get updated with new information. And then we have a weekly update that goes out to everyone in the company that hits the most active topics over the last year. So it's kind of like a digest, like an automated weekly digest that goes out to folks, so. And that all goes out via email.

A question from Mike Taylor. Are there permission options to limit abilities to edit or access specific pieces of information?

Yep. So at the top level, I had mentioned these were called communities before. So if I click into projects and practice, I can see their community managers. So community managers can do everything basically in this projects and practice community. Above that is a global administrator who can do anything kind of across the whole platform. And then, you know, we've got another level down that below that called Content Editor, which is a little more restricted. And then there's just end users. So end users can share, anybody can write posts. But the community managers are really the people and the content editors are the people that do the majority of the content writing and uploading videos and doing all the stuff we talked about.

All right, where do you go from. From here. Any other tools? I know you have the LMS that you.

Yeah, maybe I'll talk briefly just about the. If, if people are interested, I can go in a little bit more about like how AI searches built.

Yeah, okay.

We can talk about that and maybe touch on LMS a little bit. So I'm going to share my screen again. I'm just going to go to something different and let's see. So tell me if I did this correctly. Yep, looks good.

Yep.

Okay, cool. So I kind of mentioned retrieval augmented generation before. This is the kind of visual diagram that explains that workflow. So we do a search, we're retrieving key parts of assets, we send that to a large language model, and then we generate the answer with citations. So we are moving towards the next evolution of that, which is called agentic rag or search agents is what some people are calling them. And so here's how it works. Now a query comes in like, who can help me With a drone survey, we first send that to a large language model, to an AI model to ask what kind of search is this? So is this a general knowledge based search or is this an employee search? So if it's a general search, we say like, great, you know, use these new tools at your disposal. So it will like allow it to categorize it like is it an employee name search or a role or title or expertise or directory filter? It'll do all that and then kind of like, you know, generate the result and send it back. If it was a general knowledge search, it will just do rag. So there's this kind of like giving, we're giving the search agent knowledge about what's available on the Internet. We're giving it tools so it can do like database queries or it can do content searches or combine the two and then it's got reasoning. So it has to think through what is this question about? Based on the tools I have at my disposal and the knowledge, which tool should I ask? Where should I get my answer? And then when it presents a draft answer it, it looks at the question again, says does I answer it? If it didn't answer it, well, it'll then loop back and try another strategy. So it's called agentic because it's really acting as an agent on your behalf and trying to find the best answer for you based on what's happening. So projects is the next piece that we're adding in. So I mentioned that we just released the employee search project. Search is the next piece so I can ask questions like, you know, what higher ed projects have we built in California and it can search across synthesis and find that answer. Or just to show off a little bit like what higher ed projects have we built in Massachusetts which were over 200,000 square feet? Or please list our lead silver hire projects or what projects have won AIA awards. This agentix search is the next big thing. It's going to allow us to handle more and more complicated questions and make the best use of the knowledge that's available in synthesis to answer those questions.

All right. Do you want to talk about a bit about lms?

Sure. You can do that? Yeah. So this is in development now. We're planning on going to public beta in the end of the year. We wanted to help our clients again as I mentioned, the very beginning people have been trying to use synthesis to do support learning and development and been doing pretty well. But really they wanted to be able to do things like assignments and courses and courses and learning paths and things like that. So this is an example of a course in synthesis. So you can see that on the right hand side, this is a course called Project Communications. It's got several lessons. I'm in the lesson on client communication strategies. I'm tracking my course progress. I can see who the instructors are and the facilitators. Courses will have quizzes. So for example, this one was asking what tool is most appropriate for team communication. So quizzes are great for kind of making sure that people are kind of returning learning as they're going. But also it's important for things like AIA credits or any kind of accreditation where they require quizzes as part of taking courses online. So it'll support that workflow too. People can rate their courses after they take them, and that feedback goes back to the instructors and learning management team. And also download certificates of completion. Learning paths are, if you imagine taking. They're kind of like playlists for courses. So you can take those courses. I've got an example here on general onboarding, which is seven courses. And then you can see that there's a project manager or onboarding, right? So that builds on the general onboarding, but specifically adds in like three more courses for project managers. So you can start understanding, like, somebody's a novice, they're new to the company in general, they're new to project management, they're new to revit, whatever it is. And you can build these paths for people to learn just quickly. Assignments. So you can assign people courses to individuals, but you can also assign, based on role or years with firm or a variety of different custom fields to be able to say, like, I want these courses to go to these people at this time. And then anytime there's somebody new that meets those conditions, they'll get automatically assigned those courses. So that's public beta at the end of this year. We're pretty excited about it. It's integrated directly into the intranet. AI Search will also search all the content on the LMS as well. So really it's a searchable knowledge and learning management program for AEC firm. So that's kind of the.

And so that's for people. The people with their own content, right?

With their own content. That's exactly. That's the focus in version one. And then as you and I know, we've talked about potentially ways to partner to bring in external content to help people that don't have the bandwidth or the expertise to develop it themselves. So stay tuned.

Yes. All right. There's a lot of questions.

Okay, cool. Maybe I'll do one thing and then we'll just questions and I'll stop sharing. Just a shameless plug for the Smarter by Design newsletter.

Yeah, that's new, right?

It's new. We just started it like a month ago and already got over 1,000 people subscribed. It's every other week. It's stories of how leading AEC firms are managing information, sharing knowledge and building learning organizations. You mentioned our K Connect conference. The theme is unlocking the promise of knowledge management with AI. So you can just search the Google on K Connect and you'll find it. And then finally this is just my contact information. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect.

Yeah, so you mentioned the K Connect. As I mentioned to you before the session started I had two different people tell me that K Connect was one of the best conference.

That's great to hear.

The most fun industry. So that's like in Utah in August.

The Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah. So it's up in the mountains. We do general sessions in the morning and then we do kind of choose your own adventure style stuff in the afternoon. So you can go to hangouts, you can go to like other people open up their laptops and they show what they're doing with synthesis. You can go hiking with somebody you just met and go deep and nerd out on some knowledge management topic. So it's a lot of fun.

Yeah, I mean Utah to hike. It's a pretty good place. Went to Zion and Bryce Canyon a few years ago. So pretty, pretty top quality scenery out there. All right, so let's have a look at some of the questions Thomas is also asking. Maybe I missed but can we connect OneDrive folders that will also be searched by the AI?

Not currently, no. You would have to upload that information.

To it to be searchable and interesting question for Mark Wessels. That might be a ways out but it would be great if an AI could crawl a firm existing materials and start inputting the information into your system.

Yeah, like. Do you mean like a net? I'm assuming that means like a network share or some other system and like automatically kind of do the.

Yeah, I don't know. I guess if you have like a 200 pages PDF maybe it could kind of.

Oh like split it into pages automatically for you. Something like that. It'd be cool.

Thomas again can be specific parts of the data be embedded on the website as well? I was thinking about project data and profile data.

It's interesting. We had an API in a previous version of synthesis built for just that. And not that many firms took advantage of it, so we ended up shutting it down. But there is a way to do that through our system and then also going straight to systems like Deltec and Open Assets API. But no, I'm happy to dig into that one over.

If you reach out from Sarah, Sarah Petrenko, she said that your contact information were too quickly on the screen. So what's the best way to find you again?

Sure. So LinkedIn for Christopher Parsons is probably the best here. I'll reshare it, though.

Yeah.

Come on, Zoom. You can do it. You can do it. Zoom. I believe in you. All right, there we go. All right, I put it back up.

There you go. Okay, so that's the. The contact information. You can pause the video.

Okay, cool. I'll have it there.

Exactly. I'll just search for Chris on LinkedIn. All right. Yeah, I think that's mostly it for the question. I do have a few ones myself. So is it mostly for architects or. It's also being used by engineers as well?

Yeah, it's about 60, 40 architects and engineers and no GCs yet. We have a couple who are looking very carefully. But for, you know, we've been in business since 2009. It's been. It's been AE the whole way. And then, you know, obviously integrated firms that do both A and E as well.

Yeah. I was wondering, did you have any firms that are not directly in AC look at it and say, oh, that's actually interesting.

Yes. Sell to them. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm serious. Like, we just don't. Because we don't connect into the systems they care about. We don't know their business. And so that kind of part that we bring around the community and the best practices, like, we don't know how to help a law firm, you know, or an accounting firm. Like, that's just not our. That's not our. Our strength. So we stick to what we know.

I like it.

AI search. I say, I don't know if I don't know.

Yeah, I like it. I mean, you decided to drill down, stay niche on this industry. Probably a smart choice. Yeah, yeah. Recently, when I was going to the. This rabbit hole of trying to find knowledge, it was this great book, Building a Second Brain by. Actually, some of the emails I sent was about it as well, and it resonated. And I think it's. The book is mostly. It's called By Building a Second Brain by Tiego Forte. That's the name of the Other the idea is the best ways to take all the knowledge that's in your head and organize it in a way that's easy to search. But I also think that was on a personal level. I think it also applied to a firm, wide level. So recently it feels that in the last few years there's been this buzz of notion capturing knowledge. So it's really interesting that you guys have been out there since 2009. Have you seen a renewed interest? Yes, yes. So you saw that buzz as well.

So I recently gave a kind of webinar two weeks ago, and I'm calling this KM 3.0 the Knowledge Management 3.0. And so there have been three kind of in my, again, sorry, history major, but there have been like three major km booms. One was in the late 90s because the Internet came out and so people wanted to digitize all the binders and physical documents and put them into something digital and searchable. And then when social media came out, that was the boomerang KM 2.0. So they wanted to use social media tools but for knowledge sharing. And now KM 3.0 is this AI thing. And people are realizing that, like, oh, okay, so if we can build a second brain for our company, that means that we can ask IT questions. When I mentioned the guy Corey, a bit bora before, but if Corey's at a job site, if Corey's on vacation, if Corey's visiting a client, like, people can still access his expertise when he's not in the office. And that's good for the employee, but it's great for Corey too. He's not the bottleneck anymore. Right. And Corey can like get what he knows out of his head and written down and he can start making room to go learn new things. Right. And kind of like go further into more strategic elements. So I definitely see a renewed, renewed interest in knowledge management now. It's pretty exciting to see, like people discovering it for the first time. Being like, there's this cool new thing called knowledge management. I'm like, sure, yeah, yeah. Like welcome, welcome to the party.

Yeah, yeah. Before the show, I think we talked about critical knowledge. And my anecdote was that I sometimes see firmware. All the weight is on a single person that does. The example of BIM again was in charge of everything.

Yeah.

And it's not well documented. And if that person leaves everything and fall apart. I've seen it actually where one person is in charge of BIM and revit and the person leaves and they don't know what to do. And I even seen some cases where they actually went back to using AutoCAD because they just didn't know how to deal with it. I guess that's critical knowledge. So what is critical knowledge? And how do you keep it on synthesis?

Yeah, so I like to think of critical knowledge as being rare and valuable inside your company. So it could be. It could be something like bim. It could be you've got one principal who knows how to do this, one very specific sustainable analysis for projects, and the only person in your company knows how to do it, which means if they leave or retire, that's not great. But it also means that only that one person can do it. So you can't scale that knowledge within the company. And so the practice of critical knowledge is prioritizing what that rare and valuable knowledge is within your company and trying to transfer it to other people proactively instead of waiting until somebody's retiring and they're blowing out the candles on their cake. And you're like, by the way, we have all these questions for you. It's too late if you wait till that long. And so in knowledge management, we talk about this idea of tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. So tacit knowledge is knowledge that's silent in somebody's head, and explicit knowledge is stuff that's written down. And the deal with experts that's really tricky in critical knowledge is that they don't know what they know, and they're not very good at explaining it. Like, they do this thing, but they don't know even know how they do it, or they don't remember what it was like to be a novice. So they don't even think about it as special. So, like, one of the best ways to transfer critical knowledge is to interview experts and have somebody that doesn't really know the thing ask them, because they'll ask really naive questions to kind of pull it out of them. And they'll ask them, like, okay, now give me an example on this project. Give me a project example. When this thing happened and you get them talking through their projects, and all of a sudden the insights start flowing out. And it turns out, hey, they've got this little spreadsheet scrolled away here, and they've got this little rule of thumb that they've memorized. Like, they just have all this deep expertise, but they couldn't write it down if you ask them because it's not available to them, you know, like, it's not in memory. It's, like, buried deep in the archives.

You know, I Mean I've worked at a few different architecture firm and that every single one of them that was typically an older person, that was just the guy that knew everything, the details guy, the code, you had a question, you went to him. Typically older person. I remember a couple of ones that had all these little pieces of paper next to the screen with little pieces of information. I guess that was knowledge management in some ways.

I mean in a very primitive way.

Yeah, in a primitive way, yeah. But with, but when the person leaves, he leaves with all this knowledge.

And it's kind of like those stickies wouldn't tell you anything. Like if you're an outsider you wouldn't know what to do with those things. So it's like behind the stickies that you need to kind of get into to be able to understand. And then. So what's interesting about critical knowledge is it's also getting this second wind because of AI. And so I've got a story and maybe we can put the, I don't know if you put stuff in the show notes or something like that later. But what he did, they have this, they have two experts. One is a super bluebeam high end person that knows all the ins and outs of Bluebeam and the other one, she's a healthcare seismic kind of specialist in California. So he interviewed them on video, took the video, threw it into synthesis, got that transcription made, took that out to perplexity and just interrogated it and said like write me all the key takeaways here. Basically build me a page based on this transcript, put that back on synthesis. Now you can search and ask questions about the seismic stuff, about all the bluebeam questions. And that was all that took 25 minutes of one of their time and 45 minutes of the other's time to just interview them very skillfully and then kind of curate that knowledge. So I think AI is really going to unlock a lot of this ability to not only capture it but then access it later, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So interviewing all these seniors, so the. Yeah, the knowledge.

And it's not only seniors, right. It could be that like the person that knows the most about whatever your rendering program is like maybe not senior and you want like more people to know, you know how to use Enscape or whatever it is. So it's really just figuring out an efficient way A because the expert doesn't know what they know but they're oftentimes really busy. So like how do you make that as efficient as possible and powerful as possible and then put it in a. Not that it's accessible to others.

And I think it's also a current limitation of AI in terms of like doing a complete set of architectural drawings, for example. They're limited for details. There's so much stuff that there's just a senior guy, he knows how to do the detail. And AI will never tell you the good answer because there's nothing to be trained in the first place on the Internet. Right, right.

And yeah, I mean, we're a little bit out of my comfort zone about saying can, but. But basically what I'm seeing in my work, like, I think we're a ways off from any of that stuff happening. But I think it can be really useful for like, you know, for example, like in marketing, we're working with a lot of our marketing directors and it can be really helpful for like, drafts of proposals, you know, because you can search through all this information and find, you know, what are the projects Nicola did in Chicago in the last five years? And then what's our approach to designing atriums? Like, there's a lot of knowledge there to, like, pull it together. But then a real person has to like, turn that into a design strategy you put in front of a prospective client. Like, that's not going to write a strategy for you. It's not creative. It's just summarizing what it's already learned. So you're not getting like new solutions necessarily.

All right, so I think that's a great overview of synthesis. Let me just close out the episode by mentioning a couple of things before we end the show. Just a minute here. All right, so the next episode of Benpure Live is going to be two weeks away from now on June 25th at the same time, 3pm Eastern. It's going to be with Alta Avginihar, the CEO of Snaptrude, coming back for the second time to talk about the brand new version of Snaptrude. And also thanks to Piros for sponsoring this season of Bimpure Live. And finally, make sure to check out our brand new mini course about D5 render with Indy Cristoforu that's going to be out next week on Monday. All right, back to you, Chris. So that was fascinating. I have potentially way more questions about the synthesis because I've been in this rabbit hole in the last few years, but that's enough for now. So any final word or announcement or thing you want to say before we put this to an end?

Yeah, shout out to Piros. I mean, we've hear really good things about those guys and their software from our clients. And we have a lot of mutual clients with them, and they love what those guys are building. So if folks haven't checked out Peros, I double underscore the endorsement of what they're doing.

Yeah, I think there's actually a link between. Between two pros is kind of doing knowledge management, but specifically, we're not the.

Only company doing knowledge management, and it's going to be solved by one. Yeah, it's an ecosystem approach, for sure.

Yeah. But they're bringing, like, knowledge management to the content management word. Bit more than the other solutions from what I've seen. All right, so that's it. Thanks to everyone for watching. Thanks, Chris, for that. And we'll see you guys in two weeks. All right, goodbye.

Bye.

Ram.