Redesigning Work for the AI Era: How Greenprint Turns Implicit Knowledge into Shared Intelligence

Thank you so much for having me here, Chris, and, and the K community. If you had told me just 2 years ago that I would be up on this stage talking about knowledge management and learning management systems and AI agents, I would've said, I do not understand the words that are coming out of your mouth. What are you talking about? I am not a technologist. I'm not a learning and development expert. I'm not an architect. I'm not an engineer. I'm really just an accidental knowledge manager who loves to build things and is really passionate about how we can make the built environment better for people, plants, and animals. So, how did I get here? I actually started my career in investment management doing accounting and operations, which was not my passion. And then, in the early 2010s, my husband went back to grad school to get his master's degree in urban planning. And, I love to learn, so I, of course, got my own master's degree. master's in urban planning by proxy through him. And I realized, like, that is what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in the built environment, and I needed to find a way to get from investment management to urban planning and development. And I realized the only way I was going to be able to make that career change was to start a company myself. So, in 2014, I met my co-founder, April Mendez, who is our CEO, and together we started Greenprint, which at the time was focused on providing project management and community engagement services to municipalities. for green infrastructure projects, and I was in charge of building all of our operations. And so through a lot of brute force, a lot of learning, Greenprint today is now a 30-person DBE firm. I think we're probably one of KA's smallest clients, and we have 3 co-equal practices: urban planning, civil engineering, and landscape architecture. We serve mostly public clients in water resources, transportation, and site development. So you can see, even though we're pretty small, we're quite complex. And I had to build everything from our systems, our team, our processes from day one, as we grew from 3 to 10 to 30 today. And throughout that process of building everything, I really became the holder of all of our firm's knowledge. I knew all of our processes because I designed them. I knew all of our team members because I interviewed and hired them. I knew where all of our documents were because I created the drive. I knew who all of our clients were because I led our proposals. I was Our one-woman human knowledge management system. And if anybody wanted to get an answer to any question, the fastest way for them to do that was to ask me. And I loved it. I loved it.

I loved—

I realized what my true superpower was that I had not been activating as an accountant in investment management, which is making connections. I loved connecting people to each other. I loved connecting people to knowledge. I loved finding 2 disparate pieces of knowledge and bringing it together to create new insights. And I got just so much satisfaction from helping people get the right information at the right time and discover knowledge and discover insights that they hadn't been able to come to on their own. And so whenever I run into people from my old career who ask me what I'm doing now, and I tell them, they're like, How, like, where did you gain these skills? Like, how did you learn how to do all this? You definitely weren't doing it in accounting, which is 100% true. And so I'm gonna tell you where I did learn all of my knowledge management skills, and it is through my lifelong love of hot gossip. Ever since I was in high school, I have loved collecting people's stories, their experiences, their relationships, the on-again, the off-again. When I went to college, I got really into celebrity gossip thanks to my roommate's Us Weekly subscription. And I would run into people from high school on the street and I'd be like, hey Julie, it's so great to see you. Are you still majoring in business and dating Jim? And they'd be like, who are you? I, like, I don't know who you are. I can still tell you to this day where I was and who I was with the day I learned that Britney Spears was divorcing Kevin Federline. I had built this really complex knowledge management system of hot goss in my head. And you're probably wondering, why are you telling me this, Nicole? Well, what is professional services but just a huge complex web of people and stories and experiences and relationships that we use to win new business, to serve our clients, to grow in our careers? And so, you know, think about it. Like when, how many times a month do you say things like, did you see on LinkedIn? And you get that like feeling in the pit of your stomach when you see one of your competitors is marketing a project that you lost to them. And then you run into one of their subs at a networking event and they tell you the project's going really badly and the client is super pissed and you like run home and you write in your diary or in our industry speak, the CRM. Like, I have been training for this my whole life and little did I know that my love of the hot goss was gonna train me so well for running the operations of an AE firm. Now, I knew that being the one-woman knowledge management system was not going to be sustainable, so I worked really hard to try to take all that knowledge And put it out there to be more accessible for my team. I documented everything. I created a Google Drive where I put all of our processes, our procedures, our training manuals, and I— it was kind of our poor man's intranet. I sent out reminders, I led trainings, I recorded them, I put them on Slack where they promptly disappeared into the ether. But there was still so much friction in our team getting the right information at the right time that the Fastest way was still to come to me with questions. And it really started, the weight of that system was, as we, you know, hit 20 and then 30 people, was really starting to fail. But I felt really stuck with the limited tools that I had at my disposal and just the limited time I had, given how many hats I was wearing at any given time. And then everything changed because out of the sky, out of nowhere, dropped these amazing tools, kind of generally all at once. And they have completely transformed the trajectory of our operations. All of a sudden, we had an amazing intranet that's super accessible and user-friendly, which we call the Commons. It came with an LMS, and we've gone all in on Claude, so AI. And so I was jazzed, and as a builder, I immediately got to building. I onboarded and built out our intranet over my kids' winter break and rolled it out to my team in January. I have signed up for every single beta test that Synthesis could possibly offer. Uh, the LMS, AI agents, AI search, like all of it. I wanted to use it the minute it was available. Um, I've gone all in on Claude. We have an enterprise, um, subscription for anybody on our team who wants it. The minute Claude Co-Work came out, I was using it and I was building like crazy. I felt like Bradley Cooper from the movie Limitless, that I had been given a magical pill that had unlocked 100% of my brain. And suddenly I was able to do things I could never do before. I could conduct analysis, I could do research, I could create presentations, I could create reports at speeds that like were, seemed superhuman. And I just kept like sharing 'em out with my team, like, look at this, isn't this cool? Oh my God, can you believe this? And I crashed. I crashed and I went from Bradley Cooper in the movie Limitless to Bradley Cooper in The Hangover. I'd experienced what's called AI brain fry, which is a cognitive exhaustion that comes from too much AI. And my team had really gone for a ride with all of this. They were totally overwhelmed. They couldn't follow the journey I was on, and they were feeling a lot of whiplash. And so I knew I needed to slow down and set up some guardrails, both for myself and for my team, if I was gonna be able to take advantage of these amazing new tools in a sustainable way. And so I knew that I needed to slow down to go fast and just really start by just taking stock. Like, first of all, what am I even trying to achieve with all this building? Like, building is so fun, but it needs to be in service of something that helps drive our business forward. And so before I built another tool, I wanted to just really understand where does our knowledge live now and how can I access it in this new modern world? And so kind of mapped out all of our knowledge. And so these are all of our tools now, which I know are a lot of the same tools you all use. We used to be at Google, we switched over to SharePoint, but, you know, kind of our original core knowledge containers had historically been SharePoint, Deltek VantagePoint, and OpenAsset. And again, it was really hard to get right, right information to the right person at the right time with those tools alone. Bringing in the Commons was such a game changer for us because now we had the super accessible system of record for our most valuable, most essential firm-wide knowledge, our processes, our policies, our best practices, our project directory. And that just really made a huge difference for a team and made a huge difference for me to finally be able to offload a lot of that to a place that was truly accessible. But we still had a lot of knowledge that was happening really ephemerally. In Slack, in email, in meetings. And that's really where all the good professional hot gossip is, right? That's where we're talking about our projects. That's where we're talking about our clients. That's where we're talking about proposals, our competitors. And then once AI search and meeting recordings and MCP connectors all came online, Claude could really become our sort of command center to access all of these. So they all became true knowledge bases. And I could use Claude to help kind of find disorganized knowledge across our knowledge bases, organize it, and get it into the commons as more of our, you know, really curated source of knowledge for our team. And looking at this, not even counting the fact that this also accesses the entire internet, I can see why I hit brain fry. Like, with a snap of a finger, I had access to more data and knowledge and insights about Greenprint and about the world than I ever had before. Like, I almost had truly 100% of Greenprints' collective brain. And even these tools, the one knowledge container we all know that is the hardest to access is our team's brains. But being able to access them in their kind of natural way of work, Slack and meetings, meant I could kind of relieve some of the pressure of trying to get some of that information out of it because I could capture it where they were working naturally and kind of sharing their knowledge. And we can do cool things like what we heard from Brandon around how we can use structured interviews to actually capture and share more knowledge. So truly the world was my oyster. And now that I really understood kind of where we were at, the next step was, all right, what next? How do I go back to all these amazing tools and start approaching using them in a way that is actually sustainable and moving our business forward? And as we know, when you start to use AI, It is not going to help fix a mediocre process. It is not going to make a bad training better, and it's definitely not going to help build trust and buy-in from your team. But what it does really do is help you see those gaps if you use it correctly. So once you actually start trying to build agents, you're trying to give it really detailed instructions and you kind of start to see where, okay, my instructions are going beyond what we actually have taught our team what to do. And you also realize that the best way to get the most out of your AI agents is to give it an example of what good looks like. What is the standard? What is the best practice? What is an exemplar deliverable that this tool needs to help create for us? And in kind of revisiting our processes and trying to create a lot of these tools, I realized we were really missing that for a lot of things. I had been so focused on process building. That I hadn't really done this definitional work up front of this is actually what the Greenprint way of doing things is. And everyone was just kind of using their own idea of what the Greenprint way is. And we were seeing a lot of inconsistency. So, it's in order, and I know this is kind of the mantra, this is my personal mantra for 2026. I know it's kind of a theme of the conference. In order to move forward with any new tool building, it had to be grounded in what good looks like first. And so in terms of where to focus next, I wanted to focus on what was most important for us as a small business. Where can creating a cool new tool actually help us meet our overall business goals? And of course, the 2 most important things to a 30-person company like us is project management and sales. How do we win more business and how do we make sure that we're managing projects on time, on budget, to client satisfaction? And of course, those are 2 huge categories in and of themselves. I'm not gonna try to, you know, have an AI agent figure out our entire project management process. But now I can think about all the kind of sub-processes that roll up to these and try to pick one that I could test out some things with that could maybe be a lever that could really like create some impact. It could show cool results to our team, start to get buy-in, and then figure out how to roll it out from there. So for project management, I decided we were going to focus on the LMS and how we could build some great training for our PMs that could help them do a better job of managing their budgets, schedules, client satisfaction. And then on the sales side, really focusing on, um, wanting to figure out how to use AI agents. I think I know a lot of us in the marketing field, that's where I've seen the AI agents have the most power. So where is something where I can really focus on kind of getting the biggest bang for my buck out of AI agents to help specifically with our proposal development process? So I'm gonna walk you through kind of my journey with each of these, how I Started out too fast, hit a wall, built for building's sake, and then took a break, slowed down to go fast, really designed what good looks like first, and then rebuilt from there. So the first story I'm gonna share is our project management, which is an LMS story. And as I mentioned, obviously we had to focus on a part of project management that was gonna have the most impact. And so we wanted to do something where PMs are spending most of their time. And so for us, that was their kind of monthly project maintenance work. So first week of every month, they're doing the invoicing, they're updating their budgets, they're updating their plans, they're updating their schedules, they're elevating project issues. And again, like I said, it was happening very inconsistently across project managers, but that monthly cadence is the engine of what keeps our projects on track. So if we could train our team to do better, we would hopefully see a lot of results. And of course, we want to set clear success factors for what those results are. And so one, we want to see that people are actually adhering to the new processes. They've not only taken the training, but now they're actually— they understand the best practices and they're actually doing the process that we've trained them on. We hope for better quality data by actually updating Deltek in line with our best practices. We're going to see better insights into our projects. We're going to know which ones are on and off track, and we're going to be able to make better business decisions. And then of course, over the long term, we hope to see that our projects become more profitable and our clients are happier because they're better managed. So These are the kinds of things we hope to see out of improved training. Now, I'm so excited about this LMS, and I actually had created a bunch of kind of on-demand 1-hour training videos before we had the LMS, and they were just kind of floating around the commons. And so I was like, awesome, I've got this beautiful new LMS now. I can take my already pre-made trainings and just kind of chop them up into lessons. And now we've got this cool thing that is a quiz and I'm just gonna put a quiz on it and that's gonna be an amazing training. And so this is an example of one of those trainings and the LMS is great. This is a much better experience for a learner than it, it was just like pressing play on a 1-hour video. And I was like, cool, I'm gonna do this. I'm just gonna take all of our trainings. Every training now is gonna be in this mold. It's gonna be 1 hour, it's gonna be a series of courses and there's gonna be a quiz at the end. But as I kind of started revisiting this training from the lens of like what a learning management system can do, and from everything that I was learning from this community, I was starting to have this feeling like it wasn't going to achieve what I'd set out to achieve with learning. And it's because I alone, my one-man, my one-woman band, had been the one kind of designing recording and implementing these trainings for project managers, and I was not a project manager. So I was very much conveying information about how the process worked, but I wasn't really teaching to the audience. And so I once again needed to kind of take a break and say, I don't want to make a whole bunch of trainings in this mode, even though they look great on the surface, if they're not actually going to achieve the goals that I want. And that's when I took some time to learn myself from this community and started to learn about the idea of adult learning principles. And once I learned about that, I could see all the ways that my trainings were totally flying in the face of those principles. So I decided to work with Claude and from the learnings that I got from all of you all and actually create that what good looks like for training at GreenPrint. And so this is the adult learning foundations that we want our trainings to be built off of, and it's also all the guidance about how a training should look and feel and what the design should be. From here, I also knew I was not going to be the right person to do this myself because one of the core principles of adult learning principles is that they should be co-created with learners, not just delivered to them. And that had been like a huge failure in how I'd been approaching training in the past. And so it was time to actually start to— I'm sorry, I'm stealing all of Brandon's themes with the build a band.

I love it.

This is going to resonate with me. I've had to build my band for for training. And so we tapped first our planning principal who we'd recently just elevated to a kind of practice operations leadership role where she now oversaw all 3 of our practices from an operations perspective, specifically with this goal of getting more consistency around how we manage projects firm-wide. And she was already working on updating our monthly project management processes in this vein of what good looks like. And then we had, we tapped, you know, obviously her being a very busy person with also many hats, like she wasn't going to do this alone either. So we tapped 2 emerging PMs who had just taken the PSMJ Project Management Bootcamp, and that's where many of our project management practices are built on. And they were like super jazzed. They had just taken this training. They were armed with all the best practices. They were itching to get to use them, and they saw a huge development opportunity for themselves to get to shape how Greenprint actually trains and adopts their peers on these practices. So from there, all I needed to do was I needed to show them how the LMS works and walk them through the principles so that they had that playbook for how they should go about designing the training. And then from there, I just got out of the way. I was there for advice, I was there to review and test, but it was really their project to lead. And we are so, so happy with the results. It is built both on our new best practices for monthly project management practices and for learning development practices. As they were actually building it, they may have identified things that actually, like maybe my kind of version 1.0 standards weren't really working with. So they also were given the ability to say, hey, I think we should change the standard because here's what I'm learning, which is also really awesome to get that real-time feedback. And now we have this training course that really, it's about an hour and a half of content. The majority of the courses are 5 to 7 minutes long, so very bite-sized and digestible for our team. And for every lesson, any resources or tools that are relevant for that lesson are all embedded right there on the page. So super accessible for the team that is taking these trainings. There is a learning activity in the middle of the course that is time-bound. It's relevant. And it's built on the tools they're actually going to be using in operating these processes. And so in this case, it was a budget activity. We also had a mix of required and optional content. And so that also, I think, gave the learners a bit of agency in how much and when to do the work. And it made sure that they got really the core fundamentals of the practices, but also had opportunities to kind of level up with some kind of higher learning opportunities as well. And the most popular part of this training was that it had 3 5-minute expert interviews. So this was such an amazing opportunity to both make it more engaging, to get to know some of our team members across every practice better, and to hear from them about higher-level project management challenges that they face beyond, like, here's how you do the thing in Deltec. And so we heard from Hannah, who is a senior project manager on our civil engineering team. She manages a $50 million program for the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District. And so, she talked about managing a complex project. We heard from Adam, who is our Associate Director of Landscape Architecture, who's known as the King of Ad Services, and so, he talked about navigating change order conversations. And then, we had a project manager from our planning team, Katie, talk about how, when you're a subconsultant, to manage up to the prime. And so, I want to hear now from one of our experts. So, we're going to hear from Katie. One of the challenges of being kind of a planning and engagement sub to a lot of the public projects we work on is we are reporting to a huge engineering firm, and we often have to really fight for our scope and our, you know, the work that we'd anticipated on the project. If they don't think about us, they're not going to give us the work. And so, she talks about how she identifies opportunities for more work if we feel like we're not getting what we planned.

If you aren't getting what you planned, you want to identify opportunities for more work, like more scope. Your best tool really is listening, paying attention in meetings and one-on-one meetings with the prime. I would say that listening for areas where they're expressing frustration or uncertainty, and when they mention a recurring bottleneck or something like a persistent challenge, and you know your scope well enough to make that connection, you can tell them, oh, what you're describing is directly what we're already doing in task 200. Here's how we could lend some more support. That's a very different conversation than asking for more work. Solving their problem, not adding to their plate.

So what I love about that is it just shows like she is such an emotionally intelligent person and that's what makes her such a good project manager. Not just her ability to keep things, but to that listening. And it's such a core part of being a good project manager that might not normally show up in a, here's how you do the thing, here's how you manage your budget. And so this is just like a nice way to get a little bit of that, like, oh, interesting, I hadn't thought about that. And now if you ever have a question about like, how should I manage up to the clients? How should I manage up to a, To a prime, like, go to Katie because she's going to give you the best advice possible. So the last thing that we did around this training was we surveyed the PMs before they took the training and then after they took the training and had done one month of the new processes. And so this is just a snapshot of some of the feedback. And you can see just like significant improvements across their feelings of clarity on the expectations for their monthly activities. Their confidence in using Deltek, their ability to assess their budgets effectively, and then their knowledge of how to elevate challenges to the right people. So huge success. We're so proud of this, and this is now basically my template for how I'm going to approach training going forward. So if that was an LMS story about our project management efforts, now this is an agent story around proposal development. And similarly, proposal development is a whole bunch of You know, kind of sub-processes that go, you know, along the way. And so I had to figure out what the right one is I wanted to try to tackle with an agent. You know, is it opportunity identification? Is it go/no-go processes? Is it proposal strategy? Maybe it's proposal writing or project selection. And I chose poorly. That was a— that was an opportunity, missed opportunity there for an Indiana Jones reference. Um, I picked proposal strategy because to me that was, we had a huge gap there because proposal strategy, ideally before you even get to writing a proposal, you're spending time with your pursuit team thinking about what the client's needs and challenges are. What are their hot button issues? How can we add the most value? How well do we know them? What do we know about them? How have we engaged with them? What are our win themes? All the things that set up how you write the proposal. And with everyone being so busy, we just had a tendency to just kind of jump right into the proposal, start writing it, and then try to think about the strategy along the way. And it's just not as an effective way to do that. So me, of course, being the person who's like, well, I'm just gonna make this easy for everybody and I'm gonna figure out how to do that all myself so I can just give everybody a magical brief. I'm gonna create an agent that's gonna take all that external client research from the web. It's gonna pull up all of our internal client intel. It's gonna match it up against the RFP, and the output is gonna be this killer strategy brief. And of course it totally failed. Here's my monster of an agent in Claude, and it didn't fail because it didn't work. It worked perfectly well when I used it. And that makes sense because the way I designed it was not just like, here are instructions for how you build a proposal or a strategy brief. I embedded a standard into all of it, and it was not the company's standard for how to do a strategy brief. It was Nicole's. idea of what Greenprints best practice should be for how to do a strategy brief. So I had embedded both instructions and a standard into this agent and then thought it was gonna work for everybody. And that real moment of truth for me was when I asked our marketing coordinator to try to test it, and she was totally game. Our marketing team is the most forward of anybody in the company around using AI. She really wanted it to work, and it— she just couldn't even use it because she had never been trained on this new standard. She didn't, she wasn't a part of building the standard together and she couldn't even see it. It's not visible. So I once again realized like I tried to do too much and I needed to slow down and really think about once again, like what are we actually trying to achieve here by building, um, these agents? Um, and so again, that aha of I forgot to define what good looks like. And before I touch another marketing AI tool, we actually needed to go through a process of defining what good looks like across the proposal. development process because every phase really builds on each other. And so now we're working together to build a BD playbook that is basically across each phase, kind of like a one-page simple set of best practices for how we approach each that all roll up to these kind of 3 basic phases of our business development process. And what was fun about this effort was that I got to once again try to use that kind of 100% of— close to 100% of Greenprints brain. Because this was not a blank page exercise where we're going to start from scratch and write out what our best practices were. We've been talking about business development for like all year, all last year, like trying to strategize. We had strategy docs, we had presentations, we were talking about in meetings, we were talking about on Slack, and we kind of just kept going in these circles and no one had stopped to say like, let's take all of this and like create some standards around it that we can all agree on. And it took this crazy agent for me to realize, like, we have to do that and we have to do it right now before we build another thing. And so I did that. I worked with Claude. I kind of did all that effort of kind of pulling all the, all the thinking that we'd already done as a company. And then I benchmarked it against best practices in the industry and produced this playbook, and I shared it with the team. And from there, we could really see, like, oh, where are we already on the same page? And where do we have some misalignment still that we need to work on? And really, we were 80% of the way there. You know, it was like, yes, that's right. We just hadn't done that last step of like, here are the standards. And so now I feel like I really understand what the process is for redesigning the work for any workflow. First, we gotta define what good looks like. And for us, that's a BD playbook, and it's our learning and development standards from the previous story. And then you can refresh your processes in service of that, what good looks like, those standards, those best practices. And then you can build the trainings to train the team on the standards, on the processes, and also the agents that are hopefully going to help make the processes work better and create higher quality output. So this is an agent story. So I do want to show you a better agent that we have since that I've been working on that is much simpler and much better. And it is tackling a problem that I think you're all— I know you're all very, very familiar with. Raise your hand if one of The favorite things about your job is to try to nag architects and engineers for project data. Yes, I know. We love it. We just love nagging architects and engineers to give us the project data. And we know, we know what a struggle it is. They are busy. This is not their priority. When it comes to like marketing copy, they're not the people to write marketing copy. The marketers are. And it's just this constant battle. And I really wanted to see if there was any way that an agent could help solve this problem. And we got a huge boost in our ability to do this in the last month because KA gave us access to the MCP connector between Claude and the Commons. And that had always been the missing part of our brain. Like when I had been trying to create agents, I had to copy and paste our standards from the Commons into Claude. And I knew that that was not gonna work. You never want, you want a single source of truth. And so now I had it. I had connected to our command center, I had all of our processes, all of our standards, and our project directory. And so that gave me the ability to try to test out an agent that I'm going to just give you a little bit of a peek into now. So this is what I'm calling a project summary updater. So my goal, of course, is that this is going to be able to, you know, we all, all of us who use Synthesis, we've got the project directory. It has a project summary. It has project data in it. And my hope is that eventually I can use this to cover all of that, but I wanted to start simple cuz that's not my strength and just focus on the project summaries. And so what this agent does is first it benchmarks against our standards for what a good project summary looks like by checking against the commons so that it knows how we write summaries. Then it will review all of the projects in the commons and it will find gaps. Maybe there's a new project that was added that doesn't have a summary yet, and then it can check against a proposal library to see if there's a proposal that it could use to just create an initial draft. Starter draft for that summary. And then it scans our Greenprint brain. It will check our SharePoint folders for project files. It will check Slack for project discussion and see if it can elevate some new information that is now relevant for a project summary that may be missing now. And then it creates— it shoots out a Word document that's organized by PM, and it has in track changes any recommended changes it has to that project summary. So it's done all the work of just let me scrape The green print brain before I bother one PM to see what I can find, and now marketing can review this, and they can, as opposed to nagging architects and engineers, they can use their judgment to say, oh, like I'm going to rewrite this like this, or it comes with a link. It's not on here, but it comes with a link so you can see the source of it. So what Slack message did this come from? What project file did this come from? So they can kind of verify the accuracy before they can just hand it off to the PM their list of project updates to say, hey, is this accurate? And so here's an example of that. For this project, you can see the prior summary used the words, projects are now being brought to life, because when we wrote the summary, they were not constructed yet. Well, now they're constructed, and Claude has given our marketing team the information about when these projects were constructed, and they can now use that to then go ahead and verify it, update it, and make sure that it's accurate. This is one more example of something that the agent shot out. And so this was a project that it actually pulled from a blog post that we had written. that was an interview with the PM on this project where she had talked about how this project, we saved the client money with a more sustainable solution, which is like, yes, we need to be screaming that story, you know, from the mountaintops that we saved the client money with a more sustainable solution. But it hadn't been in our project summary because the summary was really just talking about like what the project was. And so now we were able to pull that from an interview that she did, and now marketing can again figure out how to make sure that we weave that into this project summary and then make sure that the PM is okay with the way we've talked about it. So what I love about this is it's really simple to design. It's really easy to follow. It solves kind of a friction problem between 2 teams that makes it so much easier. Marketing stays in the driver's seat, so they're in full control and they get to use their judgment and their skills as opposed to focus on just kind of nagging. And then the PMs get, you know, to still have that final like expert review for accuracy at the end. So. So really excited about how this is developing and all the ways that we've been able to leverage now having the Commons as part of our overall command center. So just to wrap up, I just want to kind of review some of the lessons that I've learned from this crazy journey that I've been on over the last few months. So the first is to redesign the work. I think every time I brought a new tool to a workflow thinking that this new tool was just going to be some sort of simple add-on that was going to make it better. I'd get, pull the thread and I'd keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and it would just take me all the way back to the beginning. And I realized that anytime I'm gonna start trying to meaningfully incorporate AI into my work, I have to be ready for that whole process. Um, cuz it's not a one-stop easy fix. Um, so really, it really just taught me that I need to kind of almost revisit every process, the right ones, the important and urgent, not the, you know, unimportant, unurgent that can be really fun to build too. But I need to really rethink the entirety about how I approach building our workflows at Greenprint. And then of course, the mantra, the theme of the week, define what good looks like. And this applies whether it's an AI-enabled process or a human one. We should have been doing this all along. And it took trying to, you know, break things with AI to realize we'd never been doing this in the first place. So it's been interesting to me about how AI is really Put a mirror onto our organization and made me think about it in ways I hadn't been thinking about it when you actually have to try to talk about what you do to this robot. Um, and so, and this is really like the core outcome for me is for everything we do, we gotta define what good looks like first. And it's gonna totally change the way we approach everything that comes after that. Match the tool to the problem. Does that really need an AI agent? As fun as they are to build, maybe it needs a standard. Maybe it needs a different person at the helm. Maybe we should have communicated it better. I love a shiny new tool that I get to apply to things, but they're not always the right tool. And I could have saved a lot of time and heartache in being a little bit more thoughtful about which tool is the right tool for the need. And then lastly, we have to make change with people. So that is engaging learners in the creation of training content. That is bringing people along To collaboratively define what good looks like instead of creating it and just telling them what it is. Our team is so burned out on change. We do, you know, employee engagement surveys and do upward feedback. And like the number one challenge of every employee has been there's been too much change this year. And unfortunately, that is not going away, and I cannot promise them fewer changes. That's just not going to happen. And in thinking, in kind of preparing for this talk, I was really trying to think about like, what are the themes of what I'm going to be sharing here? And, you know, it's an AI story, it's a learning and development story, it's a knowledge management story. But like really, like the recurring theme through all of it is it's a change management story. And the answer is not fewer changes. It's only going to be more changes. But I think the real takeaway for me is what we have to do better at is Just getting better at change itself. So thank you very much.

Actually, I have no questions. Do you guys have any questions? Thanks, Nicole. Can we talk about those subject matter expert, like the little short 3 to 5 minute videos? Like, how did those happen? Were they scripted? Like, how did you choose the questions? How'd you choose the topics? Like, were they scripted? Did they just Do they themselves? Like, yeah, what, what were those?

Yeah, so they were scripted. Um, we wanted every practice to be represented. So we wanted someone from engineering, we wanted someone from landscape architecture, we wanted someone from, um, planning. And there were like themes that had been coming up, uh, like challenges that we'd been seeing and observing with our project managers. So the, the ad services one, the change orders, we're a very low ego team. And actually it's, it's a problem for both the managing up to the prime and the change orders is we're a very low ego team and people have a really hard time advocating for themselves.

Mm-hmm.

And so we were people seeing people like we were going over budget on a lot of projects because people were too afraid to ask for more, to ask for more budget or to ask, advocate for themselves. And so I think that was like a theme for us this year is like, how can we teach our team in a way that feels authentic to them, how they can advocate for themselves, for our team? And so I think both of those kind of came out of that, those observations that we were seeing as something we wanted to have be a takeaway of this training, of this idea of like, how can you advocate for yourself? In your work.

You kind of toward the end, you were talking about like doing the simple thing first isn't your forte. Do you, have you learned any techniques for figuring out what the simple thing is and where to start before overblowing it?

Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely breaking down the process. I think it's just like inherent in us as operations people as we want, we just want to like take all the admin off of everybody's plate and let them focus and I wanna solve everything at once. You know, I wanna solve big problems. And I've now, I've learned now why that doesn't work and why, you know, again, my team's asking for slower change and part of that doesn't mean less change. It means a little bit more focused change that they can follow along with. And so now I think it's just breaking down the problem. Like I wanna solve proposal development. Okay, no, I'm gonna break it down. Okay, now which of these is actually most important? I'm gonna bring my team along on that. What do we think is most important?

Mm-hmm.

So I think breaking it down and just being more intentional about Bringing in more voices is kind of key to that.

That's cool. Do we have questions from out in the audience? I see a couple on this side. Yep, sure. Hi, I'm Chris from Ramza. When you bring more people in, did you ever have the— maybe an incident where you brought someone in to help you and then they had Either completely different opposite ideas or they tried to take over.

So that all I think goes back to culture. And the Greenburn culture is very much collaborative, low ego. We're all in it together. And so it's almost like we have the opposite problem where they're like, what do you think? What do you think? And I'm like, no, this is yours. I trust you. I need you to lead this because frankly, you have like honestly that training. I can't believe what they came up with. Like they came up with things I wouldn't even have thought of. And it's because I just really got outta the way. So I think it's, for us it was actually the opposite problem, like letting people actually feel the agency to own something at Greenprint. Whereas, you know, for so long it was Nicole and April are the CEO and the COO. They build all the things. And I wanna change that. I want people to feel like they can be builders too because they're building way cooler things than I am. And so I think that was a perfect example of, of really giving people those agency, empowering them. Celebrating the results and, you know, seeing how good the outcomes could be.

There's another one over here.

Yeah. I'm a little bit like you in the sense that I've been working in Claude and standing up things like you've been showing there and working with them. I kind of have 2 questions, and Chris, maybe you can answer this. I have a— we're a hat of innovation, and I get— have C-suite members that listen to all the AI marketing, and they say, Richard, I need agents. I want agents. I want agents to operate autonomously. I'm seeing a lot today in this conference that these are really context-aware chatbots that we're building. They, they react to an input. They're not operating independently. So how do you all— It doesn't sound like you're quite in that situation, but how do we all deal with situations where we're building these things which are hugely effective in terms of being context-aware chatbots, but they're not truly agentic, but we call them agents? So, I guess it's a question for you, if anyone in the room, or Chris, if we've dealt with this. Because I'm going to go back and they're like, what agents did you learn about, Richard? And I'm like, I didn't actually see A lot of agents.

Do you want me to take the first one?

Yeah.

Yeah, I can help.

So I, um, yesterday afternoon I shared something that I wrote about earlier in the year called the agentic spectrum. So I borrowed the idea from the self-driving car industry, you know, that built a similar spectrum where it was hands on the wheel is level 0 to full autonomy was level 4. I think someone can correct me if you know better, but you get the point. And then there are steps along the way, right? Supervised driving and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I think the same thing is true with agents. You've got informational agents, which is your like chatbot, but then you have ones that can create things. You have ones that can execute processes. The next step past that is semi-autonomous agents. So you still have a human in the loop, so create a draft, but you can't actually publish something. But then you can get to the point where they can publish, and then you have, you know, on and on and on. So I think you are seeing agents. It's just a matter— it's like the, the, the thing I named the piece was like agents. It's a, it's, you know, one word, multiple meanings. Right? And so trying to disambiguate some of that. So I think that's a piece of it. I also wrote a piece about, and this is like, Nicole was definitely in mind when I wrote it, about like why leaders should build agents. Because I think, you know, hearing marketing from AI companies is fine, but like getting in there, it's, it's useful on 2 things. First, people can get the actual challenges, opportunities, and limitations of the tools today, but they also have the most context of how the business— this is why it's great that Nicole as the COO is building, right? Because she has a huge viewpoint. and understands a lot of how the business runs. So I think getting leadership into actually building even a simple agent would go miles, you know, for helping them understand both challenges, limitation, but then also, oh my gosh, this is what this can unlock. Oh my gosh, we haven't defined what, oh good, what good looks like. Oh, we don't have the data necessary to make this agent run. So that would be my kind of hot take. I don't know if anything you wanna—

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Agents are a spectrum. We have like, you know, we are using the knowledge agents as well and they're really great for like the helper agents, like, What for stuff that is in the commons content, it's really easy for like helper agents and we use it like to audit our content and stuff. So that's really simple stuff to the like it's producing Word documents. We have ones that run every month. Cloud, we have the ability that it could be like a totally autonomous thing where you could like have something run automatically and then would send an email. I'm not, I'm not ready for that. I've turned all that off, but it is at our just think disposal if we wanted it. I have stopped reading all AI marketing. I'm done. Like, I started it. Like, my personal board of directors for AI is this community, and then some kind of thinkers with a variety of viewpoints that I'm following on like Substack that are not AE people that are helping me kind of think through philosophically what AI means to me and how I wanna think about it. Like neuro, you know, um, neuroscientists and design thinkers. And so I've got a whole bunch of Substack folk that I follow to help me kind of shape my thinking about it. And then I've just decided this is my community for AI, who I wanna talk to. people who are doing it.

Yeah.

Who are thinking about that. And like, I cannot with another webinar from somebody telling me about like AI in the AEC industry. I'm, I'm kind of done with that.

But you should attend our webinar next week.

Only this community.

I'm curious about the survey you did kind of pre and post development. Can you talk a little bit more about like how you actually executed that? Like, is that done inside the course? Is that done outside the course?

It was done outside the course.

Yeah.

So it was a Microsoft, just a Microsoft Forms survey to the PMs in advance. Our team, this is one, I think one thing that's really special about us having urban planners and all 3 of the PMs, the people who ran that are actually on the planning team. And so they actually bring their own skills of facilitation, translating complex concepts, you know, to diverse audiences. They do community surveys. So they're actually able to bring a lot of their skills that they use in our client work to this effort. And so again, like, that's why, and it makes me think too about like any other of these operational things, where do people have skills in their day-to-day work that they can bring to operations without impacting billable time? But like, so they, they just knew how to do good survey design and how to stage it out and how to engage the staff in the process. And like everyone just felt so brought along. So it was just, yeah, really win-win-win.

There's a, I'm speaking of outside voices that are really good to pay attention to, like signal versus noise kind of stuff is, there's a guy named Benedict Evans. Some of you might know of him. He has a podcast and a newsletter. Um, his maybe second to most recent issue and episode was called Most People Aren't Tool Builders. And so the idea was most people aren't gonna build agents. Like there's kind of like this idea that like, hey, everyone can do it now. It's super easy. But like, there's a lot more to building agents in terms of being a systems thinker to actually being having access to the whole process so you can see all the pieces. Um, just being interested in doing that kind of thing, having it occur to you that you can actually design a better solution. And I'm curious, as you've given a, you know, you have a Claude Enterprise license, is that how many people at Greenprint today are building agents besides you? How many do you think will be, should be? Like, what are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, so it's been really interesting when we started using AI. Obviously I'm very, at the head of like wanting to use new tools and they come to me if they can make our work better. Um, once you see it, you can't unsee it. But like we had our team very skeptical and I was like very nervous. This was 2, a year, no, last year, 2 years ago. I can't even remember. What is time? But we, so people were very skeptical and they started to see people using ChatGPT. They could kind of see it coming through in the way we were talking. And there's a lot of skepticism and even some kind of fear. So we had a one-day retreat where we brought everybody together to talk about AI and to like hear about people's hopes and fears. Were they using it already on their own? What would they like to see? And then use that to create our responsible AI policy. And so I think that was really good and that people felt heard and listened to. So even the ones who were still skeptics still felt like they were part of the conversation. And then the responsible AI policy was very much built on trust and, you know, laid out guidelines. It acknowledges this is a fastly, you know, quickly changing. area, but that like the human will always be the center. And so I think people felt heard and they felt a sense of trust. And so that made me feel okay saying, okay, I'm now going to open up to anybody who wants it. You can have a Cloud Enterprise license. The one thing you must do is you must take this training and you need to follow a responsible AI policy. And so we've got 30 people. I would say about 15 people so far have signed up for their own Cloud Enterprise and they are all building tools and they're all doing things Like, I mean, most of it I think is a lot of like research. Um, but our landscape team, like one of our designers is building like an interactive plant library. Like it's really cool seeing all the things that they're doing. And I want to find more ways for them to share that with each other and inspire each other to try to do new things. But this is also where, you know, I have been the primary builder and I'm really trying to find ways to, you know, kind of step back and let other people build and showcase their work and have me turn into more of the person facilitating all of that. But yeah, people are doing things that I haven't even, I couldn't even tell you how to make a plant library. You know, they're bringing different skills to the table and it's really cool to see.

Did you, how did you teach, did you, come on, man. How did they learn how to build tools?

So this is where, at first I had this vision, because of course I'm like, I'm going to build all the training for all the things where I was going to train everybody about it, about how to use Claude, even though it was changing so fast. And I think it's, uh, it's kind of like that, the, the like Oxford story about like, you know what, here's what you can do. Like, go, like, figure it out yourself. Like, you're all smart people. We're all learning together. I'm not actually the person who like knows the most. I can give you the basics and the foundation, and I think we just all need to like learn together. Like, I can't, it's just, I don't have the capacity. It's changing too fast. I don't know that I'm the right, have the actual right idea of what good looks like for agents yet, you know?

Yeah.

So I think it's been better actually in this case to not force, oh, this is what good looks like, and let people experiment and just have that openness and trust where they feel comfortable sharing it with me, sharing it with others, and also the confidence that we're all following our policy. And yeah, it's actually, it's been nice to have this kind of feeling like some experimentation across the firm, not just in my little, you know, office.

Yeah, I like where you were going with the, You know, to bring an old school knowledge management technique of communities of practice. I think a community of practice around people building would go a long way. We actually, we have a Slack channel called The Agency, you know, internally, right? When we're just like showing somebody built something cool and we wanna show it or we see, you know, some new, new ideas. So I think that's a, when something's moving so fast, like a community of practice is like oftentimes the fastest way to disperse that knowledge for sure.

Do we have questions out here?

Oh yeah, right in the front, Bill.

Brian. Hi, Bill from Bergmeyer. Nicole, thank you so much. You just said, what is time? And I don't think time is the same for me as it is for you. I'd like to just jump back to one of the first things you mentioned, that you built your intranet during your kids' vacation. Okay. Just like right there. So from that point in time to what you've learned, what is happening with your intranet now? Like what is being rebuilt? Are you doing it? Are you passing it to someone else?

Mm-hmm.

And I'm just wondering how you're structuring that, cuz it's, it's great to like, you have the knowledge, the ability to get stuff like this done. But now it's like, how do you hand that off and trust and make sure it looks good?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's been the, I think the story for me for the last couple years is I experiment and figure something out and then I need to pass it off. So, you know, when I hired a finance director and I got to do that, when I hired a marketing director and I got to do that, when I hired an HR director and I got to do that. And now I'm starting to see that even this conference has really opened my eyes to that is like, what do I need to hand off now that I'm here? Like I've kind of hit this point. And it's so interesting for me to hear from everybody where knowledge management sits with all of you. Some people it's in IT, it's in marketing, it's in HR. And like, how do I bring my— now I have people with those hats, like how can— what can I pass off to them to give them ownership of? And where, what is their role? Who's, what's who, like who should really be taking learning development over? Because that, like, I can do so much. I'm an inch deep, mile wide, but like I can never go deep in one thing. And so I've gotten to this point with the LMS, I've gotten to this point with the internet, and it's gotta go deeper. So our internet right now, it really is, I think it's like when I had that energy burst to get it built and I got as much as I could in there, and it's been kind of static since then.

Mm-hmm.

I hear from all of you like how deep the knowledge is on your internets. And for us it really is this, like, it's mostly focused on business information. It is a place of essential knowledge firm-wide, but it's coming from my vantage point. point. I haven't yet gotten the practices themselves to use it as their core place for knowledge. And I want to get there next. But that's a people problem. And I need to figure that one out. So, I'm coming away from this really thinking about like, who do I tap to own that? Who can now have that excitement of building something new on their own and taking it to that next level? So, I'm getting a ton of ideas from here.

Are you—

how are—

I mean, it's interesting. You're in a class of companies that Kind of, I'm kind of faking my question, but like, let's just pretend like it's true. Who were kind of like come to an era of synthesis where there was both an LMS and an intranet at the same time. And are you thinking about, do I build this as on the intranet side as like it's capturing what good looks like as a standard? Is this actually gonna be a course? Is it gonna be both? Like, how are you thinking about that breakdown?

Yeah, it's, I right now I really like, like I, I just, I really like the truly structured learning content. that we currently have in the LMS. We don't really use the wall, I think because we came to Synthesis so late, like that social part of it had passed. Like Slack is, that's what Slack is for us. Slack is our social intranet. But I can see that wall being the place for that more like podcasty, like more informal. I wanna do more of that stuff too. And so, so I guess right now I'm kind of seeing the LMS as like true structured learning paths and content.

Mm-hmm.

And maybe that wall can be more of that, more like informal. Um, kind of video type stuff or, um, that can, that can still teach but less in less structured ways.

Awesome.

Cool.

Yep.

Thank you.

Um, Gloria from Walker Warner. Um, I love what you were saying about giving people a little bit of freedom and flexibility to try and test things out on AI. Um, I was curious to hear a little bit more about what kind of training you've Prior and what you show them off the bat before you let them loose? Yeah, so Claude actually has really good ready-to-go trainings, like Claude 101. They have how to use Cowork that are just as good as anything I could show them. It really just shows the fundamentals. And so with the LMS, you can bring in outside training, just like link to outside trainings. And so it, like, you can make it look like it's in your system, but then when you click on it, it takes you to Claude Academy. And so that was the requirement for anyone using Claude. They have to take Claude 101, and it gives them a really nice overview of, you know, all the elements of Claude that was just as good as anything I could have tried to design myself. And they also have some like higher level ones. And so I'm gonna add those in there too for people who wanna go deeper. So I figure it's one of those things like, let's just have the people who built the system, who've made their own learning academy for Claude, like let me just leverage that instead of trying to create it myself. And then I can be there as a, oh, if you want some, Like, like office hours, almost, um, informal office hours. Like, I am here, I will jump into Claude with anybody to talk about how I can help you or share my feedback with you, but I don't need to actually do like formal training for you on how to use the tools. Well, that'll be kind of like just learning by doing.

Amazing. Um, Nicole, that was awesome.

Thank you so much.

Thanks.

Um, and thank all of you.

Yeah.