Atoms To Bits: Beating Climate Change—One Building at a Time

Integrated Projects Head of Applied Research sits down with Cove.tool's Co-Founder and CPO, Patrick Chopson to discuss how climate risk has come to equals financial risk, digital collaboration and how firms can make the right decisions to build a greener built environment.

October 31, 2022
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Orlando, Florida


Patrick Chopson at Cove.tool

Murray:

I've been with Integrated Projects not for long now, maybe about three months or so but Integrated Projects is spread all over the world. It's quite nice being in South Africa and being part of a mostly American company, and part of the conversations that are taking place in America and all over the world.

Cove.tool is also in South Africa. I've followed Cove.tool for a little bit. You've got a nice product, your product's amazing. These conversations around BIM and around energy modeling and sustainable development, which a lot of people don't know where the conversation should be going. I want to get your opinion on all of this and see how we take that conversation forward.

Patrick: 

My background, I'm one of the co-founders here at Cove.tool but I'm the CPO. I basically set how the product should go, what we think we should build next, things like that.

One of our investors, Sean Abramson, he's from South Africa.

Murray:
One of your investors is a South African. The Ironman story is that one of your other investors is Ironman. 

Patrick:

Yes, one of our investors is Robert Downey Jr.. That's always cool to have someone who's that interested in climate tech also be someone who people know about. You’re able to have those kinds of conversations and he'll usually do something about once a year to help us from the marketing side as well.


Climate Tech & Building Information Network

Murray:

Very cool! So, I've been in reality capture of scan to BIM for four or five years now. I was in architecture for 15 years before that, but for the last five years I haven't tried to design a thing. I've just been drawing what's there but that's your primary market, isn't it? You like what you do, the world is changing, everything is heating up as architects or MEP engineers. They're the people who need to reduce carbon emissions and reduce embodied carbon and sort out daylighting and all sorts of things. That's what you guys are here for. You provide a tool for the architects. 



Patrick:

One of the things that we also try to do is also promote other startups too. That's one of our main goals, to create, from a product standpoint. We're building a node on what I call the building information network, which is a real time understanding of a project. Right now, every three months, we have a good understanding of the project, but trying to make it so that everyone is able to have interoperability between their different platforms so that the information is always real time.

That's why I try to engage a lot with other startups, to see if we can make sure that our apps interact with each other, 

Murray:

Making sure everybody's talking the same language and  there's a few parts to that. One is jumping between software platforms. As for Revit, everybody loves Revit.  I tried to use Speckle and I bite it up a few times but Speckle is probably the way to go. I sit in front of Revit my whole life, so I love it and hate it. Yea, one of those people, if you spend eight hours in front of a product every day, you absolutely hate the products. There are many open letters and I agree with them all. That's one part of it. 

You are creating a hub of apps who aren't huge multinationals, who can answer a niche kind of question. Covetool have got stacks of different things from like energy modeling to the 2030 app plugin.

You've got a whole bunch of apps and we've got our scan to BIM part that comes in. None of us are trying to be Autodesk and trying to be in four or five products, and you'll never leave Autodesk. It's complicated though, and it all boils down to probably IFC.

But how does it work out for you?

Patrick:

For us, we have a simplified JSON Format that uses our API. That's usually how we connect to other software,  to create single plain geometry from a complex model. We actually have an IFC import and export as well, because we have a drawing tool that allows people to import a model and then clean it up for the purposes of the analysis or HVAC design or something like that. What we see is that real time understanding is when people start to connect things together. I've seen some success from the Speckle kids but at the same time there's several other large engineering firms that don't want to use Speckle because they don't believe that Arup is no longer associated with it. So they're afraid that their information will be seen by Arup or something.

Murray: Oh, really? The politics.


Designing Online

Patrick:

Yeah, there's definitely a need for a standard that is not connected to any particular firm that originated. The whole SaaS, web-based world of apps, where they're not coming from a background of a firm, is super helpful to make sure it's an unbiased source of truth and that information's not getting mixed. Some of these big firms have national security clients, they have people who are designing super secret labs, they can't let that information leak. There's a lot of data security that I think drives that conversation and also liability. 

Murray:

Data security is a complicated thing these days because we are getting more and more to be on the web all the time. Your products, you don't download your apps, you deal with your apps straight on the web, so how are you gonna get the data into it in the first place? With those kinds of security issues, it's a complicated thing. 

Patrick:

The thing is, is that now a web-based application, because there's so many of them, more so than anything else, is actually more secure than a desktop based app. Obviously, if you download some software, that information can get locked on a laptop that could be stolen or whatever but with a web-based application, you're continuously in charge of the data. AWS or, or Google Cloud or whoever will be way more secure than any implementation that a firm could do and they have more of an interest to maintain the Fed Map standards. You're gonna end up with a more secure thing because you also enforce things like two factor authentication. You can do things like one time login codes. You can use Microsoft logins. There's just lots of ways to secure it. Way better than if it was on your actual desktop.


Murray:

Yes. People are designing like this now. Designing is becoming completely online and that's amazing for a start, that you're not stuck in this pre covid, pre pandemic world where everybody's sitting in the office around a board table and designing like that. You can be in Atlanta and I can be in Durban and we can sit around a virtual meeting with virtual apps. The whole thing is happening online, like you say, with AWS or Google's kind of security backend, those big corporate kind of Google security we love but we also want to have the choice of whatever software we need to dive into.

That's why you've got 10 different things that you're selling and then there's all sorts. You're not the only people who are providing a great platform on the web and it's that interoperability between us, between Covetool and BIMIT. There are all sorts of other people around providing apps, whether it's inside of Revit or to jump in between. I think that's how we’re going to lose the Revit dominance, not by rebelling against an authoring program. It seems like we're making Revit redundant without trying because we will do our little bit to your little bit and eventually there's nothing left, for what it is to do in the middle.

Patrick:

The thing that's really cool if you think about it, like your firm, IP, the ideas and the information that you're generating. If you can view, as a firm leader, the information as the thing, not necessarily the drawings but the information that is derived from those drawings. If everything is interoperable, then your data is truly portable, from one thing to the next. You're not locked into a particular platform. You're able to see that data, download it, the information is like traveling neatly. There's no translation losses between each application. That's the holy grail, but I think probably more likely than that is where everything's headed.

Murray:

Also the thing is that although we've been building information modeling experts for a while now, I think that there's a chance that that building information model, some central source of truth, is fading out so that you don't need a model anymore. It's almost outdated. We're trying to transfer information between people. I'm looking at your background of some facade, the green facade versus the yellow facade. That's actually the important part, that you can see it in 3D. But it's this information transfer, trying to communicate rather than trying to build a model or drawing. The model is irrelevant now, which actually makes it interesting.

Patrick:

There's certain relationships of rooms that are patterns. Like a hospital or an apartment building.

Wouldn't it be great if we could Google our models, so to speak and say, “show me all the rooms in this project that have windows on two sides.” And you could say, “oh, these are gonna be higher quality, this one has more views” or “show me all the rooms that don't have views or the ones that are missing a door”, just being able to ask questions in a more interactive manner. Then the software respond back. My guiding light is definitely Nicholas Negro Ponte from the 1970s. He had this idea of the architecture machine and it's where you're having this very interactive relationship with a computer around the architectural design. A lot of things like errors and emissions or things like that are just caused by the sheer complexity. My goal is to hopefully get us back to the point where we're mostly designing and then the computer is filling in the gaps.

Reducing the design cycle

Murray:

There's something I'm excited about but there's two sides to that. One is areas and emissions and does your building comply with the code? Have you double checked everything? But B is, well, the computer can crunch numbers a whole lot better than we can.

I think you started heading down the route that there's a lot of machine learning, amazing things happen. It's tying that in, as a designer, being able to tie in some machine learning algorithm. Where, how rooms fit together in a hospital or can we get double sided windows to the maximum number of rooms? These are things that a computer could probably do better than a human already and not where does the human fit in but how does the human harness all of these things? Absolutely, you wanna be doing error checking with the computer but your kind of company and ours, we are pushing the technology as far as we can.

We think that there's an awful lot you can do with the computer,  whether it's daylighting analysis or fresh air analysis, which a human could take weeks to do. That's where the advantage comes in. We don't need to be people who are worried that the machines are gonna take our jobs, rather, the machines are just offering us new tools to push that forward.

Patrick:
I was talking to the guys, big architects, in Copenhagen. I went and visited their office and one of the things that I thought was really interesting is they talked about how, basically, the key to their success was reducing the design cycle. So, the time it takes to go from one design iteration to the next, they got it down to where they could do an entire building like the one they did for Google's new headquarters with all the slope roof and things, they were able to get those processes down for all the different steps to check a design down from a month to about a week.

The part that was the limiting factor was the daylight analysis, that was the longest part of the whole process. I thought that was an interesting thing, because it's not just them, but many, many other firms. I'm starting to see that this general trend is emerging where the machine does 80% of work, the human provides like the design intent. At the end of the day, the goal is to reduce that cycle time so that you can arrive at a more well considered building solution. That seems to be the trend that I've been observing across the world. We have users in maybe 23 different countries that are all using code tools. A lot of your three letter firms as well. We start to see these broad trends start to emerge, which is exciting.

Climate risk = Financial risk

Murray:

At integrated projects we kind of do the same thing where we've got projects from all over the world. It's quite nice to be capturing models, seeing how similar everybody's construction technology is. I never worked, like I was saying, in New Build anymore. It's always existing conditions, but even so, I suppose it's always complicated. On the one hand there are standard building techniques everywhere. On the other hand, you can very easily look at a building and you can see an Australian building a mile away, even if you're just looking at the point cloud, just looking at the model. The world is quite globilized but not that much. You have something like 20,000 users. Is design moving forward across the world in the same way, especially from an ecological or sustainable development point of view?

Patrick:

Yeah. I think definitely from a digital practice standpoint it's moving ahead at relatively the same rate.

I'd say from an environmental point of view, though, that what has happened in the last year or two is that the financial markets around the world have decided that climate risk equals financial risk. A
That has started to really unify the push for embodied carbon and operational carbon, like running your electricity and whatnot as being the two factors that are starting to really come to top of mind. In addition to the financial aspect, of course, but that's coming to the top of mind for a lot of people who are providing loans to developers. And then developers are coming to their architects and saying, “Hey, we gotta have this” because now you're getting interest rates that are different depending on your ESG score. So, if you're trying to do a big building in Miami, in the United States, it's on the coast where there's really massive climate change and lots of flooding. There's a lot of projects I've heard that are no longer being built now in Miami because the climate risk was so high that it would destroy the asset.

Then moving those projects to other cities where migration is happening away from the coast. You're starting to see,around the world, there's consensus building that, that financial thing is really what's driving most people's decision making. Not necessarily, “Oh, we should do something green.”

Murray:

Is that what's pushed it over the edge? I would've loved it to be, “we should do something green.” But you take the win where you can get it. So, great, if ecological risk equals financial risk, we'll take it. You say embodied carbon, do you guys do your full life cycle analysis, embodied carbon from the coal to make the steel kind of thing?


Patrick:

Yeah. We do the embodied carbon A1 through A3, which is like your manufacturer's carbon profile. We've been doing a lot of work for the last year on building automated structural calculations that can help us estimate the volume of structural material so we can do a full biocarbon calculation automatically. That is actually currently in our testing phase we're releasing in December. The thing that's really cool is that we already have embodied carbon as part of our cost versus energy versus carbon optimization so you can use machine learning to sort through thousands of alternatives for your building, find the one that's the lowest cost, lowest carbon, lowest energy use. That's been cool. The one where we can actually provide a true carbon calc for the whole building, that's happening, we're pretty jazzed about that.

Regulations for Operational Carbon

Murray:

Absolutely. There's new regulations coming in all the time. New York has got LL97, which I'm hearing about a lot, which is operational carbon. It's happening everywhere. Everybody is tracking their carbon. Everybody is tracking their emissions. If you’re building owner anywhere, you should know what your emissions are.


Patrick:

Absolutely. Especially if you're doing renovations, because the most carbon, the least carbon intensive building is the one you don't tear down. A lot of time the kinds of projects that are gonna have the biggest carbon impact like building a new high performance building, would take a hundred years to offset the carbon from building a brand new building compared to if you just keep the old one.

It’s interesting to see that everyone's thinking about it now and doing something. For example, in Europe, they're gonna start requiring,  em embodied carbon calculations for your building, co building permit. , and also in California they're starting to do the same thing and probably UK will introduce that as a requirement. The momentum is building. The consensus is that finance is a lock in too. If you're gonna introduce a new code and the finance guys want to have that anyway there's now an alignment of incentives.

Murray:

Feels a little bit like the bankers have aligned with everybody else and actually that's changing everything. I'd love it if we were different but, like I say, we'll take the wins where we can get them. 

Patrick:

One last thing I will add to that, though, is that it's not just the bankers, it's the manufacturers.

If I have a commodity based product, like brick, and two companies have the same exact brick, but one makes it with one kind of electricity and the other one makes it with another kind. Now they have two different products that they can sell to an architecture or engineer. What we're starting to see is there's a race down and it's being driven by the market forces of materials. We're engaged with a lot of manufacturers right now who are trying to sell based on their carbon profile. Like drywall, they can make drywalls 20% less than embodied carbon just by what factory they get it from.

Murray:

Yeah. Somebody was asking me the other day, we were talking about New York and American law and, and surely South Africa is doing the same thing but not very much. Really what South Africa's doing is we are producing a lot of steel, bricks and coal, and we think you should use as much coal as possible in South Africa, I'm afraid but we're losing out because of it and a lot of people can see, that we sell our steel, which is made with an awful lot of coal and nobody thinks it's green at all. Somebody across the world is selling their steel, which is greener and suddenly nobody wants to buy our steel anymore. 


Patrick:

There's steel plants now that have our solar power. Last year they produced the first a 100% green steel where it's made the embodied carbon zero from the electricity production. That's gonna be crazy.


Murray:

Do you think the built environment's gonna catch up to wherever they need to be? If you pick a model of how quickly the earth is heating or how much needs to get done, it’s mammoth, are we doing things well? The AEC industry is picking up slowly but too little, too late. Can we fix this? 

Patrick:

Yeah, from an embodied carbon standpoint, in the architecture 2030 reporting where people report their projects, last year was 4% of projects had embodied carbon calculation. The previous year it was 1%. That means it's scaling exponentially so that's a good sign. Will it be enough right now? We're definitely locked in according to scientists. At least a 2 to two and a half degree world, if we continue our current track. About 4 degrees Celsius, on average, higher for everyone, is pretty catastrophic. At this point, what we're looking at is the difference between Mad Max versus very unpleasant. My goal is to bend the curve and do what I can. I think right now we’re at about 4%, there's still time to avoid the worst case scenario.

Murray:

 Although it's probably pretty bad, two degrees C is still horrible.

Patrick:

4 degrees Celsius, the world population collapses to 2 to 3 billion people by 2100. We'll top out at 10, drop to 3. It's that’s not great. 

Murray:

It’s not great and we can see this within our lifetime or within the lifetime of our kids.My youngest just turned 13 yesterday so in 80 years time or in 70 years time, that's the end of the century. 

Patrick:

According to the limits of growth, the worst time, financially, food production wise, pretty much everything you can think of is between 2030 and 2040. That's the decade of no matter what scenario of emissions that we do right now, that's the decade of extreme disruption.


What should our industry do?

Murray:

Are we actually playing to this? By 2030 your industry and my industry are gonna turn on their heads. We accept this, what are you doing about this in the next eight years. I wanted to make the point, actually, you've dedicated your career to addressing climate change, like Covetool does other things but I've been very interested in climate change for 20 years and I'm still just an architect. I'm still not a sustainable development expert. Well played for doing that but how do you go about doing it?

Patrick:

I think you gotta eat the elephant a little at a time. You gotta help people pick that low hanging fruit. The true enemy is not that we don't have the tools to figure it out. The true enemy is that we don't have the will or the priority. A lot of people will feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the problem so they don't do anything. But in reality, they could just decide to renovate, they could use Integrated Projects, do your guy’s process. That’s very easy. Or they could do things like just make sure that their building is 20% better than code. That's still a lot of carbon every single year.


Murray:
That's still a big thing. You're right. One bite at a time. It's the little things that can make such a difference.

Patrick:

Especially with buildings because nothing you do is small. Any decision you make, if you're like, “Wait, let's not put gas in this project” and somebody's gonna go, “Oh yeah, we don't know what the right specification would be for this.” And you're like, “Okay, I'm going to go online, here's some brand new equipment. It's like half the cost of the stuff that you guys want to use with gas, and it has an app for your phone so you can actually control your heating costs better.” Most of the things that are carbon better for the environment are actually cheaper now because manufacturers are switching to the lower carbon thing because that's where the market is bigger for that. It's kind of counterintuitive, but doing most things the right way is almost always cheaper right now. It's just people don't think about it. But you have to ask, you have to push when the contractors complain about something, you're the owner. You have to be the more mature person in the room and say, “Hey guys, for your own good. I'm gonna push, we're gonna look at this one more time, make sure we get it right.” 

Murray:

Let’s just look at the numbers quickly and see, because I'm sure we're doing it the wrong way around. I'm sure it's cheap, it is finally cheaper. And it has been, people have been arguing for decades that solar's more expensive or perhaps it was, but times changed now. 

Patrick:

Now it's cheaper for a house, for example, if you compare the backup power in the United States it's $15,000 for a gas generator for backup power on a single family home. Now it's $14,000 for a full solar array with battery backup and you get free electricity.

Digital Practice / Digital Tools

Murray:

You compare it to the U.S. as one thing. In South Africa we have issues where our national power utility switches the power off for two hours every day because they don't have enough power so a diesel generator costs a fortune and any solar power pays itself back. 

Patrick:

Exactly. There's a lot of smart things, for example, ductless, mini splits. Most of the world is switching, especially India. I've been there many times and almost everyone has a ductless system but in the United States people are still installing ducted systems into houses, which is double the cost of a ductless mini split. Habit is more so the enemy too. 

Murray:

Absolutely. I'm afraid it’s like that with how digital practices are maybe the same globally.

See, if we're all pushing forward with embodied carbon, we are getting cheaper electricity as architects and as designers. Whether people are building or existing buildings or new buildings, the idea of digital twins and what we are doing and what you're doing to create digital twins, how does all the design talk with all these apps that you're creating, with a globalized practice where everybody's doing everything on the web, in terms of design, how does that relate? How are we changing our design, in the 21st century, match that change of workflow?

Patrick:

I think the most effective technologies where you don't change how you design is my take on it. You want to minimize disruption and minimize the complexity. The great thing, if you're a software developer anywhere, but especially in the AEC industry, you have to remember that every click equals money. So every time someone has to do something, that means they have to get training. Potentially the less automatic something is, all input is error. The saying of another South African, Elon Musk. 


Murray:

Most famous South Africans, I'm afraid. 

Patrick:

I definitely ascribe to that whenever you make changes into a digital process, as a person who's designing or doing work, you wanna make sure that every time you do something, that that thing is intentional. Because it's kinda like the air bar. If you've ever seen like a hurricane plot or a typhoon plot, maybe it'll be here, maybe it’ll be over there. That's the uncertainty. So uncertainty is introduced whenever we start guessing in a process. A lot of times if you rely on automation, then you can actually narrow the air bar and then your projects start turning out more correct. You really have to make sure that as you're doing these more digital processes, obviously, you don't wanna become over reliant on a computer, but what you're trying to do is say “I'm trying to understand what is the decision making flow and I'm gonna quantify what that is.” A lot of times that could mean, doesn't mean necessarily a computer, it could mean a checklist or it could mean that's an algorithm that helps you avoid errors. Use hand drawing for a conceptual design rather than using Revit because hand drawing is probably faster. It's understanding what decision do I need to make. What's the appropriate tool for this step? Rather than I just learn tools and I apply them willy nilly to whatever task I'm working on because I don't know another technique. We go to school for architecture, we learn all these different techniques like hand modeling, drawing, drafting, 3D model.

A lot of times people graduate without a sense of why did I learn those things? And how do I solve the problem that I'm working on using the most appropriate tool. That is the question that I always ask people when I think about When they ask, “so how should I do this?” I'm like, Well, what works for you now as an architect, do you design with hand models? So, if you make models, then you should use a different process than the guy who draws with hand versus the guy who used the grasshopper. You need to know your process. Know thyself.


Business decisions for architecture

Murray:

Know thyself. But also, I suppose, architects in the 21st century, you've gotta spend an awful lot of time knowing whatever products are out there. Great, use the appropriate tool, which one is that? There's a list and there's gonna be 45,000 tools, which you could choose from. If you're the poor architect, you keep searching and that's it. 

Patrick:

There's like a framework for evaluating what kind of software you should use. One, you have to take that and actually do, in the consulting world, a process for adopting software in AEC. We see something online, maybe we buy that, we don't know. Or you have to know that there's all these different stakeholders in your firm. If it's a reasonable size firm, there's the principals, the project managers, there's the people who actually do the work. You have to do testing to figure out how does this work with our process? And then quantify how much time did it take to learn? There's a cost of using the software and then in terms of training, a lot of times people don't factor that in. They'll see something and be like, “Oh, I'll just use that free thing.” But they don't realize it's maybe like a hundred hours of training to get someone to be able to use it. Whereas maybe there's something that they can pay for that takes them an hour of train. It’s kind of like doing a full life cycle analysis, one could say, of the software that you're purchasing. That’s typically the key to not making a bad decision.

Murray:

But, but it's gonna be a absolutely never ending. Your processes, your office processes in an architectural firm. Whatever the scale, whether you're a five man firm or a hundred man firm is gonna be much the same. Working through your processes and going, “is this one of those things that we need to optimize or is this one of those things where maybe human flare or a specialist skill comes into play. What you'll find in all sorts of weird cases, you might be a heritage architect for a town, a specific kind of town's architecture, and then you, the human have knowledge, which you're not gonna be able to replace anywhere. But that's only one instance. Each of those processes you have to look through and go, “yea,that one we're not gonna change. But what about this one and what about this one, and what about this one?”

Patrick:

I think, in today's world, if you want to be competitive in productivity. The AEC industry has kind of bottomed out for the last 20, 30 years, we can see that. That's why everybody's writing these open letters to Autodesk. We're not getting productivity gains. You have to ask yourself, “Yes, this new technology is great, but does it actually generate productivity gains? Can we validate that? Does the company or person that we're working with, do they give us the ability to verify that actual business savings?” There is the process that one uses as an artist, as an architect, but then there's also an architecture firm is a business.

If we can say like, if we can start to sign hours, like it gives me a certain number of hours, to do this or hours to do that. Kind of borrowing some of those lessons from the software world where the development workflow where you make stuff, you have retrospectives where you sit down at the end of every two weeks and everyone says, “what's working, what's not working?” Identify those blockers and then come up with solutions for them. Whether that's a checklist, new piece of software, Bob and Dave need to have a meeting once a week, you know, whatever it is that we come up with, we have to make sure that we're dedicated to this idea of increasing. Workflow efficiency so that even if you're doing some high design project, you're able to deliver those at a reasonable cost to you, as the architect, so that you can capture more profits, pay people more, work less hours. Those are all the things that need to happen.

Murray:

Everybody wants that. Even if you're trying to be an architect, you’re still being an architect to get rich, at least nominally rich, like, you would undoubtedly retire if you could. So, you're talking about agile and lean processes compared to the very typical waterfall construction process.

The AEC industry has hated the changeover and when I left the formal construction industry about five years ago, everything was a gant chart with the critical path and that's recently. I know South Africa goes backwards, but still. Recently, outside of the traditional architecture or construction processes, I kind of do software type things and you kind of do software type things. We're used to talking about Agile and scrum methodologies and all that kind of stuff. Everybody in architecture, they're still fighting that, maybe less so, but it's not an easy changeover to, to suddenly think of a building, which is a three year project or a five year project. How do you design a five year project in two week sprints isn't an easy switch.

Patrick:

The real forcing factor is the labor movement within architecture. So all these young kids that are graduating, they’re like, “this is unreasonable. This doesn't make sense. It's not up to the standards of the 21st century way of working. Why are we doing these like super slow things? Maybe we should fix them. I'm working 80 hours a week. That doesn't seem like this is a well run concern.”

That is honestly the thing that will eventually, the need for more data, to hit your embodied carbon goals. You can't do them using traditional practice and the need to take care of the new labor force and not repeat the mistakes of yesteryear. 

Those two things are pushing from two sides on all these firm leaders to try to deliver a better workflow that's more digitally enabled. What we'll see is just this continuous turning of the screws until people are like, “fine. Yeah, let's adopt this new tech and go for it.



CFOs & Building performance

Murray:

In your mind you can see a goal. The gears are turning slowly. We're adopting digital processes towards a goal. Eventually, all of these old CEOs are gonna get in their mind and agree with what people are pushing for. What are people pushing for these digital workflows?

Patrick: 

What we found, first off, our software was definitely for the sustainability folks, but what we found is that it's actually the CFOs, the people who control the money in the firm, who are the most interested in building performance because they know that if they can avoid one design revision per project team per year, that's like a three to 6% profit increase for the firm.

So then they did the math, most architects don't do the math on that, but they've done that. So what we're seeing is that, it's really the financial leaders of firms that are the biggest people pushing this idea of performance and digital practice forward because they actually see the money profitability intersection. Because the financial incentives are now aligned you're gonna see more and more people pushing that forward. 

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