Why AEC Firms Need Semantic Search For AI-Powered Knowledge Management | TRXL Podcast

One of the things that's enabled RAG or retrieval augmented generation is what's called semantic search. It's oftentimes called vector search. When most people think of search, they think of keyword search and the precision required in order to find exactly what you look for. Especially with, I mean, Google is a little bit of an extra case because they've been using semantic search all along. We just didn't know it. But if you think about anything you've used inside your business, you have to search on the right term, no typos, you know, in order to find what you're looking for. And if you search on standards and it's actually a guideline, good luck, all that naming, or what we call it, good luck, it's called, it's taxonomy, right? That's what we call it in knowledge management. So what semantic search does is it understands actually my kind of more shades of meaning and words that are clustered together. And so when we do that process, we have to kind of prepare all the content for retrieval. Augmented generation, essentially what we're doing is we're putting into a semantic search database so that it's easy to retrieve. And that's been. That's made a huge difference. It's way more forgiving in terms of getting precision in terms of exactly what word you search on. And it's allowed people, because if you watch people search, they say all kinds of things, there's all kinds of typos. And so there's this kind of flexibility. Like how they really want to search is just type really fast and then if they don't find what, they'll type really fast again. And it's kind of staccato. It spoils you too, right? It's like, I can't tell you how.

Many times I'm using a tool tool, like an AI tool, and I misspell something and it actually doesn't matter, right?

And then you go back to a.

Tool where it's like one letter is off and it's like, I can't find.

What you're looking for. Like, what do you mean? Right. I'm so spoiled now. In such a short period of time with.

With that kind of thing. And that. That's pretty. It's different for sure.

It's different. It's different. And understanding acronyms is different. There's so many things that it's unlocking. Like especially one of the kind of core people I think about all the time are like emerging professionals and they walk in the door on day one and it is just like an acronym and jargon fiesta for them. Right. It's just that's the name of this episode right there. It is. It's wild. I mean, we like to do it as people, but I don't know, AEC just takes it to, I mean, even our industry is an acronym. Yes. I mean, that's where we are. So pretty meta. Yeah. So I'm trying to imagine what it's like to be like 22 years old and like, so you're in an AEC firm and now you're going to work in a healthcare project. Oh my God, the jargon soup that's coming at you. So being able to quietly under your desk and look up what's a nicu, what's a bxp, what's lead without the kind of shame and be able to get a good answer. I don't know, I feel like that's a really nice thing.