Why Video Is Supercharging Knowledge Management in AEC Firms

So anybody that knows me knows I'm a huge fan of video, especially for aec because it's such a great way to like get across who you are and your personality. And you know, we're always trying to work with people we like, know and trust. And video is just a really great kind of go between for somebody you haven't really had a chance to work with directly or even meet in person. What role is synthesis playing or how is synthesis looking at video or video assets?

Yeah, I'm a huge video fan also and it is a foundational technology for us. So we've done two rounds of massive investment in video. The second round that we did last year, I should start by saying you upload native video into synthesis and we transcribe it. But we actually built an AEC specific video transcription model so it understands all the jargon in the language. So we get Ashray, not Ashtray or we get Revit, not rabbit. And I could just go down the list of like all the stuff that we, we taught it, you know, how to understand, you can do chaptering, you know, but we. The thing that's really interesting about video is that it's all searchable within the platform. And if I were to like search for, I don't know, something about this grab bar and it was in a training video at minute 47, it would not only find it and put it into an AI search summary, but you could click on it and it would take you right to minute 47 and you could watch that thing. So the ability to like not to have hundreds, I mean, Shepley Bulfinch has uploaded over 500 hours of video this year into synthesis, primarily for the purpose of making it searchable. Because they've recorded all these qa, QC meetings and design crits and town halls and lunch and learns and training programs. They, they've got all this amazing archive of video now. It's just all searchable. And you know, some of our clients have been saying like video is the new pages, right? Because it's so much easier. Like we were talking about critical knowledge transfer. It's easier to interview somebody and ask them about their work than it is to ask them to write it all down and to document it. And so there's like so many things that are good with what you said about the non verbal and the emotion and the tempo and the pacing that comes through. But, but it's also from like a subject matter expert perspective, a lot easier to just get them talking than it is to ask them to get to get them writing, which is huge.

Yeah. Even if you're not using the video as the thing you're going to publish. Even if you're not using publish it as a paper or as a. Whatever.

Yeah. And so you've got that option. It's either a way station to the knowledge asset you're trying to create, or it's the knowledge asset itself. Or it could be both because you're trying to help for people that have different learning styles. So you, maybe you publish the video, but then you use the transcript to make a really nice like write up of the key themes and like takeaways, you know, from what was covered in that session. So yeah, video is huge. I mean we're, we're seeing more and more firms trying to record more because they'll be in the middle of a meeting and all of a sudden someone starts dropping some knowledge, you know, some magic starts happening. It's like, cool, let's capture this, you know, because recreating this is going to get really hard. So yeah, I think video is going to be just a huge, huge part of our platform. Especially now that we're adding a learning management system. Right. That's another huge part of this. And I think what we're also seeing is a transition to shorter videos. A lot of times like the state of the art for internal continuing education was get a subject matter expert to talk for 50 to 50 minutes to an hour on a topic. Great. You get your AIA continuing education units or your PE credits or whatever it is. But that's not necessarily the best learning experience. It's kind of like easy to put that together. But what we're finding is people building, like let's do a 15 minute session instead. How about that? Let's not make this thing an hour long or maybe do three 15 minute sessions over time. Which. One thing that's interesting if you start thinking about videos as knowledge assets is they can become liabilities as knowledge changes really quickly. So now there's something at minute 50. Right. Which isn't true anymore. It's not as easy to edit a video as it is to edit a page and go fix that issue. So shorter videos also carry less risk. They're easier to make, they're less of an ask. And so that transition to shorter videos has all kinds of momentum behind it. And those are just a few of the reasons. There's other reasons. They make sense too.

Yeah, there's a couple photo and video youtubers that I follow. One guy in particular, I was thinking of did this whole breakdown of how this particular camera works and then all the, all the pluses and minuses and they did a firmware update and now all of a sudden the camera works very differently. And all the things that he was like, oh, this, I wish this worked, but this is out of the workaround and oh, never mind, that's not a thing anymore. So you had to just create more and more content right around that, right?

So if you make it more modular, right? So instead of being like, I'm just going to make this up, if that were a 30 minute review, maybe it would have been, it would have been smarter to make ten three minute segments instead. So that if the change is in Module 9 of his little thing, he can just swap out that three minute piece or what it is. You kind of can de risk it by like spreading it out.