The Shortlist Episode 98: AI in AEC

AI has moved from an experimental playground to an everyday reality, and AEC firms are figuring out how to use it responsibly and effectively. On this episode of The Shortlist, Wendy Simmons, Becky Ellison, and Hana Kaneko explore how AI is impacting AEC marketing from proposal support and content editing to data organization and workflow efficiencies.

The Middle of Six team discusses the opportunities and challenges of AI adoption, including security, bias, intellectual property concerns, and environmental impacts. Their ultimate stance: MO6 is Human at Heart. While AI can accelerate tasks and improve efficiency, it cannot replace strategic thinking, authentic relationships, or the creativity that helps firms differentiate themselves and win work.

And robots will never be funny.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 6

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist, we're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist. I'm Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Becky Ellison and Hana Kaneko about AI for AEC. Hi, Becky.

Hey.

Hi, Hana.

Hi.

I cannot tell you how many AI focused conference sessions and webinars I have personally sat in over the last couple of years.

I went to one conference and I think it wasn't an AI focused conference except for every keynote was an AI session. And many of the internal breakout sessions were also AI focused.

And I think it's kind of slowed down slightly as AI has become more and more a part of how we work.

But, you know, I just want to admit that I've sat on the side looking, researching, asking questions, facilitating roundtable discussions about AI to understand how it's working well for our clients and in the industry and how it could be a resource

or a tool at Middle of Six. So, we were very deliberate, very deliberate about not jumping to make some big statement.

I also felt like a little bit in the beginning, every podcast that I would listen to or LinkedIn article that I would read about AI felt a little clickbaity.

It was either going to save the day and, you know, make our work so easy or it was going to steal our jobs. And here are the reasons why we should be scared. So, you know, I saw a lot of that just like the rest of folks all over the world.

And I think the AI conversation at Middle of Six started, you know, quickly, but quietly internally to figure out like, how do we feel about this? How could this be used?

So thank you to all of our listeners for letting us take our sweet time to get to this topic. It felt like, are we really ready to go and put out a stance? And maybe this is just more of a conversation.

We're going to share how we use it, how we don't use it, what we like about it, what we really don't like about it. And to help us with that conversation, we've got some wonderful voices here. Becky, you all know Becky Ellison from The Shortlist.

She's the host of that little sub podcast that we have. And she's always bringing a little bit of like comedy and humor. I'm sure she will mention at some point that AI can't be funny.

There it is. So she's here to kind of share her side, especially from like being a graphic designer and a creative person, and her thoughts on AI. And Hana Kaneko, you know, does proposals day in and day out.

She's confronted with a lot of AI being sent to her and has some experience shares for how it's worked well. But we're going to try to keep this a little bit balanced if we at all can. I just want to say that Middle of Six isn't fully on the AI boat.

That is where we are. We really believe in the creative process and brainstorming and creating something that's new and unique and differentiating our clients so we struggle in some ways with AI. But let's have a conversation, right?

Let's start that here. So Hana, Becky, thank you for being here. Let's get into it.

Becky, since you've already done an episode on AI, I'm going to throw that to you. Tell us where you're coming from.

All right. I feel like I need to preface this with I am a millennial. I am an early adopter of technology.

I was on Myspace. I am tragically and pathologically on social media since it was invented. Like we're talking texting photos to Twitter early days.

I have every Apple device you can possibly have. I am not afraid of technology and I believe you do have to keep up, you have to evolve. There's that.

As an artist, I was, of course, very suspicious of something that was constantly being touted as a replacement for graphic designers, something that anyone could use to create art. Is that really art? I don't know.

Then we've seen the results of the so-called art that it has produced, which have gone through several evolutions of weird, frightening, hilarious, and sometimes it produces pretty good results. Why is that a problem?

Because it's crawling the Internet and scanning images on an incomprehensibly large scale to build its knowledge base, and this content is all coming from real human artists whose jobs are slowly disappearing as a result.

So this is also happening with non-artist work, and the progress we've seen already really indicates, I think, that AI is going to evolve faster than anything we've seen before in our lifetimes in terms of technology, which means that once all the

thinking jobs are replaced by AI, the only jobs left will be physical ones, right? And they're not going to want to build and maintain robots or whatever.

So I mean, I, like, as much as that sounds like the plot to a sci-fi film, like, that is, I think, absolutely the trajectory that we are on if we're not careful. So I don't think I would succeed at physical labor.

Therefore, I hope we can limit this light speed growing technology whose explicit goal is to replace what humans can do. I'm generally anti-AI surprise, but I do use it.

I personally use AI only for, like, tedious tasks that don't represent someone's livelihood, like, you know, aggregating searches, like, where can I find a nail salon that does this?

You know, like, just that sort of thing, like medical research that I could have done myself, organizing information, calculating things, whatever.

And then, you know, here at Middle of Six, like I've really only used it for, like, what I would call tedious image editing tasks, maybe, like, no generative fills in Photoshop and, you know, that sort of thing, because I absolutely can do that, but

it takes forever. I'm not, like, putting in prompts, like, make me an image of this, you know, because that just, why would you want that? It's soulless.

It's soulless, yeah.

There's my manifesto.

That's exactly what it's going to say. Well, okay, so we know where Becky stands. That's great.

Well, it's no surprise to Hana or I at all. Some of our listeners may or may not be surprised. I'm not sure.

But she's a 10 on technology in general and a 2 on AI. That's how I'm translating that.

That sounds right. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. And your comment about we have to have jobs and labor, I will say is visiting with a friend who is in tech, and he's building his fourth company, and it's all app-based stuff.

And he said to me, he's like, oh my gosh, I'm very nervous for my children and what they're going to do for jobs in the future. And he said, everyone needs to become a carpenter. He's like, that's what it is.

That's where the job security is. And I don't think he was thinking about who he's talking to with me in construction, but I noted that, I'm like, that's right. Okay, here we go.

Everybody go get certified, build something, be an iron worker.

Good point.

Maybe we're safe, we're just slightly old enough. But yeah, it's definitely a big deal. AI is like as big as smartphones, the internet combined.

I don't know, something like that. All right. Well, Hana, where do you stand on AI?

How are you using it or what would you say kind of your level of expertise is?

Yeah, I'm also a millennial. I'm a younger millennial. So I'm same as Becky.

I think I like grew up during technology advancing. I grew up with the internet. So I'm very comfortable with technology.

But I'm also a little bit wary of AI. The only time I use AI is for work. I do not use AI at all for my personal life.

And I'm mostly an analog person anyway. I love taking handwritten notes. I have like a physical calendar.

I love physical books when I'm reading. And so I think it's an interesting juxtaposition between like being so tech forward in my day-to-day work, but then also stepping away from technology in my personal life, just to give my brain a little break.

I can see why people reach for AI. Everyone's very busy and AI promises a lot of things. And so I don't fault anyone for using AI.

I'm just not quite convinced yet. So maybe I'm similar to Becky, where my technology use, I'm like nine or 10 potentially. And then for AI, I'm a novice.

Okay, well, this is gonna be, I think a cool conversation in the way that we've got me.

I'm a owner of a company, right? So like there's a whole perspective there about what tools does your team need? And what is like ethically okay?

And there's that side of it. Becky, very much a creative person, defending the creatives of the world. And also probably, you know, I'm sure this, the AI stuff is being really pushed hard at you.

And then Hana, who you've got your own, like the difference between your work life and your other life, right? So probably we're not gonna be saying a million ways we're using AI, is what I'm taking away from this. Do we even need to define it?

Because I'm going to use AI as my shorthand, right? Just like we do for BD, for business development, and we just kind of lump a whole bunch of things into that. Can we get permission from our listeners to just be generic and say that?

But what we're talking about, I don't know, Becky or Hana, either of you kind of want to expand about like, what do we mean when we say AI in AEC?

Obviously, everyone on Earth is using ChatGPT. I think that's the most popular. That's what most people know.

But there's also Co-Pilot and whatever else. There's Claude. I don't even know what Claude is, but I've heard a lot about Claude.

What I'm noticing is that it's in almost everything now. If you open up any app, I'm sure even home appliances are being powered by AI now, which is nuts. I mean, I don't need AI's input on ordering groceries like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok.

They're all begging me to use their AI every day. The phone answering robots, the customer service, they can't understand what you're telling them. I hate that Spotify DJ thing.

It's in your face everywhere you go. So I feel like we're trying to define as a fish what is water at this point. But I got to breathe.

This is a hot topic for me listeners.

Getting all excited. Yeah, it is everywhere. And there's a lot of the large language learning models that like have, it's all about the text and the search and it's generating responses based on questions.

And then there's also this like AI enabled components where you have agents doing specific tasks and even companies that have just built out.

Gosh, like you said, Becky, so many companies have built out either an AI add-on or just a whole separate company that is doing the AI part of it. For like, you know, shred AI or joist AI, those that we see in AEC that are very task specific.

So you're totally right though, it is everywhere, plugged into every single thing. Maybe my first experience was the Photoshop generative fill or whatever we were testing out.

That's my favorite one. It just feels like a feature.

Yeah, exactly. But it was the, it was in those early stages where we were like, oh, okay, ChatGPT is released to the whole world and everybody. I read that it is easily the fastest adoption of any technology in history.

This is actually an AI overview summary, telling me this bullet point. But I was like, yeah, I mean, it was quoted from MIT. So that was actually like from a real study, but it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

It went to 100 million users in two months or something like that was pretty ubiquitous all over the place. So, okay, so that's people, that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about all the ways AI can fit into our lives and some of the ways we're actually using it for work or that we hear people are using it and that kind of thing.

So if you are, how do we transition from what is AI to considering even using it? I kind of have to go in the way back machine and think about that because Middle of Six had its own conversation a few years ago. Do we trust this?

Can we use it? What does this do to confidentiality agreements? All of that part.

So, Hana, have you thought through some of the things that are important to consider when choosing AI tools?

I think the first tip would be using protected versions of AI tools. So, at Middle of Six, well, in the work that I do, I use the Microsoft 365 Copilot.

It offers an enterprise data protection, where if you signed in to your business or student account, it gives you a higher level of protection than the third-party public platforms like ChatGBT.

So, just being aware of which tool that you're using and what the security risks might be, your firm or the company that you're working for may actually have policy around it, right? And so, they want you to use a specific tool or no tools at all.

I'm not sure if there are any companies that exist that ban AI overall, but you definitely want to look at your company's policy or AI governance policy even, employee handbooks, before you start inputting potentially sensitive data.

And information into chat bots.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to upload all of your proprietary confidential information, and then just have that get mixed in with everything else.

I like to think that at this state, any decent size company does have a policy. I hope. I really hope that's what I hear from people, that that has happened, and their IT groups and leadership teams are drafting, making that policy.

But you might be a firm that has been resistant, or smaller company. Maybe you are the leader in pushing your team to go in this direction. So I think those are good tips, Hana.

I'm thinking about security, having a closed system. Yeah. And then some policies around it, so that you just have an idea of what's being created and what's being shared.

Yeah.

And quick plug for S&PS. If you go to the S&PS headquarters website, they actually offer templates for AI governance policies for firms and companies to use.

So if you work for a firm that doesn't quite have anything outlined, that might be something good to suggest.

It's been vetted and published by reliable people through S&PS, and they even offer little on-demand webinars that you can listen to and watch. So there's some good resources out there.

Yeah, Becky, do you have anything to add to considerations about picking the tools or?

I think cost is going to be an interesting thing because right now a lot of AI is just integrated into various applications.

But as we've seen, we've moved from a model of like, you purchase a software application and it's yours, and that's it, and then you update it, whatever, to now subscribing to everything. We subscribe to so many things.

We're paying for an incredible amount of stuff that used to be on a sort of a per purchase basis. Look at TV. I mean, we've reinvented cable and separated it into many different channels.

I think AI, we've already seen ChatGPT has gone through. They're wanting you to upgrade to the next plan, pay more if you want faster, better responses, image creation, all that. Everybody's trying to get you to pay.

So I think we are definitely in the early days of that. I think we're going to start seeing costs probably going way up as the AI applications become more crucial to what's going on.

I mean, so once they know they've got you, of course, you're going to be paying. So you definitely want to keep an eye on that. Also, I mean, looking at the companies that own these platforms, I mean, who are they?

We don't know. That's probably a whole huge conversation, but there's inherent bias in the content, both in terms of what it's pulling from societally, as well as maybe the company that's behind that AI, putting their own agenda into the algorithm.

You never know. You can't always completely accept what it's telling you, because you got to just be critical, I think, looking at that information.

Never just grab something out of AI and put it out in the world, because not just for errors and things like that, but you never quite know what information is being pushed at you. This is getting so.

I think that you can underscore that line about you. Can not blindly trust anything on the Internet and even AI, and I think it will admit to you, like, oops, I made a mistake. I don't know everything, and hopefully, that wasn't a big mistake.

That's what it is.

Well, one thing that came to my mind very early in the, like, considering if we could use AI, I think that when some trends were going around on LinkedIn, and people like posting generated images of them doing cute things or as a Lego or whatever it

might be, right? might be, right?

So that little trend went around, and then someone said on LinkedIn, I'm avoiding doing that because this cost this much power, energy, money, you know, whatever they were relating it to. I was like, oh yeah, I think I can skip that too.

I don't just need to spend that. So I guess that is a way of teeing up the environmental impacts. You know, that might be a consideration for a firm.

If you're a B Corp firm, you know, maybe this is actually something that you have to think very seriously about. And I think for just being a citizen of the world. Hana, you did some research on the environmental impacts of AI.

Do you have any stats to share or tout, or just a general opinion?

Yes, my, I'm very passionate about this specific topic. I am very concerned about the negative environmental impacts of just the crazy amount of energy and water that data centers use.

And I'm sure everyone is aware, but generative AI models like CHATGBT, they pull power and data from data centers that require a lot of energy to run and a lot of water to cool down.

So they demand a lot of electricity and water resources, meaning to increase carbon dioxide emissions, pressure on the electrical grid, and strained municipal water supplies, resulting in the disruption of local ecosystems and communities.

And some studies, like the study from MIT News, suggest that a single CHATGBT or copilot prompt can take seven to 10 times more energy than a simple Google web search. So that's pretty serious, I think.

And just think about how many CHATGBT prompts that one person prompts at a single time or Google searches and just multiply that by everybody on the earth. That's a lot of energy and a lot of power and a lot of water.

So that's definitely something to consider.

Yeah, I found similar information on that.

If you want to do a high resolution, high quality type of image, that it takes the amount of energy to generate that one image that it could take to charge your phone from dead to alive, or basically one to three hours of kilowatt hours of energy.

I mean, that's a lot for one image. And so if you've ever tried to see what your hair could look like with a different hairdo and you do 10 of them, there's a cost to that.

I know I think people use that for, or like, oh, not that type of K-12 school. We need it to look different.

I mean, there's lots of ways that people have been experimenting with the image generation outside of the Photoshop tool that we were talking about. Like, that is, that's an energy hog.

So definitely think twice before you're doing 10 versions of that photo. There's some serious energy happening there.

Well, I feel like we are, I feel like we just moved right into the cons of using AI. We skipped right over the potential pros. So let's keep this rolling.

Let's just keep going with the things that we were like, we were very hesitant about and aware and cautious, and then we'll come back and we'll wrap up. It was like, okay, okay.

There are some things that actually, the way the AI can make our life a little bit easier as a marketer, but stay in the negative side with us for a while. Yeah. What are some other things that we know that we've seen?

We will not name any names, but we get to see a lot of weird AI stuff come across our desks with all of our clients. Yeah. Sound off.

Well, there's errors for sure.

We've seen the ChatGPT, for example, is very confident when it presents you with information, and it will tell you that it's absolutely Friday when it's Tuesday, and you have to be on top of that so closely.

So if you're writing content, let's say, and trying to use ChatGPT or whoever to fill in the blanks, or edit what you've written, summarize, expand, whatever, you absolutely have to read every word of what it generates and edit it yourself, because

otherwise it could be full of errors. There's AI speak, which is like, you know it when you see it, it's sort of like, it's not that, it's this. I mean, like the tone of voice that it just uses and you just know it, it's becoming almost instinctual.

That kind of stuff, if that ends up in your writing, especially in pursuits and proposals, I mean, if you've got a proposal full of AI written text, like they're going to know, it's going to be the same as everybody else.

I mean, it's you're eliminating your personality, you're eliminating your ability to stand out from your competition, and it's just sort of homogenizing everything that you're putting out because that is what AI is.

I mean, it's the homogenization of all of humanity, you know, as absorbed through the internet, which is creepy.

That is the new definition of AI, by the way. Becky, you can just put that out there. Yes, all true, all true.

I simply put it also as like, you know, you put in garbage, you get garbage out, and what that could look like is if you are starting from a blank page and not giving it anything, and then you're asking a prompt like, tell me about my design build

approach. What are you going to get? And that's what Becky is saying. It could be wrong.

It's going to be just generic information, and it's certainly not going to be specific to your firm or your firm's unique approach to anything. Zero uniqueness in that statement.

So that's kind of like how the starting with garbage in could produce that.

But I have heard on the positive side, some of our clients who are using enterprise systems and they're all paid, and it's a closed loop and they fed it and trained AI on their content and their voice, and they have spent time and energy on that, and

that's a totally different story. So I guess it is like if you take in the time and put it in, you will get something better and you can probably get something decent in that way. What are some of the other pitfalls that we've seen?

Maybe just loss of human touch. Becky, I feel like you're really passionate about this. It's like, yeah, Middle of Six is definitely like a human first firm.

And so we want to make it sound like you. And we want a little bit of that uniqueness and touch. And that kind of goes back to what we were just talking about.

Yeah.

If you read a bulleted AI list, and like Becky was saying, and it sticks out like a sort of them, like then how quickly do we stop reading it? Because we're like, this is garbage. And that's the opposite of what you want in your proposal.

You don't want people to stop reading it.

It's very true. And if you're, if you don't have that good security, if your system isn't really locked down, then you are just contributing to the cloud.

So again, like if you are putting your, your company's information, your information into whatever AI platform you're using, it's going to take that and chew it up and spit it out to every other, everybody else on earth.

It's just adding, it's like, I don't know, Star Trek fans, they're the Borg. They're just adding your distinct uniqueness to the collective and you're giving away everything that was used.

I mean, I think it's probably at this point very expensive and requires quite a bit of attention and hands-on monitoring to maintain that kind of level of data security. But you really don't want your stuff just heading out there into the cloud.

Yeah, I agree. Unless your stuff you're putting out there is on your website for GEO strategy or whatever, but we'll get to that later.

GEO? Uh-oh. That's a new one.

I know SEO, but G is a new one.

SEO is so 2024, you don't even need it anymore.

Well, in general, I mean, it's getting scary with what people can fake with AI. You know, video deepfakes and all that sort of thing. We're just about to the point now where you cannot trust anything you see anymore.

Videos, photos, that sort of thing. And I am struggling to find a way to connect that to AEC marketing.

But I mean, just generally when you when we as a society have gotten to the point where just because you see something doesn't make it real, I mean, that's that's got scary implications for anybody.

I mean, again, how can your content be trusted when anything can be faked? I mean, yikes.

Yeah. Scary. Don't like it.

And then I feel like for me personally, I'm like, I stop telling stories or sharing anything because I was like, I don't want to be the sucker that taken by AI.

So then there's like this, I don't know, an atrophy of communication that's just happening. Anyways, I don't know, maybe someone else in the world can relate to that feeling. But I will be like, wow, that's amazing.

I'm like, I don't know, AI, less amazing. Okay, we're putting our positive hats on, because that's actually where we sit most of the time.

There are some ways that AI generally can help us. So let's dig deep and find them right now. I will start, and I just want to say that AI is amazing for large data sets.

That's what it is built for.

So if you don't want to suffer through your Excel documents, or you just want to assist, I do think that's a place, especially if it's a closed loop, because I would say most of your Excel documents are probably pretty confidential types of

information, or client lists, or whatever it might be. But I have found good success in being able to make it convert a lot of information, crunch numbers, do some analysis.

Of course, you have to double check things, but at least you're making it do the hard work. So anyways, I stole that easy one, but it's actually one that I've used a lot in running the business. And so that has been helpful from my side.

Either of you using AI to help with Excel type documents or any CRM stuff. I don't know if that's come up in your world, or maybe there's other places that you've been able to leverage it.

I hear a lot of people using AI plugins to take meeting notes. I think that's a pretty smart way of using AI in your day-to-day. I mean, at the end of a long meeting, for example, just having those notes organized and digestible is very handy.

So I hear a lot of that.

Sure. And there's different success rates. I think we've seen some where like, oh, that was really good.

And sometimes you're like, that went too deep. And in a weird way, they didn't get what we were talking about.

Yeah. It can be used to make transcripts of meetings and things like that. But again, you really need to read through it and make sure, because there can be just hilariously wrong errors in there.

It can hear the wrong word. It can ascribe the wrong quote to the wrong person. I mean, there's so many ways that could go wrong.

But yeah, I agree, that is an efficient use of AI.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure our podcast transcripts are done by AI. Kyle might know about that part.

But I mean, they did start offering our transcripts for our episodes, and that's super handy and helpful, and definitely not something that we would have done, or we would have had to pay a different subscription to make that happen.

But there are errors for sure, and we see that, you know, even with the best recording.

But that just boosts accessibility, which is nice. I mean, you have people who, you know, need captions and things like that.

I mean, it's probably a huge leap forward for that, because you didn't used to always have that unless somebody literally did it.

And Kyle sharing, producer Kyle is chiming in with it. Oh, it's Apple Podcasts that provides our transcripts for free, and they use AI, and they say it. So that's fine.

So all of this information is in the world, but we want it out there. That's a good thing. How else have you heard or used AI yourself successfully?

I use Copilot to condense information sometimes.

It's actually a tip I learned from Melissa. So thank you, Melissa. So if you have a narrative or a passage, it's just a little bit too long, and you have a million other things to do.

Copilot is pretty handy in being able to streamline some sentences and cut it back a little bit. The tip, though, is when you're prompting it, again, you need to be a pretty good prompt engineer.

But one of the prompts is to make sure that they're not fabricating any information and to show changes that were made. And so they'll outline exactly what changes were made.

You can even ask it to highlight the changed sentences, and that way, not only are you able to get the output that you want, but you can also quality check it a lot easier. So there are some ways that you can streamline things like that.

Kind of similar to that part on the proposal world is using AI for a compliance check. I haven't actually gone this full workflow that I'll describe here, but it was shared with one of our clients who does have that closed loop system.

And so they now have it as part of their final review process, not the final final one, but where they still have time for changes, just do that compliance check.

And I'm sure that, I'm pretty sure they said, someone else is also doing the human version of that, and that just might evolve as they go, but basically upload the RFP, all the addenda, your draft, your capture plan, your strategy matrix, all of the

documents. It's a lot being fed in by what you created and what your team created, and then they get a report out of, I think they've generated the prompt that they can use again and again, which is deciding, determining, is anything missing

completely? Is there any requirement that would just be not compliant? And then also holes or weaknesses based on what they've trained their AI engine to do and see. So anyways, that can be done.

I think I've used it in much smaller ways. I appreciate like comparing when a new RFP is issued. Like you're reading, you've read the draft of it.

Sometimes we're working off of a draft and then the final gets issued. And to get the comparison, to have it just note like, it's essentially the same. Here are the five things that changed.

I mean, that can help. And then you know where to focus, especially when you're looking at a 150 page RFP. What's different on this one?

So kind of getting that report is similar to Hana, what you were describing and like having to say, this is what I changed and being very clear about that, or this is what looks different.

That's probably a good tool, but I would caution again, relying on AI for something like that, because your eagle-eyed person still very much has a job here, because as we all know, anyone who's ever letter proposal knows, you have to read every

single word of the RFP several times, figure it out, think, go through it. We become insane. You have to be so attentive to detail. And I mean, chat GPC sometimes doesn't know what day it is, or what language it's speaking in.

I mean, the Adobe Acrobat AI, where it's always trying to give you a summary of your document, once gave me a three-paragraph summary of an illustrated packaging wrap design. So I wouldn't trust your $80 million job to the robot just yet.

That's maybe good to test it out and see if there's anything obvious, but please, please, please, I beg you, do not leave your compliance checks up to AI entirely.

Yeah. And that brings up a good point too, is that, okay, so we're really busy. And I think at Middle of Six, we say, like, yeah, we read the RFP three times, right?

There's ones to understand it generally and dig in, right? We've got all those steps to review it.

But if you get an addendum or something that's new and you're like, run in a million miles a minute to get a quick update so you can communicate to the team or something, that can be helpful.

But then you do need to do the work yourself or have someone, you know, just confirm, you know, because an $80 million project would be very sad to lose because of an AI miss.

But here's the big but, is that the more we rely on these tools, the more comfortable we will get and then we won't do the other part. There's like a big world of atrophy that is going to happen and has happened.

Yes.

So true. We've seen that because I used to have 40, 50 phone numbers memorized when I was younger. Everybody's addresses, I knew so many things that I just kept in my head.

Now, I know like one person's phone number. I barely remember like my parents' address. So that is real.

So I don't know if we have any great tips for actually being still judicious with your process and doing all those steps is going to be a slippery slope.

And if they, like as touted as like, it will help us elevate to the new next level. We'll think strategically, we'll put all the like low level work to the computers, but this will free us up to be strategic.

But I caution like, is that going to happen or are we just going to be expected to do twice as many things? I'm like, ah, that's how we felt once we like, you know, started working from home.

We're like, look at all this time that we're not commuting. Oh, oh no, look at all this time that we're working. So yeah, I want to push back on that for all marketers.

Think everyone is doing enough. We don't need to do it faster with more, you know, white knuckling it to the finish line. That does not sound like a good reality.

I think we've already seen that because, I mean, you know, the 40-hour work week was based in a time when we had no technology, you know, when like there were no smartphones or computers or anything and everyone was doing everything by hand.

And we're still there even though technology is, you know, robots who can like tell you which nail salon is the best. Like, what are we doing with our lives?

Okay, well, sorry, back to the positive stuff. Anything else to put in the positive bucket.

Photoshop, AI integration, I've been a big fan so far. I think when you try to generate images, you know, make me a picture of a, you know, bird sitting on top of a car playing rock and roll music like that. I'm not talking about that.

That is not what we want. I'm talking about like, okay, you know, this guy doesn't work for this company anymore and I've got to get him out of the group photo. How can I delete Derek, you know, from this photo?

Sometimes it helps to have AI just fill in the gaps because yes, again, listeners, I can absolutely do that stuff. I can delete little things.

I can content aware fill all day long, but it's usually so much faster to just do, you know, the generative fill or like the remove, delete function, whatever they're calling it.

That saves a ton of time and the results are generally really quite good, I must admit.

Yeah, it's a good gold star for that. Thank you. Well, maybe elephant in a room here, because we do get content that's given to us, and Becky's like, you can sniff it out.

It's AI. It doesn't sound unique or special or even like the person who is sending it over, right? All of those things.

But I want to say that for some people, where writing is not a place that they find a lot of comfort. It can be a place to experiment, draft, have more confidence in some ways.

Again, I'm just really trying to put myself in the place of someone who is not comfortable writing. We happen to be comfortable writing, so it's not going to be a go-to. I think back to like the Grammarly is a good example.

Now, it touts its AI capabilities. But in a lot of ways, it was still helping writers write and have more confidence that the structure was good, and that this made sense, and so whether you're...

I would still recommend putting your own content in there so that it can be reflecting what you're saying as opposed to what the internet is saying. But that can help, and it can help people who would normally be shying away from that area do better.

And then I've actually heard from writers, professional writers writing books and stuff, that they will use it to bounce things off of and work on drafts and get improvements.

But that's very different than what we see in our proposal world, where I think people are trying to just get something to fill in a spot. And there's not that much care into the writing process.

So there's two ways, two ends of that spectrum, whether you're not a great writer or a really great writer, how it could be useful. And you just, again, we've got lots of caution flags. Be careful with that.

What else? We have AI agents in our project management system at Middle of Six.

I hear from them all the time. It's the weirdest thing.

Do we need to turn some of them off? They do try to answer questions for us, and we're like, you don't know what you're talking about.

No. It's passive aggressive, borderline rude. How dare you?

And you can't delete them or block them or like, oh my God.

We'll connect you with Lauren Jane. She'll make those, hopefully go away for you. But wait, we're on the positive, Becky.

We are.

Yeah. The time management robot, whatever that thing is that tells me like, oh, this project is at 75% budget, like that's good because otherwise I'll never know. I mean, somebody does need to sit on my shoulder and tell me that.

So, all right.

So that agent is doing his job. And I would say that the thing is there's so much data in our project management system, it would be very hard to analyze that all the time and give people the information they need on the project.

So, that's a great use of data management with AI. That's all we got in the whole world of AI. We have five bullet points.

Come on, Hana.

Hana, you know this stuff.

That's all I got.

What do you got?

Oh, man. I know. I'm like, I'm digging in my brain.

Hold on. Give me a second. I'm reaching.

We should ask like ChatGPT what we should say.

No, we shouldn't. No.

I did some ask in ChatGPT what they thought about this, just for the entertainment value of like, what is it going to say about itself? And it was very polite, you know, about some things like, here are some tools.

Of course, ChatGPT is kind of the all around good one. I was like, are you just saying that? But I don't know.

I was just using it like as a research tool. I was like, what is it going to say about itself? About this?

We didn't use much of that. Okay, and now let's wrap it up.

We tried our best. We tried to get through all of the positive ways that we see AI working in the world. And I guess the fact is, is that AI is definitely here to stay.

It's not going away. It's literally woven into everything we do. Like, you know, our phones, practically every app has that little AI agent, you know, asking to help.

And then there are ways that you can also, you know, like really truly weave it into your workflow, whether it's like our project management system or, you know, using Co-Pilot through your Microsoft systems, right? I mean, it is, it's in there.

You're going to be tempted or maybe you're harnessing it really well. So it's here. And again, like I said, sorry, Becky, for that.

But we think that it's just important to think about the, you know, considerations and potential unintended consequences.

So if your company doesn't have that AI policy, doesn't have some safeguards, doesn't have closed loop systems to keep your company information safe, secure, proprietary, you know, that's like the starting point for sure.

And then, you know, be considerate about the impact of, you know, the energy, the power, how your team, individually, is, you know, they're using the resources kind of willy-nilly.

And, you know, do we, do we need an AI summary for every PDF that we open up in Adobe? No, you can turn that off, and we have. So, you know, let's not stick our heads in the sand.

It's here, but let's be thoughtful about how we're using it. And Middle of Six had the chance to talk about AI and how we use it at our recent retreat.

And we, you know, developed a little bit of a manifest, or at least something that we could share and feel good about, and how we use it and don't use AI as a tool at Middle of Six. And we came down to that Middle of Six is human at heart.

We feel and experience that AEC work is one through relationships and differentiation.

Our efforts to help our clients build those relationships and differentiate their firms is, you know, something that we rely on, like, insight, experience, collaboration, very, very much human components there, right?

Human first.

So that's what we are focused on, and that's what helps make our work interesting and really stand out and help bring that win. So that's how, you know, we, that's what our stances of what our role is as marketers in AEC.

And AI doesn't help with those facets that much.

We will use it selectively as a tool for kind of arduous administrative tasks, you know, note taking and extra set of QCIs, but not the only set of QCIs per Becky, photo editing, crunching large sets of data, whatever.

We will use it again like a like a tool. And it's all through our paid closed loop systems. And we're fine with that.

But it's not a substitute for our strategic thinking and our creative development. And that is the part that just makes us really excited to get up every day and dig into another RFP.

So I hope that's helpful, interesting, just another voice in the conversation. And I hope it helps you all understand how we're using it. And maybe that's something that you could pick up on too.

I'm not sure. Becky, would you like to have the last word on AI? Do you want to make your case one more time?

And then we'll officially wrap up and see you on the next one.

So as you can tell listeners, I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about this. But for those of you out there who are also artists, there is hope. There will always be a human element that cannot be copied by a computer.

They can only regurgitate what has been input into their knowledge base. They will never be able to be spontaneous or portray deep emotion through visual media or write stories that will move you to tears.

Like we will always have something that will be in demand. Even if the job market starts to look bleak, priorities will shift. Like as people get sicker and sicker of the AI slop, the human-made stuff will become more and more priced.

It's a cycle. We see that all the time. And as I've said many times before, AI will never be funny.

That is one thing that I think the conversation in our society about AI just never talks about, but it's one thing that they cannot replicate.

Like despite having access to the words of all the great comedians of the past 100 years, like to be funny requires emotion and empathy, reading people, knowing what you yourself find funny and why, and on and on.

And that, fortunately, in addition to being a fun thing that we all just enjoy as humans, it's a great way as a business to capture attention and stand out from your competition. So I am very confident. I'm betting everything.

I'm betting my entire career on the fact that AI will never be funny.

So you will always have a job. That's awesome. Even if proposals don't get to be as funny as we want them to be.

Shout out to Schuchart.

They allow us to be funny.

Yeah.

And hey, the other side is that your interviews are probably going to be really important as the AI slop is all over the place and the proposals are more generic and we see more often in the RFP, please don't give us any generic content.

And they'll eventually really be saying, we don't want AI content. They're going to put their foot down, but the interview is where real people can shine. So anyways, start investing in your interview prep.

There you go. Well, thank you both for like going out on this limb to talk about AI with me.

And hopefully, you know, our listeners enjoyed this and got a sneak peek into what we're doing and thinking at Middle of Six, which is, you know, we're just being creative people over here trying to make things funny, interesting and human.

So, that's it for The Shortlist. Thanks for joining me, Becky, Hana. See you next time.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having me.

Keep it real, everybody.

Keep it real.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six. Our producer is Kyle Davis with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six. If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.

You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep on hustling.

Bye.

Farewell.

Sayonara.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.