Today’s construction industry might be a bit under innovated or not as technologically open as they should already be in the new digital age. Why is that? And why is it crucial to change this? Today, Adrian Hatch shares the crucial things contractors should let tech companies know about construction, and how to actually get them to give contractors their much-needed technology solutions. Adrian is an entrepreneur and construction technology expert that currently applies his passion in the AEC industry with mixed reality as CEO of IMAJION, a startup bringing telepresent communication to construction and solving practical problems with MR (mixed reality). Tune in and learn the most effective tools in construction and how contractors can help companies outgrow the biggest misconceptions in construction technology!
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Skip The Drive: How To Visit A Job, Anytime, Anywhere
When was the last time you used Google Maps to find a restaurant? You’re standing on the street somewhere. Let’s say you’re at a conference and you want to find the best Italian or sushi, and you go on Google Maps and you find a spot and have a great meal. That’s an example of you using augmented reality. That is the topic of conversation in this episode. It’s how to use AR and other technology to enhance your construction projects. You’ll notice on the show that we do have a lot of folks talking about technology.
The reason I do that is that you want to be able to build projects safely, efficiently, and profitably. There is technology out there that can help you to do that. That’s why we have these folks come on and these discussions because it’s important that they’re top of mind for you so that you’re able to evaluate technology and think long-term about how can you use it in your business to be more successful and more profitable.
My guest is Adrian Hatch. He is the CEO of Imajion. It is all about getting you information from your job anytime anywhere. It’s the next generation of onsite collaboration technology and they connect remote and onsite workers securely and immediately to ensure that projects stay on time and on budget. The great thing about Adrian is that he knows what he’s talking about in terms of understanding how technology works well with construction and how it doesn’t.
He has enough experience so that he doesn’t come across as some software egghead who thinks he’s going to solve every problem in the construction world. Read carefully what we talk about here. We’ll talk about various leading-edge technologies, how they affect construction, and how you can effectively adopt technology in your organization. You’re going to have some insights here that are going to be very helpful for you and your entire company. Thanks for reading. Enjoy my chat with Adrian.
—
Adrian, welcome to the show.
Thanks. I’m happy to be here.
It’s my pleasure to have you on. I’d like to kick off with an important question for the contractors and business owners here that are reading. Why is the construction industry, in your mind, is under innovated?
There are a couple of reasons for that. It is getting better. I’ve been doing this since about 2016 and it is very exciting to see how much better solution providers have gotten at bringing tools to the industry and how much the industry has invested in getting better at adopting those tools. When we started, we’d be lucky to find a VDC director at a lot of the firms we talk to. Now, you’ve got whole VDC departments and all these big contractors.
That speaks to what the challenges have. On the solution provider side, it’s a matter of understanding this industry. The job site environment and a project building or renovating a building are different from what a business analyst and a consultant do. What are the typical customers or the most common customers of these software-as-a-service startup innovators from Silicon Valley I have been working with?
Those folks needed to get over their ego a little bit. They needed to realize that you can’t sell the same exact product to this business that you’ve been selling to the Deloittes of the world for the last decade. That is happening. Part of that’s been from the success of platforms like Procore, the growth of platforms like Autodesk Construction Cloud, and tools like PlanGrid that have shown what you can do when you understand this industry and bring it effective tools.
What is it in your mind that most tech companies miss about construction that contractors need to be waving their arms about and letting them know right up front? The reason I ask this is that if you’re a contractor, you’re swimming in your contractor ocean and you are experiencing things that you don’t even necessarily think about that other people don’t even see and can’t even relate to. What do I need to be surfacing and telling people about to help them to get better at providing me with those technology solutions?
Please tell everybody that software and traditional business folks need to understand that construction projects operate differently because they have to build a physical building. Unlike a software project where somebody can start fiddling with the UI on day one, and somebody else is writing the back end and someone else is writing the front end or one of those consulting analytics projects where you can have all your analysts go out and start doing research and doing their own individual reports.
That building needs to have its foundation port. It needs to have its framing built, the right materials, and the right subcontractors. It’s remarkable how many people you’ll speak to who don’t even know the whole notion of how you find and assign subs to a project that you’re starting up as a GC. It’s those kinds of differences between traditional business processes and what happens on the job site. The way that job depends on getting to the next step, on getting the cement port done the next thing that can happen on unblocking that subcontractor so the next MEP, you can show up with their tools.
We need to empathize and understand that because you see many cool technologies that either insert too much delay into the process for learning, education, and adoption and wind up a cost to the job, a headache for that superintendent, or that don’t fit the team dynamic. What I’ve seen a lot is that we bought the drywall framers one exoskeleton because we want to see if that reduces the rate of injury.
We got a dozen drywall framers. How are they going to treat the one guy throwing the exoskeleton on a Monday morning? That’s got to be something the whole team can use as a resource, not something that one person has to volunteer to try out, especially if it winds up having an issue and slowing them down and now they’re the one who held up the job. Honestly, I tell anybody getting started with this, “Go to a project and shadow a super. Spend a couple of days moving a wheelbarrow full of equipment around. Learn how these jobs work. Go take that PMI course on project management.”
As a contractor, at the end of the day, what I care about is getting jobs done safely and profitably. I’m looking for solutions in the field that work. They’re not speculative or a pain in the ass to implement, and they help me to be more productive, profitable, and safe. What are some of the most effective tools in construction or technology disciplines that are helping to address those types of issues?
It’s the tools that look at how builders have been working for the last several centuries and figure out how we can provide digital tools that make that workflow more effective. The easy one to praise in that regard is PlanGrid. Let’s take the big role of plans that gets printed every week, spread out in the trailer, marked up, carried around, and ripped up. Let’s put it on an iPad.
More than that, we’re going to let you file your documentation against those plans too. All those issues and change orders are not just a piece of paper that you assign to somebody. They are something that exists on the drawing of your building. That’s a little bit like augmented reality. We’re taking different kinds of data and combining them with the physical context of our job.
You brought up augmented reality. We got all these buzzwords. Contractors get guys calling them on the phone or cold emailing them the latest buzzword and I hear it floating in the atmosphere. Give me a very simple fifth-grade definition of augmented reality.
Augmented reality is just technology that combines digital stuff with the physical world. We’ve made it real complicated to make it sound like it is a big deal. That’s a big deal, but it certainly gets blown up to be a lot more technically complicated than it needs to be. Sometimes people’s shields go up when they hear that, “I’m going to have to use some crazy new tool.” Have you used Google Maps to find the restaurant closest to you in a new city? You’ve used augmented reality.
“Here I am on the street corner. Where’s the closest place I can get a toasted sandwich?” That’s AR. You’ve augmented your physical reality around you with knowledge about what’s there from the digital world. That’s what we do in construction. That’s why AR is such a powerful tool for construction. The big challenge that we see with bringing new technology to the job is marrying that with that physical context, that reality of the building. What has to be done there? What’s changing day to day? Where is this change order? What’s it about? What does my team have to say about this right now in the context of the project and in the context of everything in that backend system, those drawings, or submittals?
Give me a practical example from beginning to end of how an augmented reality tool might be used in real life on a Wednesday at 7:30 in the morning on a construction site.
I have to give an example of my own tool. Imajion is a video conferencing tool that uses augmented reality so you can create documentation on the site without being there. One major GC that we work with is doing a big renovation on a food processing factory in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. The project was getting dangerously close to going over time and over budget. They had to conduct a change or a punch list walk with multiple different vendors that were based out of the state architects, MEPs, etc. They used our platform and took out an iPad with LiDAR, dialed in that architect, walked through the site, and said, “Start pointing out what’s problematic to me.”
Snapping the photos, the architect drops a pin and says, “This is an issue. I don’t know if we have enough clearance here. Can you take a measurement of that? We don’t. Let’s label that and take a picture. We’re going to upload that to Procore. It’s going into a new punch item.” They held that meeting three times with three different contractors who needed to build their punch lists.
It saved that project $36,000 in transit time. It was on a Wednesday morning, holding three meetings that would’ve taken a whole month to schedule and all that transit time. Where AR fit in was to make that video conferencing useful. The AR is my teams looking over my shoulder and talking with me, and they’re reaching into the site and telling me, “You go take a look at that thing that I’ve marked for you,” like I was standing there holding a laser pointer.
Let’s talk about limitations. Right away I’m thinking, “I want to go on the job site,” because you don’t understand. When I’m on the job, I not only see the stuff that you are talking about but then I see and feel for it in my bones what’s going on. I know those construction savants walk on the job site and because of their experience, they see things that you don’t see. You can have the fanciest technology in the world, but you’re still going to miss stuff. How do you deal with that perspective of people who might be candidates to use this?
That’s where it’s it’s the responsibility of the solution providers. Number 1) Not to have too much ego. There’s not one tool that does everything on the job site. You can buy the best screw gun available or the best impact driver you could get. It’s only going to do one job. Likewise, this is a fantastic tool. Letting you hold that meeting would’ve been expensive, slow, or late. We’re not going to replace every visit you ever hold on the site. We’re not going to even try to do that. There are certain times you need to be there. There are certain things that you need to see. Likewise, this isn’t the only tool to manage a job site.
There's not one tool that does everything on the job site. Click To TweetThose 360 capture systems work well alongside this because they let you at your own pace, even if you’re across the country look through the job with your own eyes or orbit that camera yourself, regardless of what the person on site wanted to point it at. Find those things you might want to ask them about, but now you get that in-person meeting, that face-to-face conversation without getting on a plane and going to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska to get those questions answered. It’s a matter of fitting into the process, augmenting it, and saving people time and money without trying to completely flip the table and say, “You’re never going to the job site again because somebody’s got to be there or building a building there.”
One of the keys is not overselling this stuff, but how does, in your mind, augmented reality differ from another tech in terms of its applicability to a contractor?
That’s the big deal with AR for construction. AR is still catching up. We’re seeing the beginning of what’s possible. Augmented reality at its heart is about bringing that digital information into the project. We’ve seen much innovation on that digital information site. What’s the I in BIM? It’s Information. The BIM model is an exciting concept. Everybody likes to talk about it. Adoption is not there in the US yet. We’re not using BIM models on a lot of our projects. Before we even get to BIM models, you have all that context of what lives in your email of the architects who are based elsewhere with their own computers and drawings up.
Bringing all that context, the documentation they’re creating, their expertise that’s at their desk two states away. The context of that model of the physical site is the power of AR. It’s about going the other way too. Being able to keep that model more informed and updated by using the ability to capture the site in 3D, by using that ability to automatically detect when you see a safety hazard and report that back up the chain to your company safety manager.
These are capabilities that are going to make the other technologies that have already started to make their way to the job site more effective and easier to use. If we make it easier to interact with BIM, if we make it easier and smoother to connect the design side and the build side, we’re enhancing the outcome of the project for everybody. We’re reducing rework and waste. AR is suitable for construction. We’re going to see it start to capture a lot of the other technologies we use on the site.
What are the roadblocks to greater AR adoption? Is it the hardware or the software? What’s the biggest challenge here? Is it the mindset that people have?
I make the software so it’s easy for me to bag on the hardware people and blame that, but it’s an early-stage market. Everything’s early on. The challenges are across the board. It’s not early on that we can’t make things that are useful. We are far enough now that we can build effective, targeted solutions that solve problems well with the tools that are on the market. Software providers are catching up with that. We’ve seen a big explosion of tools like SiteScape that capture the site and 3D off your iPad. BIM overlay platforms like Argyle, Spectar, and VisualLive.
These are emerging fast, but you can see them hitting the limits of technology. The iPad Pro’s a great device for scanning the site quickly, looking around, making markup, and doing basic AR capabilities, but it’s not 3D or hands-free. At the end of the day, you’re still carrying this thing around. It works great a lot of the time, but you’ve got tools like the HoloLens 2, which you can put on and look through. It’s got its own set of limitations. It’s not that easy to type on. Battery life is a little shorter. Not everybody’s comfortable learning That UI of, “There’s a 3D display that I’m seeing through onto the site.”
That’s all those advantages that need to come together over the next few years. We need to have wearables that are as easy to use, user-friendly, and unintimidating as an iPad that doesn’t make you look like a geek on job sites. You’re comfortable wearing it around your subcontractors. We need software that’s ready to take advantage of all those capabilities as they hit the market.
As you talk, I’m saying, “Why shouldn’t I wait before implementing an AR technology, whether it be the hardware or the software?”
It’s because not everybody else is, and the folks who are getting ahead of you are going to be applying those savings to their bids and their projects before anybody who decides to wait. I had to be sure to mention it. If it were 2016 now, I would say, “You should wait. Don’t buy a HoloLens 1 and stick a hard hat on it unless you want to be part of the early adopters who are defining the future and helping the startups design what they’re making.” Now, you ought to be learning about this, or you’re going to be late.
Projects are saving thousands of dollars using this technology already. Single incidents, not just talking about our tool, I’ve seen effective use of BIM overlay platforms and other AR tools as well for cost savings. This is the time to start using those tools that are effective to start recognizing those savings and train your organization to be ready to use the next innovations coming around the corner.
Anybody who decides to wait is going to be starting at square one whenever they get off the ground. You’re already going to be ahead at the next level and adopted the basics. You’re already going to be looking at what’s coming next. This is going to snowball. It’s going to be like when digital project management started hitting the market and you had a lot of people who said, “I don’t need to run my projects in the cloud. I have a file room in my office. It’s been working for 100 years since my granddad started this business, and it’s going to stay that way.”
Not everybody likes those platforms. Everybody’s using them because it’s mandatory for you to win your bids, and we’re going to get there when people are recognizing the savings you can make by bringing that digital world to the job site directly, building that line of communication directly between design and build.
You go into a construction company, start working with them, and you’re looking to sell the software that you offer. I get that. As you’re working with a contractor, what are some of the red flags that you look for that tell you that this company is going to struggle with implementing the software and their expectations are not aligned with reality? What are those red flags that tell you that they need to check themselves here a little bit?
I don’t see a lot of folks who are asking for the moon, requesting things that are truly impossible, but I do see a fair number of companies that will have challenges introducing the capabilities of the technology they find to the field. The companies that are very successful at this have people with field experience and knowledge in the field in VDC roles, have VDC departments that have an intimate understanding of what’s going on on the job site, and then have people out on the job site who are apt to technology. If they’re not a techie person, they are willing to try a new tool and evaluate whether it’s going to save them time and money in the field, and frankly are on a job that has the timeline to afford that luxury.
When we go to a company where everything is hitting the fan at every moment and every job site is running late. I got 30 minutes and I’d like to spend it on something else. There’s one VDC rep who’s never been to the field before and doesn’t know how to swing a hammer. We can expect there’s going to be some difficulty making it through the evaluation process to adoption out on site, even if we know, “That project could use our help. They could get some of that time back.” They’re never going to have a chance to learn the tool and introduce that to the field if they don’t have that opportunity for evaluation specifically.
Tell me a little bit more about your company and what it is that you guys do and how you help construction companies. You’ve given us one specific example out in Nebraska. What’s another specific example that people can relate to?
Rolling close is a big one for us. If you’re walking around on the job site and you’re on your own, Imajion is also a documentation tool. Our iPad app lets you record the site and markup issues specifically with labels and measurements that are right there on the job. You can walk around them and get the angles you need. You can snap photos and recordings. You can file that all into cloud project management software as punch list items. Observations are coming soon to Procore.
We’ve had a customer that had COVID. It was a project engineer. He could not go to the job site but was responsible for completing the rolling close on that job to get to the next phase. He asked another project engineer on the site, a more junior rep, “Could you grab that iPad? I showed you how this thing works.” It was a HoloLens, “Put that HoloLens on.” Kudos to the novice who said, “I’ll wear the funny glasses. Had them walk the job site.” That senior PE was able to be on the site with a trusted coworker building the rolling close list.
Imajion produces its own documentation. All those push pins they made and photos they took go to the cloud automatically. You can pull them in a spreadsheet and in a repository. You can grab that recording later at that exact moment you found an issue. When they provided that close list out to the project, everybody had all the documentation they needed to execute it, even before that PE made it back to the site. He is totally safe and healthy now and still getting reused in this example, plenty of time.
You’ve been working in construction since 2013.
It’s 2016, although I was dragging lumber around job sites to make pocket money during the summer before that.
As you started to work in the industry, what was the biggest misconception that you had that has now been changed and you’ve seen things differently?
I barely had an idea of it. It’s the superintendent general contractor-subcontractor relationship. It took me a little while to understand how a GC is responsible for building that army of subs on a site. It’s one reason why I bring that up as something that I think is absent for a lot of people who are only experienced in traditional business and technology. If you think about working for Microsoft, you might hire some contractors to build software, but you’re hiring team members who are working on the project. A GC has its whole own team and, in addition to that, is responsible for all these external teams on the project.
What are the best GCs doing? The ones that you see are good at building out those teams from a people perspective of the various players that they’re working with, what are they doing that the other folks are missing?
I talked to one GC that had an interesting strategy when they went to a new city or region. They would put a super experienced project engineer out there for several months before the project started to start building relationships with local companies, to start learning the lay of the land and people’s local reputations. By the time they were collecting bids and building that team out in that new location, they already had a good idea of whom they could trust and whom they would want to be calling.
Beyond that, it’s the GCs who foster positive experiences for their subcontractors who get that reputation of running a well-maintained site but also being easy enough to work with. It’s a competitive market for subs right now. When you are a GC that provides those tools, that makes work simpler on the job site, that makes it easier for the subs to interact with the supers and to know what they need to know from the GC. That’s always going to build those stronger relationships for your projects. It’s going to make that next job in the city that much smoother.
Building those stronger relationships for your projects will make that next job in the city much smoother. Click To TweetSubs or GCs, who are driving the most change in terms of innovation and technology adoption in the industry?
I can say all our customers are GCs for the most part. From my perspective, I mainly see GCs driving innovation. That said, I have talked to some folks at NIKA. I’ve talked to folks who have told me, “There is a big push for innovation among MEPs right now.” There’s starting to be a bit of a split in this business where I’m not sure the folks selling to the GCs know how much innovation is happening among the MEPs and vice versa.
If any MEPs are reading this and are like, “I’m using a bunch of stuff you’ve never read of,” please reach out to me because I’d love to know about it. Only from my own perspective, I speak to a lot of GCs but I’m not going to push the MEPs and the subs off because I’ve heard about that as well, mainly from some folks I know.
What are the blurred lines between the GCs and the subs in terms of technology adoption? Where do they need to be working together more closely in order to maximize the impact of new technologies?
It’s that equipment that you expect the subcontractors to wind up interacting with, even maybe relying on. I saw a talk at ENR FutureTech earlier in 2022 about Turner’s use of robotics for digging trenches on a project down in Texas. A component of that success was working directly with the subs who were going to have to be on a site with diggers, with no human operators carving up Texas mud all day.
Those guys had to be comfortable for this to be a success. They had to understand how to work in that environment, and they had to be comfortable with the idea that the subcontractor that wouldn’t have been digging trenches is a robotics company instead. It goes back to that exoskeleton story. It’s awesome that GC thought we have injuries happening on our sites because of people holding their arms over their heads all day to hang the drywall. Let’s try out this exoskeleton.
If you hand one to a team of subcontractors and sign a couple of agreements they can try it, I don’t think you’re going to see those subs super eager to hand the exoskeleton around a half dozen different people, day to day. That didn’t work because they told me it held the door open in the trailer for six months and then got sent back. On the other hand, teams that have made that a shared process, that has worked directly with those subs, have turned it into something everybody is excited about and interested in using instead of a directive to please try this thing out for VDC, a much bigger success.
It’s interesting though because as a GC, in conjunction with your owner, you could mandate certain technology being used and people do that all the time. Where’s the line there in terms of what are good GCs doing to help their subs in this technology adoption, even when it’s in the contract, you’re going to do it, the sub’s not necessarily happy about it?
That’s where you need communication. It’s where that leadership on the job site helps a lot. That gets back to where we can predict success based on who that site champion for adopting that technology is. The difference between that is the equivalent of that Silicon Valley technologist who’s, “We’re going to change your job. Use this thing now. Delete that other thing.”
Somebody who says, “Tell me about your job. I might have something that can help you with it.” That gets back to the fact that on some projects, you’re in too much of a rush to make technology a success. You got to be careful not to drop that new tech on a job where even if your super is the most patient, empathetic, and communicative one in the business, they got to make sure the cement’s getting poured. They don’t have time to coach somebody through how to use the exoskeleton. “Are you having a good experience with it? How can I help you? Let me call VDC.”
You need to have a job where you have the opportunity for that communication, guidance, and honest feedback. If your subcontractors are telling you, “You’ve mandated this thing on two projects, it’s not working and I hate it,” you have to start taking that feedback and compare it to tools where people say, “I got on this project. Where’s that thing we were using on the last job?” For the technologists, that’s your mark of success. When somebody goes to their next project and asks for your tool, now you know it’s been successful adoption. That goes for the folks coaching adoption at the GCs as well.
As we’re wrapping up here, give me a very simple 3 or 4-step process that I, as a GC, should be repeating and embracing when it comes to evaluating and then implementing technology in my organization.
You got to understand the challenges on your sites. That’s the first biggest requirement. Honestly, do that. You’re going to find a lot of opportunities for organizational improvement. That means getting to know the people working in the field, getting to know their daily processes, and looking at where rework happens. It’s a huge cost to the industry. Looking at where that waste happens, where time gets spent, not in the field, in the trailer, repeated documentation, tasks, etc.
The next thing is to have a good understanding of what tools are out there on the market. Don’t worry. The construction tech providers are going to market to you no matter what. You’re going to hear all about it. You need to have somebody. You need to have resources that can pierce through that marketing and start looking for what might be a solution to those problems.
What is the one newsletter, conference, or something like that I need to subscribe to if I’m a construction company owner that filters the signal from the noise and helps me to understand what’s real out there and what I should be looking at?
That would have to be the Construction Genius Podcast.
Is there another one that is in your mind, “Go to this sort of hub for the specific technologies that I think would be useful for you?”
There’s not one hub yet. It might be time for us all to come together and put one together. The ConTechCrew is a great podcast. Hugh Seaton’s podcast is Constructed Futures. That’s a fantastic one as well. He’s also got a great book on construction tech adoption. Todd Weyandt’s Bridging the Gap is another one. It’s going to be up to you to build a palette of different resources. ENR includes some new technology. The ABC is another one to look at. Blue Collar Capital Partners, one of our investors has a builder’s almanac of technologies. This is a call to action.
We should make some hub. There needs to be something like ArchDaily for construction technology. In the meantime, there’s no shortage of content creators, podcasts, and people who know this industry well like you and know the technology, and are communicating that to the market. Go to the ground break at Autodesk University. They have great trade shows, industrial, and great innovation. You’ll see a lot of startups and technologies at shows like that, and there are going to be teams that know the industry and are ready to speak your language.
There is a leading and a bleeding edge. You don’t need to name companies necessarily, but where’s the bleeding edge where I should avoid that at the moment? I might have some guy or girl contact me and they may be extremely compelling and it may sound good, but I should be, ‘Let’s wait for a little while longer as that gets developed. Let my competitors spend their money on it first so that they can take their lumps and perfect the technology a little bit more?’”
The very bleeding edge is using AI and ML to detect things automatically on the site environment. I wouldn’t bucket every single technology that uses those into the tube bleeding edge. There are great tools for analyzing your construction specs with AI. All they have to do is be able to pull all the bullet points out and list them in a structured way. These tools are going to detect safety hazards that are going to detect the rate of completion in the field. Somebody might call me up and say I’m at one of these companies.
The very bleeding edge right now in the construction industry is using AI and ML to detect things automatically in the site environment. Click To TweetYou’re wrong. It’s a caveat that I’m ready to be proven wrong. Some of that’s probably still a little early stage. If you’re a company ready to try the early stage, maybe you do want to talk to one of those firms. If you’re most of the industry, you might want to wait and let some projects go from beginning to end, utilizing those automated insights and looking at how effective they are in hindsight before you adopt that technology yourselves.
You’ve got to identify the problem. Where’s the waste? Where’s the rework? What tools are available? After that, what should I be doing in terms of that effective adoption?
You need a process for introducing it to the field, getting their buy-in, and then making sure you’ve got a champion to make it effective. The champion cannot be someone in the VDC department. It’s good to have a champion in the VDC department, but somebody on the job site needs to care about it and want to make it. You want to at least see if it can be successful. You don’t necessarily want somebody who wants to force it to be successful because you need to hear some honest feedback on what you know the strengths and weaknesses are. Even so, you can make sure you’re deploying that tech in the right place next time.
You need a process that introduces this to those teams you think are having that problem. Learn from them whether they feel it might be a solution. It gives them an opportunity to pilot a solution that does not come at risk to them. If this technology is a failure because of the technology, that’s not just your fault. If the technology’s a success, that is partly in a big way because of your efforts to introduce it to the site process. You got to be ready to reward people for making that effort to introduce those new techs and you got to be ready to take some risks.
Even if you have a very thorough evaluation process, you’re going to find that one tool that works for another company might not fit your own process. Maybe you need a different vendor. Maybe you’re not ready to integrate that into the field. You got to be prepared for that to happen so do your field teams without everybody getting sore feelings about it.
That’s a nice touch there because there is a failure when it comes to this type of thing, and it can happen for a variety of reasons. You have to be able to set those parameters for failure in a way that doesn’t discourage people and cause them to say, “I don’t even want to try this.” As far as the champion is concerned, for your specific offering, who are the champions that most successfully drive what you offer so that people can get an idea of whom to look for as far as a champion’s concerned?
For us, it’s often superintendents and project engineers, folks who are responsible for coordinating with the rest of the job site, and people who have to communicate with a lot of subs and offsite contractors. Get a lot of design managers as well, project managers who similarly are often based off the site but have to contend with getting out there to visit, coordinating with those teams, etc. Part of this is because those people get a lot of value from our product. Those are the people who aren’t going to have to drive to the site, who aren’t going to have to stand there, watching their subs stick their hands in their pockets for two days before that site visit happens.
On the other hand, these are also people with leadership on the site. They tend to be seniors. They’re respected by the crews. They tend to know everybody very well. The best of yet is when they see it and say, “I’m into this technology stuff,” that’s pretty cool. That’s the real recipe for success. It’s somebody who knows their project team well, who knows the problem well, and says, “Let’s make that solution. Let’s see if that thing’s going to work.”
Tell us a little bit more about your company, what you guys do, and how we can get in touch with you.
Imajion is a real-time site meeting and documentation tool. We use augmented reality to make those site meetings more effective, but you don’t have to think about us as some crazy bleeding edge thing. We’re the screw gun for a site meeting. If you need to bring that crew, take a look at something, document what’s going on, and then communicate that to more people on your project, Imajion is a way to do it without waiting and scheduling a trip or taking the risk of bringing more people to your job site.
Even if you’re on your own, it can be a great way to document the place in context by marking things up on the site for your photos and setting that right into your existing project management system like Procore or Autodesk Construction Cloud. It becomes part of that single source of truth and goes right to the person who’s responsible for addressing it.
If anybody wants to try this thing out, we’re happy to let you give it a go for a couple of weeks if we find the right project with the right team and the right champion. We’re confident that after a quick onboarding call and a couple of examples, folks always recognize their savings very early on and say, “That one meeting we did pretty much would’ve paid for the next couple of months of this. Maybe we will try this for the next few months of the job.”
If anybody wants to check this thing out, you can go to Imajion.com. You can email us at [email protected]. Go to our LinkedIn page, follow it, and reshare some of our posts. There’s some video of the app in action there. We will be at Procore’s Groundbreak Trade Show in November 2022. We’re also going to be at the Insurance Risk Management Institutes Conference in Las Vegas. We’ll be in the booth with Axa XL. We’re joining their construction tech ecosystem program. We are excited to be out there with them as well as DPR and Disrupt Tech and a few other folks.
Let me ask you to get your magic wand out. Wave your magic wand. Let’s go out many years from now, what technologies will have revolutionized the construction industry in a meaningful way?
Robotics it’s going to be AR in conjunction with AI and machine learning. That stuff’s a little early now. When you have a device that feels like a pair of eyeglasses or even it clips to your hard hat, form factors we can’t even imagine. That device is able to bring the context of the plans, drawings, documentation, punch lists, the BIM model, and all of it into the site in an easily accessible way and to capture that site in a way that a smart machine learning engine can analyze and very quickly tell you, “That’s a trip hazard. That person wasn’t wearing a hard hat. This is completed and I’ve already noticed that it’s already documented in the back end. I’m letting you know so you can confirm.”
That’s going to accelerate what one person can do on the site massively because this won’t just be super. This will be everybody on the project with that connected access so you never have to put your tools down to ask that question. You always have the current state of the job site documented accurately.
The other side goes back to get more done with less. We’re building more and renovating more. This industry’s got a major workforce shortage. With robotic automation, we’re going to be able to let the humans on the job site be much more productive at the tasks that they have to get done. That robot can be digging the trenches through the Texas mud all day without getting tired or risking injury and letting those human subcontractors work on something more complicated.
My final question is this. As you think about the number of people that you see on the typical job site nowadays, by a percentage or a number, whatever you can think of, how is that going to be reduced in many years time with the implementation of this technology? What’s the impact going to be on the number of people that are employed on a typical job site?
We’re going to see fewer optional people on the site. By that, I mean folks who aren’t there every day, the people who visit the job because they need to be there to help with a site meeting and to conduct a walk. If some people always do have to see the site, you always are going to have to be able to physically be there. We’re many years in the future, who knows what you’re going to be able to do? Maybe you’ll be able to throw those glasses on and get a perfect digital representation of the job as of fifteen minutes ago from across the country.
From a simple safety risk standpoint, we’re going to see that headcount drop considerably. People with collared shirts get into accidents on sites because they’re not there for the safety meeting every Monday. They’re not going through orientation the way everybody else is. They don’t work there every day and know the environment.
Beyond that, I’m not ready to say we’re going to see the rest of the headcount drop considerably because nobody can find enough work for the job. Everyone’s desperate to find more human hires. We’re going to build faster and more efficiently, but it might all be additive. We might be adding robots alongside the same number of people who are getting more done.
I appreciate your time. Thank you for your insights and for joining us on the show.
Thanks for having me. I had a blast.
—
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Adrian from Imajion. My book is Construction Genius. ConstructionGeniusBook.com is the website. It’s all about effective hands-on, practical, simple, no-BS leadership strategy, sales, and marketing advice for construction companies. Go and get your copy of the book. Let me encourage you. This is what a lot of folks are doing. They’re sending me photographs of multiple copies of the book that they buy because what the construction company owners are doing is they’re buying 7, 8, or 9 copies for their direct reports and they’re handing them out.
My recommendation is that you get the book, hand it out to people in your organization, identify the content in the book that is most useful to you, and then have discussions with your folks around that content, those ideas, and how you can implement them to help you to be a more effective company. Get your copy of the book. You can get it on Kindle, Audible, hardcover, or softcover. When you do get it, let me know that you’ve purchased the book because I’d love to be able to send you a thank you email and interact with you and get your feedback on what you think about the book. Thanks for reading. One more time, go out, and get the book.
Important Links
- Imajion
- The ConTechCrew
- Constructed Futures
- ENR FutureTech
- Blue Collar Capital Partners
- Autodesk University
- Bridging the Gap
- [email protected]
- LinkedIn – Imajion
- ConstructionGeniusBook.com
- Https://www.Instagram.com/ImajionPlatform/
- LinkedIn.com/In/AdrianHatch/
- Https://Vimeo.com/449396521
About Adrian Hatch
