Contract Intelligence and Data: How AI and ChatGPT Benefit Construction

JOSH LEVY: Hello, everyone. Welcome to "Contract Intelligence and Data-- How AI and ChatGPT are Benefiting the Construction Industry." We'd like to introduce ourselves to get started today. So you all at Autodesk University may be wondering what two construction lawyers are doing at a construction tech conference.

That's not something that you see every day. I'm really proud of the partnership that Nate and I have established together. And I think our backgrounds will help maybe establish why we're here today talking about technology. So I'm Josh. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Document Crunch.

I wish I could tell you that I was some cool Silicon Valley guy with a big tech background. But I'm actually not. I've been in this industry my entire career. I was a construction management major from the University of Florida. I ended up going to law school down in my hometown of Miami. And I've been exclusively a construction lawyer for most of my career now.

I worked for a very large law firm that represents a lot of general contractors throughout the USA. And then, a little over eight years ago, I moved to Atlanta, where I am today, because I went in-house with a very large general contractor. I ended up leading some big in-house legal departments for actually a couple of contractors.

And through all of these experiences, I just came to appreciate the pain points associated with contracts and the need for project teams to understand what was in their contracts. And that really led to the founding of Document Crunch.

So Document Crunch, our mission is really to empower the industry to understand what's in their contracts. So again, I come to you today as a technologist now who has spent my entire life living and breathing construction contracts and the pains associated with them.

On my journey, I've gotten to know Nate a little bit. I'll let him introduce himself. But I think the collaboration between two of us is really indicative of where the industry is going and some of what we're going to talk to you about today.

NATHAN JOHNSON: Thanks, Josh. Yeah, it's great to be here talking to everybody today. And I guess when Josh gave me the call, I thought, hey, what the heck? We're in an industry, being lawyers, former lawyers and construction workers that has historically been way behind the curve in technology. So of course, we'd like to get together and talk about technology because there's a lot of ground to be had in that space.

So I'm Nathan Johnson I'm the general counsel for The Boldt Company. The Boldt Company is a 136-year-old general contractor based out of Appleton, Wisconsin. We do commercial general contracting across the country. I was able to join The Boldt Company back in 2016 from private practice.

I am not a construction major and did not really have all that much background in construction law prior to joining the Boldt company. I was a labor and employment litigator, so I had a lot of experience in the litigation landscape and working specifically with traditional labor unions, of which The Boldt Company is a unionized general contractor. So that's what brought me in.

And then, like Josh, when you join a small, nimble legal team, you learn to fight fires really quickly. And contracting was a space that I got into almost immediately when I joined the company when we were a legal team of two. And through that, I learned a lot about contracting in the general contractor space, and how do we assess risk, and what do we need to do. But I also learned that space was very antiquated in the way that we deal with contracts, which we'll talk a little bit more about down the line.

But that's been my journey to The Boldt Company. Got in touch with Josh a couple of years ago at an AGC conference. And he was speaking my language when he started talking about Document Crunch. And, the rest is history.

JOSH LEVY: Yeah, before we go to today's topic, I just want to throw some credit. Nate has there that he's a tech evangelist. And the reality is that it's folks like Nate who were able to adopt the Document Crunch solution so early in time that it allowed us to continue to evolve, to provide a lot of the value to the industry that we are providing today.

So again, when you think about what two construction lawyers are doing here, credit to The Boldt Company for having such a progressive general counsel. The type of feedback that we get from real industry players allows us to deliver on a lot of that value that we're going to talk about from how AI can be used to leverage the contracting process and make companies better and less risky, et cetera.

So it's really neat to have come across folks like Nate. I can't say that every person in the legal profession is as progressive as Nate. But he's here for a reason. He's a real ambassador for technology and how it's helped streamline the contracting process.

So we can go to the next slide and just get into-- this is very topical here today. There's been so much hoopla about ChatGPT and large language models, and what does that mean? And when all these studies show that one of the professions that's going to get most disrupted is the legal profession-- but then, there's other administrative professions that also could be disrupted.

And I guess what Nate and I from both sides of the aisle are here to say is, we don't believe that this technology is actually here to replace anybody. And in fact, Document Crunch's core fundamental principle is based upon, we are assisting humans to be better. We are not automating or completely replacing humans. I believe that artificial-- I wholeheartedly believe that AI will speed up processes.

But you still need human input to inform the judgment, and decision making, and context that goes into making business decisions every day. And so that's been our experience at Document Crunch. I think there's been a lot made of, oh, this is going to completely replace this or replace that. Anyone who's touting that, I would challenge them, especially when it comes to things like understanding what's in your contract.

You're still going to need human input. But we are really excited about the advent of this technology. We are really excited about the ability to make our industry so much more efficient, less risky, potentially lessen the overarching need for overhead for every nook and cranny of the industry.

But replacement seems to be a little bit of a heavy-handed way to come at this. And so with that said, Nate, what are your thoughts on-- we are hearing that there's a ton of research out there saying that this is going to replace lawyers. What's your opinion on this?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Yeah. I agree, Josh. I don't quite think it's going to replace us. I'm not looking to change careers anytime soon. But I do think it is disruptive. And some people look at the word "disruptive" as a negative. I look at the word "disruptive" as positive because it is creating a lot of opportunity that didn't otherwise exist in this space.

And it's creating a lot of conversations like the one we're having today and have been having about where we're going with this. And I see it impacting the legal escape in the sense that you and I have both lived through the era of contracting being a slog. I mean, that's part of your origin story. It's part of what we have to do as in-house legal practitioners for construction general contractors.

We have to read a ton of contracts. We have to parse a ton of data. Well, historically, the only way you could do that was through asking lawyers or people on legal staff or in risk teams to flip through those pages. And honestly, that's low-value legal work. So I think what AI is doing is that it's opening up opportunity for the legal teams-- and the in-house teams, specifically-- to really focus on the high-value, high-impact work for their enterprises.

And that's going to not just translate into better contracting process. It's going to translate into a whole bunch of other strategic ancillary related issues that legal teams just haven't been able to focus on because they've been buried under the monotony of general contract reviews. I also think that it's going to help improve the standardization and onboarding of staff into enterprises because you can use these systems to train people.

In the past, you had to train people more bespoke. You'd hire a new employee. And you'd have to walk them through, here's how we negotiate contracts at XYZ company. Here's the risk factors that we watch out for. Using AI helps you kind of speed that process up a little bit more so that you've got a standardized approach to how you're going to look at those things. And the system can walk people through it rather than a playbook or a manual, like you would have to do in the past. One of the things that--

JOSH LEVY: Before we--

NATHAN JOHNSON: Sorry.

JOSH LEVY: Go ahead, Nate.

NATHAN JOHNSON: I was going to say, there's this point on here about the risk immune system. And we've got this picture of General Stanley McChrystal's book, Risk. I think this is the third book that he wrote in a series of books on leadership. But this one was really interesting to me because he got me thinking about a comment that he makes in this book talking about risk immune systems for enterprises.

And being the head of legal and the head of risk management, we're always thinking about risk for a company. Construction is a very risky industry. And this idea of creating a risk immune system kind of clicked for me when we started thinking about AI because now, we have a piece of technology that potentially could serve almost like an overwatch system that gets integrated into a lot of your operations and can watch for signals in a way that we would historically rely on people to do that, right?

So something happens on a project, Josh, you and I, we would wait for the phone call to come. And when the phone call comes, then we could respond. And that was a very reactive approach to how we manage risk. I think AI is going to push a lot more opportunity for companies, and general counsels, and legal departments to start thinking proactively about risk, where you can actually think about having this AI be part of your immune system that detects and monitors certain types of things or signals and can alert people without the requirement of having to have a superintendent who's already slogged down on a job site, just trying to make sure everybody goes home safe every night and that the project stays on schedule worry about some of these contract risks, like we worry about in the back end in the offices.

JOSH LEVY: Yeah, let me put a finer point on that before we move on. And this goes exactly to this risk immune system. So one of the conundrums that I had when I was serving in a role very similar to Nate for any [INAUDIBLE] top 50 contractor was, I'd be heads down doing all-- slogging through all this legal stuff that you would expect me to be slogging through.

But for you folks that are even watching this or attending this conference, you're here because you're thinking about, well, how does this technology impact my project teams? Well, think about this problem. While I would be heads down doing that, I had these glass doors right outside my office.

I'd have a line of people outside my office every single day-- a hard hat in one hand, a piece of paper in the other hand, knocking on my door and saying, hey, can I talk to you for a second? Something happened on the job site. What did we do?

How do we-- what does our contract say? How do we give notice? Whose fault is this? Who pays for this? What are the insurance implications of this? And I knew two things when they were in my office. And this goes to Nate's point about this risk immune system.

The first thing that I knew was, I was being paid a lot of money to take a certain position on behalf of my client once they came in my office. They didn't resolve the issue at the project level. That's why they were in my office. Whatever it was, they didn't resolve it in the trailer when they could have been talking to the owner or the architect or a trade partner or whatever it is.

And they were now in my office. And I was being paid a lot of money to now be persuasive as to why whatever they were telling me should be resolved in our favor. But whoever they were talking to was in somebody else's office down the street, who was also being paid a lot of money to take the opposite position.

So I knew the first thing I knew right off the top was that we were going to have a compromise, which actually meant we were going to lose profit on the job just by virtue of having to compromise. With these types of projects situations, very rarely is it super clean. But once it wasn't resolved, we now were going to have to meet in the middle.

I wasn't going to take whatever they were telling me that the Supreme Court in 99.9% of the cases, so fee erosion right off the top of the project. But the second thing that I knew was for every one issue that person was coming to me about, there were now nine other issues that they were not telling me about-- not nefariously, just because they may not have realized that something was coming up or, to Nate's point, they may not have been predictive as to how this impacted other things.

And there were nine other issues that now they weren't telling me about, which were now going to be landmines that we may step on during the course of the project. And if we did step on them, they were going to be very expensive and lead to even more fee erosion.

So when we're talking about this type of technology, the one thing that I hope to distill down for you all who are watching this is, this really matters for project teams. If you could start arming project teams with insights and understandings and they had the ability to win those discussions in the trailer before even having to pick up the phone or go into the office of someone like Nate, you start to bulletproof your ability to keep profit in the job.

And that's a really powerful thing. And so when we think about the impact of this technology, we're here to tell you that we don't see this as just impacting the back offices or folks like Nate and I. We see this supplementing project teams every single day and making them smarter around contract risks. And that's why I love this point that Nate makes about a risk immune system.

It increases the immunity of your projects, thus making your company more profitable. And so that's just a really important point to drive home before we get to the next slide, here.

So Nate, we're talking about tech adoption generally. And you're the general counsel of a big company. I ask you, what else keeps you up at night? Because there's a lot of concern over AI. And is it safe? Is it secure? Is it going to replace people? And you referred me to this video, which we'll watch here. So what keeps you up at night?

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

So Nate, I guess, is this scarier to you than all this ChatGPT stuff that's currently floating out there? Why did you choose to put this video up today?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Well, I'm sure all the people that are watching this are going, well, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen. Why are you so afraid of that? And I agree. It is pretty cool. I mean, this is Spot. This is Boston Dynamics's prototype. This video is from Trimble. They have another one out there prototyping Boston Dynamics, human-looking version of this robot that's called Atlas, I believe.

But the reason that these keep me up isn't because of the potential for innovation. I think that is absolutely amazing. But we have introduced a new level of data, a new level of interaction, and a new way of having to assess risk on all of our projects, that we haven't had that layer of exposure before. So as a general counsel, I look at this and I say, this is groundbreaking innovation.

But it's also groundbreaking risk because we've never had robots walking around on construction projects in the history of all of the litigation and insurance claims management that has gone on before today. And we're going to have to carefully proceed to figure out how do we not only capitalize on the innovation, but more so, how do we make sure that that innovation doesn't become something that exposes us to unnecessary risk?

And so we're creating a whole new environment. And I think it's just important to not get lost in all of the lights, and glamor, and glitter for a moment and just indulge the risk-oriented conservative mindsets, as we tend to be in the legal and risk offices and just say, OK, this is great. But there's also a level of consideration that we're going to have to give as to how we do this appropriately in a way that doesn't expose our companies to the bottom line.

Because to the potential profit that we gain by using the technologies and creating the risk immune system like you just talked about, Josh, we don't want to erode it because we're not really trying to think through everything as it pertains to how we roll these out. So it's great. It's cool. I want to see these on construction sites in the future as much as the next person. But I also want to make sure that we're careful about how we anticipate the risks associated with using these types of technologies.

JOSH LEVY: So Nate, if I could just ask, is part of this meant to say that there's going to be risk in any innovation? And just like we're hearing about the potential risks for large language models, are you using this as an example just to say that there's always going to be the underside of risk in innovation?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Absolutely. The first time they put a steam shovel on a construction site, somebody was probably thinking the same thing. And it's no different today than it was then. It's just a reminder, really, to everybody to say, hey, while the innovation and the potential for what this can do to construction as an industry is amazing. We just also have to not look at it through only one side. We have to make sure that we're managing the risk as well.

And that's where the lawyers and the risk and the legal teams like us have to make sure we're sharpening our pencils just as much as the project teams to figure out, hey, when you guys come into our offices and say, we want to put one of these things on a job site or we want to use an AI model to do some predictive analytics as it pertains to something. We are ready to understand what you're talking about and think through it through our lens to partner with you so that we can leverage this in the best way for the project and, ultimately, our customers.

JOSH LEVY: Yeah, I think it's just a great perspective, right, especially in the role that you're in and where you come from in the industry. All innovation, the steam shovel is a great example-- all innovation has great potential, but it has a risk. And I think that you being able to really deliver-- focus on the value that the technology brings to the construction industry.

And then make sure that value outweighs the risk or that the risk can be managed. I think that's a really important point. I mean, some of the hoopla around this-- the ChatGPT and large language models-- has been fascinating to me. We're a pretty risky industry. Yet, there seems to be a lot of pushback around this technology.

But there is a lot of value to be had. I think it's incumbent upon the industry to be pushing us service providers or software providers to make sure that we're delivering real value and not just a shiny object that doesn't really do much. But think it's just a great example of, here's something that we-- there's a lot of very positive energy around these robots and robotics in general. But of course, there's going to be risk that comes with that innovation. So thanks for that, Nate.

NATHAN JOHNSON: Absolutely. And a hat tip, Josh, to you and to both Autodesk because The Boldt Company has been involved with both of these technology companies for a while. And we do pride ourselves on having partnerships, not just with our customers, but with also our trade partners. And in this instance, you all aren't that much different than a trade partner. You're supplying us with something that we need to be efficient in our projects.

And having a dialogue with us and with a lot of people in our company in different positions as you develop your technologies and roll out your different product innovations has been huge. Because I have been on the phone with you. And I have been on the phone with Autodesk as we look at some of these things. And in the past, I just don't know that that's been the case.

But it makes me much more comfortable and able-- as a general counsel assessing risk and managing all of these different exposures, it makes me comfortable knowing that we have an audience with the leadership and the teams that are doing this innovation to understand all these perspectives. So I appreciate the fact that we have a collaboration. And I think that's going to make it a lot more efficient for us to roll out some of this innovation in the future.

JOSH LEVY: Well, look, with that overarching view in mind as to why this technology is not here to replace people, why this technology carries some underlying risk, but that we know comes with all types of innovation-- what we're now going to do is shift the second part of this presentation to talk about how generative AI, large language models, and artificial intelligence are actually being used to impact contracting for the construction industries, and then real world examples of how it's being used by top contractors like Boldt, and then some of our bigger picture thoughts as to where this is ultimately going, which Autodesk, of course, has a big part in, as well.

So we're really excited about that. So here is how Document Crunch is actually being used today. We're going to show another brief video here. And then, we're going to get into how Boldt is actually using AI for contracting.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- At Document Crunch, we know that construction contracts impact everyone throughout the project life cycle. So making the contract a team sport ensures the most success for your company. In this video, we'll talk about how Document Crunch empowers your entire team, making your company smarter, less risky, and, ultimately, more profitable. Now, there are four main groups that are responsible for the execution of each project and make up this team.

You have the pre-construction team. This is business development, scheduling, and estimators trying to bring bids through the door. The risk management team-- legal, insurance and safety try to mitigate the risk of each contract. The executive team-- these are the people responsible for the profitability of the firm. And then, the project execution team-- these are the people in the field actually executing on each project.

Now, let's talk about how each Crunch impacts these people in each phase of a contract, starting with the risk review phase. Now, in this phase, our comprehensive review gives the pre-construction team an easy way to review the most important provisions in a contract and know what to look for, while the risk management team gets a quick understanding if it meets the organization's risk profile.

With our checklist, the risk team can standardize the team's review to make sure the important stuff is covered and the project is worth bidding on, which brings us to negotiation. Now, in this phase, each Crunch helps the pre-construction team understand how to fulfill in the contract, gives the contract professionals a document checklist alongside redlining tools to understand and efficiently negotiate the contract.

Once you've won the bid, the executive team can take what your team learned during the initial evaluation and then negotiate the most important areas until you reach a mutually-agreeable risk managed contract. Now, when we move to the actual execution phase, Document Crunch builds a bridge from the back office to the field by arming the project team with a playbook to ensure they can leverage and be compliant with the contract as they run the project day to day and gives the back office, the risk management and executive teams, the confidence that the team is prepared, knowledgeable, and in the best position to run a profitable project.

At Document Crunch, we are on a mission to empower everyone in the construction industry to understand what's in their contracts. Whether you're in the back office or the field, come see how you can help your company level up at DocumentCrunch.com.

[END PLAYBACK]

JOSH LEVY: So that's the full suite of what document crunch is currently doing today. But Nate, how are you using AI around contracting?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Well, we're kind of dabbling in a lot of areas to understand the true value proposition that it brings. And the way that we are doing that is across all three of those fronts that are shown in your video there. So a contract walks into our team in the first phase because they're looking for, generally, a high-level review. So what does this contract look like?

We're working through commercial terms with the potential customer. And we want to know if there's any buried hazards in the contract that we need to get ahead of now. In the past, those reviews would walk into our team's office. And it would mean we'd have to sit down and do a literal page turn. So I put it on the slide here, can you take a quick look at this contract?

Josh and I both would laugh and sort of say, there's no such thing as taking a quick look at a contract because you literally have to flip through it. So we have lived in that world. And that's part of the origin story of Document Crunch. But now, with Document Crunch, we actually do have the ability to take a quick look at a contract because AI does the work of finding those major provisions in a contract that we, as risk and legal folks, care about the most.

So it will highlight all of those things that we need to find or tell us if they're not there so that we can really give that quick assessment to a project team or the pre-con team to say, here's what we found, here's a couple things we might want to take into account as we continue down the process of winning this work. And then, once we're awarded that work, you can shift the data that you've collected and reviewed through Document Crunch into the negotiation phase.

So we have a record and an ability to use their platform to inform the negotiating positions. Because as everybody knows, when you submit a bid on a project, it may take some time before an actual award happens. And you need to pick that agreement back up for negotiation. So you can lose-- if you're not diligent, you can lose a lot of information that was gained early about the negotiating positions that you would want to take.

Now, with Document Crunch. It that information. You can take notes. You can use that AI to flag and tag things that you want to pay attention to or that you want the teams to pay attention to. And it creates a comprehensive record that you can pick back up if you win the work and you can start your negotiations from there. So we're using it. There's some great integrations that we're using and exploring with them on that front.

But I think one of the biggest things for my benefit besides the actual day-to-day work that we, as lawyers, do is the ability to improve communication across the entire project life cycle about a contract. In the past, contracts-- borrowing from somebody else, contracts were coffins, right? You just put a bunch of information in. And you bury them in the back yard until something goes wrong.

And you have to dig them up and figure out what it says about something. We don't have to do that anymore. You can earth information out of your contracts and share it a lot easier with a project teams at all the different phases in the work so that everybody understands what's happening in that contract depending on-- for where they are in that project life cycle. It also allows us to streamline communications across our internal teams because we can work with the right people on the contracts.

And we can train them-- because of the way the platform with Document Crunch works, we can train them about some of our risk positions so that as we're working through a contract, they're also learning about the kinds of risks that we want so that in the future they know, hey, these are the kinds of things we need to watch out for. And here's where we can find them in the contract. And here's a great product that is approachable to the project teams because of the UI being really well designed.

They can use it. And they can do some of this information. So I think for us, it's really opened up the doors for communication and collaboration, which is huge in construction because everybody needs to understand what's important at different phases in the work. And the contract is one of those things that is consistent throughout the life of a project. So having that data at your fingertips and using that platform in that way is really, I think, critical to anybody in the construction industry that is adjacent to the contract.

JOSH LEVY: Thanks for that, Nate. I think the big takeaway is, look, this technology is here now. This is already being deployed in the industry. It's really exciting know that it is being used and it is making these processes better, not just in some promotional video, but actually every single day in the industry.

And so the time is now to embrace this type of innovation. This isn't coming soon. This is happening now. This is the reality today. And so we can go to the next slide.

NATHAN JOHNSON: Yeah. And I'll just say, while we're doing that, Josh, your collaboration with your customers on this front makes it a lot easier for this to be a reality because we know that every contractor has a different risk profile. And you guys, very early on in your journey, knew that and recognized that there was going to be a need to be flexible to different customers' risk profiles.

Some are going to have certain things that they really need to pay attention to, whereas others might not. And your platform offers that flexibility. You can come to your customer. And they can say, hey, these are the kinds of things that we like to work around in our reviews. And you can work with them and you can integrate that right into the product. And to me that, that's huge because you're not trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

JOSH LEVY: Well, to the next point-- and you hit on this-- training and what the importance of fair contracts are, why we need to have fair contracts. So this is just another example of an alternative use case, which we've also started developing with an insurer, where we're actually starting to benchmark contracts for that insurer's cohort of big customers. Or we're saying, OK, based on the insurer standards, here's where folks are grading out, essentially, across important terms based on a set of standards that they've set up.

So this is just another example of starting to level the playing field where, when you've got that gun to your head-- which we've all had before, hey, if you don't accept this term, I'm going to go to the next bidder. But what if there wasn't a next bidder? And why is it important, Nate, that project teams also understand why contracts may be fair or unfair, from your perspective?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Well, I used to say this when I was an employment litigator because when you're on the defense side defending employers, sometimes your clients lose sight of the fact that employers have rights too. And you don't have rights to the extent you're not willing to stand behind them. And a contract is a basis for what the commercial agreement of the project was at the time it was conceived.

And so that means that the project teams that are executing the work in the field, when they run into issues, they need to fall back to the contract to understand what rights they have. And those are legally enforceable commercial teams that were decided at the time that the project was initiated. And if you don't know those and you don't use those, well, then, any lawyer worth their salt is going to say, well, if you just waive your rights, then there's not much I can do for you to come back and say that.

So understanding the positions of strength and weakness that you have in your agreement when certain types of things come up is hugely important to the project teams because they're the first people who are going to encounter those situations.

JOSH LEVY: Yeah, and just going back to the example that I was talking about, the hard hat in one hand and piece of paper in the other hand-- I mean, look, it doesn't mean that you're always going to get to negotiate all of these terms. It doesn't always mean that you're going to have a basis to get more fair terms. But knowledge is power. Awareness is power.

The ability to understand where you're at and then think through how do you mitigate these things? If I've got a bad delay framework in my contract, maybe we need to add some fat to the schedule when you start to think about how preconstruction is working with risk management who's working with the executives and whatnot. And being able to just arm everyone in your organization with transparency around these issues, that leads to better outcomes for the projects.

I mean, Nate and I can't speak to this with data. We could just speak to this with collectively probably dozens of years of experience and billions upon billions of dollars of projects-- and frankly, probably hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of claims. When teams are prepared and they understand this stuff, you get better outcomes, period. I mean, that is the overarching experience that we've had.

So anything that we can do to empower folks to understand what's in their contracts is hugely important for a less risky industry and, frankly, just smoother relationships at the project level, which is also really important.

NATHAN JOHNSON: Absolutely. And the data that I saw on this is a couple of years old. But one bad project, on average, is five to seven good projects to recoup the losses that you have from that one bad project. So in addition to the margin competition that we all share in the construction industry, if you run into some of these risks and you drop the ball and you have a bad project, you know that it's going to take you a long tail to recover on that.

And I know there's plenty of people in this room that know exactly that pain. And our job is to try to make sure that we have that pain eradicated from the organization as much as possible.

JOSH LEVY: So look, Nate, I know we talk a lot about the future. And you are a technologist. Maybe start to give some examples of how you could see these large language models being used in the future. And then, also, maybe even I'll show some of our Document Crunchers going.

And we'll talk about how we're even thinking about some of this in Autodesk. But what are your thoughts about the future and this type of technology? Where do you see the value coming?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Yeah, well, any good lawyer will say they don't like to make predictions. So I'll disclaim it by that. I think the most interesting thing to me near term is, well, I would say two things. One, it's that I think it's going to level the playing field, like had mentioned earlier, for some of that low-value legal work.

And that means that we're going to be able to get to high-value legal work a lot faster because we're going to find ways to use AI, whether it's janitor products or traditional AI, to create a lot more streamlined processes and workflows for just the day-to-day work that we do. So I'm really excited about that because in the legal industry alone, aside from construction, I know there's a lot of ground to be gained there.

So I'm excited about the potential that these generative AI products have in that space. I also think it's really interesting now that lawyers and risk and legal teams, through partnerships like this and with our insureds, are actually going to be exposing a layer of data that we've never really had clear line of sight on. So we're going to be able to start connecting some dots because we're going to be able to extract data about certain types of things that, historically-- take a contract, for example.

There's not really a great way to get any leading indicators about what kind of contract terms are out there in the industry and where the winds of change may be blowing or where there might be potential exposures. The way that you would get to that in the past was you'd have to wait for litigation to come up.

Or you'd have to wait for the AIA to update their contract documents or consensus docs to update their standard form agreements to really get a sense as to where the industry is going. I think with AI and some of the things that we're going to be able to do with contracting, we might get a little bit more visibility into that. That could help us, not just from a negotiation standpoint, but it could help us with our companies understand the risk exposures that we're getting.

We can partner with our insurers to understand how they're underwriting things and what that might look like. And so I think near term, the potential for the data that we're going to be exposed to is really huge. We're going to be able to draw some great insights that we haven't, as an industry, been able to do.

JOSH LEVY: What about the ability to start delivering some of these insights to project teams in environments where they work, like Autodesk? What are some of your thoughts there?

NATHAN JOHNSON: Yeah, that, I think, really kind of ties into that risk immune system that I was talking about before. I mean, that idea for me is-- I'm not sure how it's going to pan out exactly. But I look at it as AI is overwatch. It's watching what's happening on projects. And the majority of the work actually happens in the built environment in the field.

But it's so tech informed and enabled now that we're going to be able to extract things from the way people are interacting with the technology. If somebody pulls up a change order, there's going to be a way to signal that and say, hey, it looks like you're putting a change order together, do you want to serve up the portion of your contract that talks about change orders?

And let's make sure that the change order you're drafting complies with the form that you need to follow or it has the word in it that you need to have. Or it's going to watch for certain types of risks that you look-- like a spot on the job site, there-- if it's walking around the job site and it notices something, which there's already software that picks up these hazards from a safety perspective. And it alerts people.

And it says, hey, we noticed this thing happening on your project. We think maybe you should take a look at it. To me, that's taking and connecting the front of the project teams in the field with the back office in a way that we've never really been able to do, like you said. And Josh, outside of something happening and it gets to the point where the project manager says, I got to go to legal, and they've got to either pick up the phone or they got to come in and have a meeting.

So I think the ability to have AI sit as a middle layer between what's happening in the field and what's happening in the back office and us to be able to monitor that in a way that we never have is really exciting.

JOSH LEVY: Yeah. And as we have an eye toward exactly what Nate was talking about, bringing these just-in-time insights to project teams and environments where they work. You know, I'll share with you my views of the future. I believe that by putting these insights and knitting them very closely to these workflows, you're going to start being able to bulletproof projects a lot more. You are going to be able to start automating some of that contract compliance.

The change order was a great example. If Nate was following every project manager around, Nate would be asking that question. It's not super complex, but it's just that nuance-- hey, let me make sure that form is the right form, right? And AI can start filling in some of those gaps. Because the reality is, Nate never gets to those workflows because Nate is too busy heads down in the much bigger issues like negotiating $100 million projects.

But every missed change order, every notice letter that should have been sent out more timely or in a better forum, every lien waiver that was inappropriately executed-- all that does is create fee erosion for project teams every single day. And AI can start getting into some of those gaps and filling them in a way that provides so much more assurance to the industry. So when we think about that, I'll just show you the next big rollout that we're bringing to Document Crunch, where project teams can just start querying their contracts very similar to that discussion that maybe they would be having with Nate in the back office.