AEC Digital Innovation: Up for Adoption

ADAM HORN: Thank you for joining us today for our industry talk on Digital Innovation: Up For Adoption. My name is Adam Horn. I am the Team Lead for Digital Transformation Solutions Group. We are a large group of almost 20 subject matter experts that are supporting our engineering and design projects here at HNTB through all things 3D to XD creating immersive collaboration environments and doing 3D to 4D for design modernization within HNTB's largest infrastructure projects.

DAVID WILLARD: Hi, I'm Dave Willard. I work underneath Adam Horn in the team that he's just mentioned. My specialty is I'm Immersive Experience Team Lead. And my specialties are working on rapid visualization technologies, workflows, real time media, immersive solutions, and also do a little bit of training planning and implementation and management on some of the mega projects within HNTB.

AJ LIGHTHEART: Hello, everyone. My name is AJ Lightheart. I am a product sales specialist here on the XR team at Autodesk. And I've had the pleasure of working closely with Adam, Dave, and team around some of these different emerging-technology initiatives which we're going to shed some light on. And for the last three years have been really connected and involved with anything and everything real-time collaboration, immersive experiences as it relates to the AEC industry. And we are really excited to shed some of these concepts with you here today.

ADAM HORN: All right thanks Dave and I really appreciate that. First, we're going to start today with a brief history of some of our normals. That's been a word that we've heard a lot about lately, this concept of normals. So let's take a look at where we were, where have we been. Well, as you can see here this is one of my favorite pictures from our industry. This is probably about 50 years ago.

But this was a very traditional design, engineering design drafting room. This was just this was how we did business. This was state of the art at the time. So I'm sure many people listening probably have experienced something similar to this throughout their career if they've been doing this a while. And Dave and I, we always kind of joke one of the things we loved about this is that you can almost smell the cigarette smoke in this room.

Most drafting tables came with an ashtray in the corner and an electric eraser, which was digital innovation I guess at the time. What were we creating? What were these people creating on those drafting boards? Well, they were very discreet plan sets with very specific information. And if you're not familiar with these plan sheets or plan sets, you look at this and you probably are thinking like most people that looks really important, and there's a lot of text and numbers on there.

But you probably don't really understand what is important about it. And when you open the plan sets and you start to get into the real math and the detail of it, it gets even more confusing as you can see here with a complex multi-level interchange to flatten it to 2D. It's very confusing. And so it's hard to understand that as just a non engineer or technician. That's what we did for a long time.

But somewhat influenced by the pandemic, we are in a much different place today. We're not together in a line of drafting tables in one room smoking cigarettes together anymore. We are now more in immersive digital environments, like Teams, that something that we use almost every day now to do our jobs.

So we're not meeting in person. And again, that's being led by somewhat by the pandemic and our more easily adopting these digital technologies where we may have been a little more resistant prior to the pandemic, these are just becoming how we do our day to day jobs now. We're not driving into the office as much. And maybe we're working more remotely across states with teams doing design across state lines.

And so what are we doing? Well now, what you see here those same plan sheets that we saw earlier, the 2D plan sheets, this is the same interchange now. We've taken that and we're moving to a 3D environment. This is obviously much easier to understand for non-technical people. They can clearly get a better feel for the context and how the interchange flows.

You can start to kind of choose your own adventure around this large interchange and you can get an idea of scale and elevation change and everything else. So we've made already one normal change, right? So that was the previous normal drafting table and now we're sort of here doing this today. But now we're even talking about this new normal, right, and where do we want to go?

Well, we really want to even take it to the next step and fully immerse ourselves into that experience, and provide the ability for our stakeholders a wider stakeholder group to experience that with us and actually take them into our large design projects, take them into the drafting room with us, if you will, and fully immerse them and let them feel like they're a part of the design process.

We also want to be able to take that information to the field through augmented reality and see things that can't be seen. Like on the next slide, if you look up, you can see engineering proposed engineering utilities that otherwise you wouldn't understand where they go. But now we can see them in context in space through an augmented reality device like a HoloLens.

And then on the left, we have collaboration rooms, and we'll see more of this later, that are allowing us to get together within one design room and collaborate around a table, and look at our design in this dollhouse view. And even dive in and be to scale 1 to 1 and look at this design in context. So you probably are asking yourself hey that sounds great, Adam. But why do we want to do that?

I mean, I'm already getting some digital fatigue. You know I've got teens, I've got Zooms, I've got all these things. So why do we need to do that? This is an example that I like to go back to of one reason why I think and we think that digital adopting these new digital solutions is important. It was a year ago, year and a half ago, my family and I were on a cross country trip Kansas City there.

We call home out to the East Coast to the beach trip. And if you're like most people even me, and I'm a bridge geek, you probably when you're on the road you don't really think about how many bridges I've crossed or really what was the condition of the bridge. You're just driving, right? You're trying to get from point A to point B.

But actually on this trip I became very aware of a specific bridge that we came across, the I-40 bridge that connects Arkansas to Tennessee interstate bridge crossing. And I was like, oh yeah, that's the bridge that was in the news not that long ago that actually almost collapsed. And our firm as well as many others this became a federal national news story because of the such a big risk of this bridge falling actually due to a large crack in one of the structurally, next slide if you can Dave.

Yeah there's the bridge the I-40 bridge. And they had actually identified upon an inspection, a crack in a large part of the superstructure. This would have brought the bridge down. They shut the bridge down immediately. They had no idea really how long the crack had been there. This is a major mobility thoroughfare, large diesel traffic goods moving between states. It's the heaviest travel bridge between those two states.

So you can imagine I mean they shut this thing down. We responded kind of as a industry to this bridge. But it really put a spotlight and it became really emblematic of all of our bridge infrastructure in the United States. And we started to take a look at that as an industry. And you see there's 614,000 bridges in the United States.

And in 2017, over 50,000, almost 60,000 of those bridges were rated as structurally deficient. That's almost 10% of our cumulative bridge infrastructure. And in that year, much like me and my family, probably found yourself and didn't even know it driving across one or more of those bridges. In that year alone, there were 188 million trips across structurally deficient bridges every single day that year.

And that's just bridges. That doesn't account for ports, airports, transit, rail. So this really as I said, this is emblematic of one of the reasons we believe digital transformation is not optional. We simply cannot ignore our aging infrastructure anymore. But our owners really are dealing with a multitude of issues. They've got an aging workforce, they're turning over their workforce, their infrastructure is aging.

Right now, bridges that were engineered to last 50 years or over 100 years old all over the place. So we have a really unique opportunity, once in a generation, funding opportunity to help our owners transform our infrastructure back up to a state of good repair. And so for us, this is not an option. But the good news is that we are doing this stuff already right now. And it's really due to a convergence that we see it as a convergence of people, technology, and the theme of our talk today, adoption.

Again, somewhat driven by the pandemic we're seeing our large stakeholder groups becoming more comfortable adopting these new technologies. This is allowing us to be more efficient with our designs, reduce risk, identify issues early in the design process, iterate on our designs to find opportunities to save, to provide cost savings to our clients, which are ultimately our traveling public.

So the great news is that we're here. This is happening today. And really this is kind of our new normal, right? Which leads us straight into Dave, who's going to talk about this new normal today.

DAVID WILLARD: Yeah thanks Adam. So my duty here is now to talk about the new normals in the industry as we see it within HNTB. And perhaps your own firms, as well, are experiencing some of these new normals. So first and foremost, one of the things that kind of forced all of us to do during the pandemic was to be able to talk to each other in a completely different way than what we used to be able to do, being able to be in the same room with each other, and having meetings, talking, shaking hands, getting that personal feeling in the meetings that you typically do that helps you actually build understanding, to be able to see somebody.

Those kind of technologies came about with being able to build remote team members on here. So being able to have team building without boundaries. We like to say the ability of being able to recruit new talent, that normally would be overlooked if we were in the typical world pre-pandemic where we'd like to hire people to come into the offices where we wanted to.

So location no longer a factor within this new normal. We can hire people outside the industry, outside their skill sets, something that fits outside the areas of the offices that we want to work within because we no longer have boundaries of location to tie us together anymore. Speaking of a remote teams, being able to have those teams across the US communicate with each other, of course, brought some of the technologies that we're all using today now on a typical basis, the Microsoft Teams, the Zooms, the click ups, everything that a lot of different firms had to adopt.

Whether they adopted them pre-pandemic or post-pandemic, it's almost a safe assumption to think that they've all adopted something by now. To be able to get together in the same room and be able to visually see each other, talk, see the hand gestures as they're talking you, name it. So it did bring out a sense of bringing people back into a room, so to speak, to start having their meetings again.

And it's also cut down on travel for a lot of the cost of travel and things for our clients. And it's soon to becoming the thing that our clients are really pushing more towards is let's have these virtual meetings instead of flying everybody in to have a two hour meeting when it takes you four hours to get there. When you have remote teams and you have remote teams communicating online, you also have to worry about how do we share data across all of these remote team members.

And one of the things that's really been pushed heavily within HNTB and some other firms as well has been the use of common data environments. Those environments being environments like Autodesk Construction Cloud, being able to tie a bunch of information on projects, and tying multiple teams and team members within those teams together in an environment where we can easily share information live as it's being edited. Or be able to publish it when it's ready to be seen for everybody else on the team, all within this single source of truth common data environment.

So what's in the common data environment? HNTB has chosen to go the route of being able to include BIM and CAD data of course, which is kind of the norm for common data environments these days, but also static and live data as well as geospatial data. And we see this as the big picture of how do we take advantage of a common data environment to ultimately deliver digital twins, another buzzword in the industry that everybody's asking about and what is it.

But being able to have this centralized single source of truth along with the standard workflows to be able to share that data review it, approve it, you name it, has barely become very important post pandemic for us. Speaking of projects working across the board on remote teams, another thing the pandemic did for us is that it basically eliminated our ability to present projects in person to the public to get their information or to provide information, and get their feedback back about those projects.

So HNTB took the turn of let's how can we deliver this information and gather their feedback online. So we started implementing some various types of technology geospatial tools, gaming engine tools, custom application development to be able to create a little bit of what you see here today. This is just a very generic or early version of a virtual meeting room that we put together almost immediately after the pandemic hit, and we had to present a project to the public.

So as you can see this has an avatar, so to speak. Our avatar actually has languages built into her. So you could select options and say what language do you want this person to present information to the public. It allows you to click on various items within the space and get to information about those items. So it's basically just a feature packed virtual room, so to speak, that you can get to all of this information, and then ultimately go into an app to be able to leave your feedback.

And that app from agents has been a tool we call PIMA. And basically we create these little links within these virtual rooms to get directly into the PIMA application and directly get that feedback, report on it, gather all the data that comes in from the public and be able to that data, and use it for very good informational decision making on our end.

We've also have completely changed our ways of creating and capturing reality. And in this case, on the screen that you see here, we're using autonomous drones to be able to fly around bridges or other structures to be able to capture them in high-definition photographs and be able to create subcentimeter accuracy in drone photogrammetry or 3D meshing with textures on there.

And the nice thing about this is when you think about the ability of sending drones to do what was typically a human operation to do is the safety factor. If you think about how a person in the past were going to have to tie themselves off to a bridge structure that may be going over lots of traffic or over bridges or over water-- you name it-- that safety factor was pretty important to the humans doing this work.

In this case, we have an autonomous drone. It's a Skydio drone that can go up, basically fly around the structure, and then figure out on its own how to fly that structure and capture it, flying through structure members, beams-- you name it-- and never hitting any of those as it's autonomously capturing all of this information.

We then use the application that you see on the right-hand side to be able to take the high-definition photographs and the photogrammetry model together and use those as a tool to capture, log, tag information about those bridges, say, if it was that crack that Adam mentioned about on the bridge that he drove over skittishly after finding out about it-- being able to get this information and log it quickly and always have that back office access to this information to check and double-check without sending somebody back out in the field to gather that more information about these problems that a bridge may have.

We're also working heavily on the augmented reality out in the field-- the ability of being able to see information, whether it's above ground or below ground, in very high accuracy, walking around with headsets on or your iOS devices or Android devices and be able to see subsurface utilities in a manner that really brings light to a whole new thought on call before you dig.

What's under the ground? What is it? What's in those pipes? How deep are those pipes? How big are they? How can we find these things if we were out in the field as a construction crew getting ready to maybe start digging through concrete? You name it. Or maybe it's just an operations or maintenance crew needing to be able to walk the site of a facility and be able to understand, where are all of the piping systems going underground? This has been a very popular type of technology on some of our aviation projects and some of our bridge projects, as well.

Another technology we bring to the surface within HNTB is the real-time gaming engine solutions while we say "game," we like to take the term of taking games and turning them into useful somethings for the industry of AC. So what you see on the left-hand side is a multiplayer gaming engine deliverable for a plaza. It's basically a train station for BART Warm Springs. This was completely modeled using BIM or Revit application, brought into a gaming application, and then basically some additional development to start tying elements within this environment to various aspects of maintenance or asset management type of information.

So you can see in the video being able to walk up to any asset that's maintainable in a facility and click on it and get to various types of information. Could be any kind of information a client may want to get to-- could be quick how-to videos on how to fix something. It could be, show me the maintenance logs on this. When does it need to be maintained next? Show me everything in my facility with viewing filters that say, all 5 of these objects within the 100 on the site are behind schedule on maintenance.

And it's a really good tool to be able to use as a visual to be able to find those elements or even to be able to train people to get to those elements, say, a maintenance crew, brand-new employees that need to figure out how to get around the site. These are the type of tools that allow them to be able to do that.

The video on the right-hand side is a 4D construction tool. It was basically a project we put together using real-time tools to be able to show a client how this thing is going to get constructed over time. And as you can see in the video here, this is a full real-time environment. So the viewers, which could be the client, contractors, designers, even, can go around this in real time and be able to scroll through time, and be able to see what's getting built when, and be able to start making decisions on, is this the right design for what we need to build over the time frame that we have? Or do we need to change how this decking system is getting built to be able to actually make it safer or meet the goals of the project timeline that we have?

So very nice project that we had here. This really had shed light on the design itself when we delivered this. It was immediately going into some redesign to help save on some of the costs of construction and the timeline, crunching it down a bit. And this was a combination of various tools-- Revit modeling, Unity, Twinmotion, a lot of different things. But the technology is out there to be able to create these types of deliverables.

We're also working with GIS and BIM integrations for digital twin delivery. We talked about digital twins as being what is that ultimate goal for all the 3D design models that are starting to be developed by all the AEC firms out there. What is the client going to be using these models for, if they're even asking for them? And the ideal is to be able to start creating tools like this that connects geospatial technology and applications with BIM technology and then present those into a one-window type of scenario.

So what you see here is a project that we've recently been working on that integrates Revit modeling along with Bentley models, Revit models, AutoCAD models. It was a huge team of various consultants and ourselves to put this model together. But the ideal is taking all of this BIM information in formats that we can bring right into a geospatial application, in this case, called GeoBIM from Esri, and be able to start presenting this information and all of the Information of BIM, the I in BIM, in a manner that's more visual for everybody that's included in any phase of the design, construction, or operations and maintenance.

Project on the right is a combination of 4D and 5D, so construction sequencing and how costs, the 5D portion of that, are affected over time. So this gives the viewers or the client the ability of scrolling through time and being able to see exactly how something's going to get built and how the costs accumulate throughout the time frame.

The nice thing about this tool is, in this case, what you're seeing is the planned construction sequence and costing. But the ideal is to ultimately create a same tool where you can see both planned and actual side by side and visually see what construction is ahead of schedule, what's behind schedule, and where are we at with cost based on planned versus actual in that aspect.

We're also playing around with a lot of AR/VR collaboration and training environments, so being able to create immersive experiences for design, construction operations, even just conference presentations and things like that. We've put together some different types of environments for people to walk up, put a headset on.

In this case, what you're seeing is a video of people walking up to a conference and putting the headset on and immediately being confronted with one of our HNTB sales people, who happens to be one of our team leaders within the group that we have, talking about the tools of PIMA, that Public Information Management Application.

So being able to put the headsets on or the iPad or whatever you have and walk around the actual presentation space and be able to see things in a whole different light-- it really gave people an idea of, we can actually change the environment that we're standing and walking around in through AR type of technologies.

Another technology that we're working on with AJ, which-- he'll be presenting next with me here pretty soon-- is the idea of using Autodesk's The Wild in an environment completely, I would say, automated, or not automated, but completely connected with others that are coming into the same space, no matter where they're at in the world, trying to come together and be trained.

Florida Turnpike, in this case, came to HNTB, wanting a better way of training a staff of volunteers who work a hurricane-evacuation site along their turnpike at a service station. So what we've done is we've modeled that service station in 3D, captured it, reality capture modeling, and to that, brought it into The Wild, the tool that AJ will be talking more about, and be able to create this training environment for multiple people to come in, put their headsets on, come into the environment, and actually have training with a lead trainer within the room. So I'm going to hit the Play button on this--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

--just to give a [INAUDIBLE].

- The three types of team members that will be out on the field. Position number 1, of course, is going to be asking vehicles, as they enter the plaza, over here on the board, if they require fuel or not. And if so, there's going to be some vehicle movements that are going to be directed by position number 2.

Position number 2 really is the person who directs traffic, whether it's through up to the northbound side of the site that doesn't--

[END PLAYBACK]

DAVID WILLARD: I'll scroll through some of the different applications, but the ideal in this tool is to be able to create--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- --created on this site [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID WILLARD: The tool or a trainer can actually push information.

- Position number 2, right now, the plan is to position them right within this crosswalk area here.

DAVID WILLARD: Push pins.

- Position number 3, is actually--

DAVID WILLARD: Be able to show people what things [INAUDIBLE].

- --multiple people on a team, but their positions allow you basically to copy them for every lane that's in here.

DAVID WILLARD: And as he's putting the push pins on the table, the ability of being able to, as a team, look around this table, discuss with each other-- is that a good idea? What am I going to be looking at from that perspective? You name it. But being able to completely go through in a virtual space and be able to see multiple types of information within this space-- plan views, almost whiteboards like you see that we're working off of, videos integrated-- you name it.

But the idea within here is to be able to then walk over to what Adam and I call the dollhouse model and be able to hop within these environments.

- Come in at 1:1 scale [INAUDIBLE]--

DAVID WILLARD: AJ's showing you how we can hop right into this space right now.

- --strike team members really fully internalize the topography as a whole and all the different main checkpoints that are relevant to this process. So taking the same ideas of what Dave was just doing up on the board there, we've loaded in a number of different assets so that strike team members can truly practice in position where there'll be cones going and, again, what that flow of traffic will be into the site here.

And, of course, when we get to a point of understanding the big-level view, we have a belief that there could be different training spots within this model for each of those three respective points. So maybe we break off into pods or different groups. Or maybe together in the hotel, we stay together in one group and review what we mean to a 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3. So it becomes a--

[END PLAYBACK]

DAVID WILLARD: So he's talking a little bit about how and leading up to a point where we can actually pull that person directly into the--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- --advisor would be leaving- the whole group--

DAVID WILLARD: --within this digital space, and how they have real-world--

- So we can go right from high-level understanding--

DAVID WILLARD: --perspectives.

- --down into this model at 1-to-1 scale of what we were just discussing. So I'll kick it back to you, Dave or Adam, for any additional context that you'd like to provide.

[END PLAYBACK]

DAVID WILLARD: So the ideal here is to be able to use this environment, whether up on the digital whiteboard that you were seeing or within this 3D environment in real space, to be able to visually see as a volunteer on the staff of emergency evacuation crew to be able to say, here's what I'm going to be seeing when they position me and at this position along the route of cars coming in.

This is a project that's ongoing. We're developing this out as a training tool, of course, like I mentioned earlier, but also as a way for the team itself that develops these emergency evacuation plans to, like you see, be able to pull these push pins back and forth and actually plan this site out before they even pull the staff of volunteers in to be able to have some training virtually on this.

So the ideal through all of these technologies is these are, to what we consider today, new normals. We know normals are always changing, of course, as faster than sometimes people with my age can keep up with. But the ideal is all the normals, it's really a way of knowing or understanding technology did not come to a halt when everything else did during the pandemic. It kept moving forward.

And in a good way, the only good thing that may have came out of the pandemic, was the fact that technology had pushed us or was at a point where we could be pushed to start adopting it in a much faster rate than what a big company would typically adopt. I know that's our case for HNTB is the technology adoption has really come a lot faster since the pandemic, post-pandemic phase for us.

So real quick recap-- team structures, team communications, data sharing, public involvement access, augmented reality, real-time gaming engines, GIS, and AR/VR collaboration have all been a major change for HNTB and hopefully for some of you too out in the industry themselves. So what we have to do is now start asking, what is our next new normal? So what comes next? And I'm going to hand it off to AJ here to help lead us into what's coming next for the normals.

AJ LIGHTHEART: Yes, thank you, Dave, for all those wonderful examples. And if the new normal is here, the next normal-- it's already in motion, right? Snowball is building. And what I'm going to speak to a bit is where we continue to see that next normal evolving into in years to come.

Step back in time a little bit. What did get us to the new normal? The foundation that we have, add a little bit more color about Turkey Lake, and how it is a really good example of what we see that next normal [INAUDIBLE] for the industry as a whole and then just shedding some further light on some deeper aspects that relate to emerging real-time collaboration.

So what you'll see here, and really what we observed, certainly, as we've all talked about-- the pandemic pushed technology at a faster clip than ever before. And what we heard from the industry during that period is a desire to bring people together from anywhere in the world, giving them multiple channels of access, so that they can create an environment or create an experience, if you will, where they can better communicate spatial understanding, spatial intent that can so easily get missed or misunderstood through a 2D screen.

Because even with the likes of clash detection, one, we can all agree that not all clashes are created equal. So how can we go in at 1-to-1 scale, which is what Adam mentioned earlier, and prioritize them? But two, some of the items that create the greatest constructability issues aren't even a hard clash. It's ADA compliance, throughput, ergonomics, sightlines, safety, as Dave talked about in some of these environments.

So what the industry has really started to recognize as it relates to the new normal is if we can put people shoulder to shoulder, even if it's avatar shoulder to shoulder like you're seeing on the slide here, we can take what are very complex topics and break it down to its most digestible, fundamental level so that anyone, whether it be a 20-year professional, a junior intern out of school, one of your owners or stakeholders that is not technically minded but they know what they want, or, heck, even if I put my 11-year-old son in there, we can leave crystal clear.

You know what I meant. I know what you meant. We go back to the real world, and we move the conversation forward. We move the ball down the field, if you will.

So the new normal, in my mind, is really defined by the fact that these emerging technologies aren't viewed as sci-fi anymore. They are not pie in the sky. There's recognition. In their purest simplest form, they're really just an empathy engine, where all parties can better articulate and advocate for project priorities.

And by doing that, by embracing these possibilities, we're increasing the probability, the holy grail in this industry, alignment, and getting that alignment earlier in the process before something goes so far off the rails-- that's an RFI, a change order, wasted materials, hurt feelings, the timely, costly things that we're trying to avoid in this industry.

So what's this culminated in, as we'll see on the next slide, is that the next normal, the new, new normal, I suppose you could say, is that these are not viewed as just one-off events, rogue technologies that we use sparingly, that they are moving towards becoming a daily driver, encompassing the totality of the design workflow from early stage to hand off to operations and everything in between.

The new normal is also defined by, again, the reality that these technologies aren't just for kids playing video games on the weekend. They're not just for creating a pretty picture that's fading away. Day-to-day applications, new ones, kind of like what Dave and Adam have shared, are sprouting up every day.

And as we'll see in adding some further color to Turkey Lake on this next slide here, in my mind, Turkey lake is a perfect foundation of so many key ingredients that will define what the next normal is built around. And as Dave so eloquently shared, it was built around the application of bringing together first responders called a strike-force team so that a training advisor could do a one-to-many overview of the site and responsibilities.

But some of the key things that really make this go, and again connecting it to what we expect to see more in years to come, is bringing together all the different channels, all the different ways that we communicate our ideas and intent in this industry-- the evacuation plans, 2D, the 3D equipment, the equipment that first responders were using, 3D. There was a video playing in the video that Dave played-- dollhouse view, 1-to-1 scale.

So the key takeaway here, and as it relates to the next normal around these immersive technologies, is them really acting as a glue that further defines what a common data environment it really means and can mean. Having all this data, as an industry, we need to stop thinking about things in terms of files and thinking about things in terms of data. Having all this great data that Dave and Adam shared available at our virtual fingertips or on our virtual console to insert into these environments-- so whatever meeting, whatever way someone takes in information, you have the right piece of data, so you're not having to bounce around to different tools and technologies.

So that is something that I think Turkey Lake has done a fantastic job of laying the foundation of what we're going to start to see in the industry as a whole, as we'll see on this next slide here. And, Dave, you might have to hit it there a few-- like, four or five more times. We believe there's a lot of opportunities of what this next normal will further be defined by.

And as we talked about, in many ways, it's already in motion. The industry is using these technologies to collaborate and design and engage with clients. But we're really just scratching the surface, still. How can this become, again, the daily driver, the go-to, of how peers are going through their iterative design process? How we're engaging with our subs and other industry partners, not to mention, our clients?

So that's not just a novelty or maybe a one-off experience but something else that Dave mentioned earlier. Travel is expensive as all get out. But can we use technology like this to virtualize transportation, still bring people together, have the same level of effectiveness, but do it at a much more cost-effective rate? Not to mention, us lowering our carbon footprint of not hopping on a plane or train, for that matter. So we see that as a real opportunity.

Coordinating design and build-- Dave was talking about the autonomous drones, and we all can recognize there's just as much brownfield, renovation work, as there is greenfield and new projects, so overlaying the virtual onto the physical. And, again, how can XR be an environment that brings together all of that data into one of these experiences? That's only going to continue going forward.

Digital twins-- again, another buzzword out there. But how can we really start to tap into live site data or data as it relates to a piece of equipment? Don't get me wrong. The static BIM and metadata, mind you, is very, very important. That's what the new normal as it is today.

But how can we start to get carbon output live from the site, or when a piece of equipment was last maintenanced, or all the other different pieces of live site data? What conversations could that open up? How could we start to identify things at a faster clip? And maybe most important for what a lot of firms are trying to identify, does that open up a new monetized service offering that you can start to bring to the market? So we feel a lot of possibility there.

Turkey Lake, as we've talked about, the training and assisting operations, that's only going to continue. But it could be just as much for as you're bringing new talent onto your firm. Could you put them into an environment like this, if you're an engineer, then walk through an environment and identify what the flaws are and document it and use that to speed up that onboarding. War for talent is only going to continue, so how can we quickly get people up to speed at a faster clip?

And maybe the Mount Everest of what the next normal will be defined by, the icing on top of the cake-- true designing in XR, not just being a view-only experience, walking through, annotating, but truly the changes we make. Going back to that whole concept of a common data environment, this is how we work going forward. 2D will never go away altogether, but truly, truly using this to be impacting and be that one source of truth.

So as we'll see on the next slide here, there, as we think about the totality of the design workflow-- you might need to hit it one more time there quickly, Dave. And I know this is a very simplified model here, call. But there's a few key takeaways as it relates to the next normal that I want everyone to take here is, one, it's going to be a daily driver. This is not a rogue experience that gets used once or twice a year and then sits on the shelf, collects dust. It is going to be impacting, as this visual represents, from start to finish, everything in between, having the opportunity of really improving the workflow processes that we're currently following today.

And two, it really is that glue that really connects and brings together everything that you'd want to have in a common data environment-- the possibility of all those wonderful examples that Dave highlighted available in one of these immersive, real-time, collaborative experiences. And again, just my two cents as we think about one of the biggest opportunities short term in the next handful of years, I would really draw attention to that construction-to-hand-off process. How can we bridge that gap better? How, again, does it open up potentially new monetized service offering?

So I appreciate you letting me share what the next normal may in fact look like. And with that, I'll hand it back over to Adam and Dave to bring us home.

ADAM HORN: Wow, thanks. Thanks, Dave and AJ. That's great and exciting stuff, of course. And I want to just thank everyone for joining us on our journey and story of some of our normals and have given you some thoughts and ideas on how you may adopt your next normal. So thank you very much.