The AEC industry has a growing information management problem. In the following discussion from Confluence Lexington 2024, discover how AVAIL plans to innovate with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to make it ever-easier for customers to retrieve information.
Jump to
- The AEC industry's growing information problem
- What is AVAIL?
- Search no more: AVAIL's AI and ML overview
- Example: Taylor Design's custom chatbot
- Innovate with AVAIL's team
Confluence Lexington attendees, including Steve Bennett from Taylor Design (far left), listen to day one of sessions.
The AEC industry’s growing information problem
“Who feels inundated with information lately?” Taylor Design’s Steve Bennett asked a room of 50 architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) technology leaders at AVAIL’s professional development event Confluence Lexington 2024.
Hands raised around him in agreement.
“Yeah, everybody back at our company feels the same way,” said Steve, who is the Director of Design Technology at California-based architecture and interior design firm Taylor Design.
There's too much information, Steve went on to explain. It's in SharePoint, Teams, Windows folders, in project files … and often, it's in multiple places.
This growing information management problem is what AVAIL’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives are working to combat.
In this blog, we’ll provide a look at AVAIL’s innovative AI and ML initiatives—as presented this September at Confluence Lexington 2024—and how they will help Steve with opportunities for improving information searches at Taylor Design, as well as aid many other AEC industry firms globally.
AI and ML in the Next 12 to 18 Months: How AEC Firms Can Get Ahead
Explore the highlights from Confluence Lexington 2024’s speaker sessions
What is AVAIL?
AVAIL is a software company that creates content management solutions for architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms. Its desktop platform and Revit application tools act as an index and search engine for the firms' files, from Revit, to AutoCAD, Rhino, SketchUp, Adobe Suite, Microsoft Office, photos, and thousands more.
As a single, streamlined, searchable source for all of a firm’s files, AVAIL helps designers and engineers find the information they need faster. Explore AVAIL’s features and benefits.
AVAIL Desktop offers broad file-type support and indexes files from multiple storage locations in one streamlined solution.
It’s important to note: With AVAIL, files can stay where the firms have stored them, including cloud-hosted locations like Egnyte, OneDrive and others. The platform does not take possession of the files themselves; it simply indexes them into one streamlined source. The artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives we’ll discuss, then, are built around information that already exists in AVAIL like file names and thumbnail images, ensuring the security of our customers’ files remains intact.
AVAIL started hosting AEC technology professional development Confluence events in 2019 to understand what AEC industry firms are needing, wanting, and thinking around technology. These conversations feed the software company’s product development and strategy.
Along with the rest of the AEC industry—and world, for that matter—AVAIL’s team has been closely following the hype surrounding AI and ML technologies. The last few Confluence events explored how AEC firms and technology companies are thinking about implementing these technologies, as well as where they see them entering architectural and engineering practices over the next 12 to 18 months.
Search no more: AVAIL’s AI and ML overview
Our vision for AVAIL’s future involves information "coming to" users automatically, rather than users having to search for it as they do now.
Our tags and filters are great tools to aid designers to find the BIM files they need quickly and drive the best search solution in the AEC industry. Our current development efforts include adding the ability to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to automatically tag, classify, and structure what is often unstructured content, as well as learn firm-wide and individual content patterns. These automation developments will ease the work of designers, BIM managers, and technology leaders even more significantly over time.
On the first day of Confluence Lexington 2024, AVAIL CEO and Founder Randall Stevens spoke to the group of 50 AEC technology leaders about AVAIL’s experiments utilizing AI and ML technologies and where he sees the team implementing the technologies in AVAIL’s products in the near future.
His session was titled “AI, ML, and The Future of Search … Which may be no search at all!” Explore his presentation slides that detail AVAIL’s AI and ML experiments below.
Check out Randall’s presentation slides from Confluence Lexington 2024
To propel us in the direction of automation, our development team is starting to lay the groundwork. New features like Related Content and the custom Help Chatbot are the beginning. Next, we think using large language models (LLMs) on things like thumbnail images will help us automatically tag and label content. Here is the progress we’ve made so far:
Related Content
AVAIL’s newest feature Related Content is laying the foundation for AVAIL’s automation initiative. With AVAIL 5.0 (available to customers as a Preview Release), there is now an interface for manually building these relationships in the AVAIL Desktop. With this core database infrastructure now in place, we’ll be able to begin building relationships “automatically” using analytics data, workflow analysis, and advanced AI and ML techniques.
There is a world of possibilities for the problems this can solve. We are already exploring the impacts in our AVAIL Select Channels, where documentation like installation manuals can be attached to manufacturer Revit Family files.
Data sheets, UL certifications, and technical, installation, operation, and maintenance manuals are connected to a Cla-Val Company Revit Family in AVAIL Select’s MEP Channel.
AI-Powered Custom Chatbots
In addition to exploring ways to understand the project context so AVAIL can proactively suggest relevant information to users in the midst of project workflows, AVAIL is also working on integrating chatbot functionality to allow users to ask natural language questions to documents that are in an AVAIL Host in Cloud Channel and get responses summarized from the content.
The first of AVAIL’s AI-powered chatbots is the Help Chatbot, now available in AVAIL 5.0. This chatbot answers AVAIL questions in the desktop platform in real time, but we imagine custom chatbots of the future in AVAIL will be curated by firms, helping customers maintain their own knowledge hubs in AVAIL and empowering their teams to find the firm-specific information they need faster.
Learn more about how an AI custom chatbot can help your firm.
Example: Taylor Design's custom chatbot
Back to Steve Bennett's challenge at Taylor Design: one way AVAIL imagines helping his team manage their growing information problem is with the AI-powered custom chatbots discussed above.
Designers at Taylor Design, Steve said, are so absorbed in projects, it is difficult to pull themselves away to search for answers to questions regarding firm standards, for example, even though these documents are indexed and searchable in AVAIL.
Steve asked the AVAIL team, what if the Taylor Design designers could have a natural language conversation with these documents?
AVAIL’s custom chatbots will connect teams like Steve’s with the information and knowledge they need, in a more user-friendly and automated way.
A custom chatbot will make it easier for employees to access and utilize a company's institutional knowledge and information, rather than having it siloed in different places. Beyond standards documents, we imagine this being useful with a firm’s onboarding materials to train new hires, historical responses to requests for proposals (RFPs), lessons learned databases, and more.
AVAIL and Taylor Design have been collaborating on an experiment that will help employees have natural language conversations with standards documents hosted in AVAIL.
From Search Engine to Suggestion Engine
By leveraging AI and automation to classify, structure, and deliver relevant content proactively, AVAIL’s goal is to reduce the manual effort required by users to find and access the information they need.
These projects to structure context data around the content that lives in AVAIL will enable the software to suggest information to users as it is relevant, saving AEC industry firms time and improving productivity.
Explore our experiments using AI and ML in more depth.
Innovate with AVAIL's team
Looking for more information on AVAIL's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives, want to try the new features out for yourself, or interested in helping us experiment? We'd love to chat!
- Contact our team
- Try out Related Content and the Help Chatbot in AVAIL 5.0 Preview Release (only available to customers)
- Register interest in an AVAIL custom chatbot
About AVAIL
Founded in 2016 as a solution for architectural and engineering firms to find the information they need faster, AVAIL creates software for the global architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. AVAIL’s content management system (CMS) platform and Revit application tools help designers and engineers take control of their intricate network of files in one visual, streamlined solution. AVAIL’s customers include industry leaders Gensler, Perkins&Will, IMEG, LEO A DALY, and Populous.
About Confluence
Hosted by software company AVAIL, Confluence is a series of architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry professional development events that bring design technology and product management leaders together in collaborative discourse. Its signature conference, Confluence Lexington, is a three-day, invite-only event themed around a pressing industry technology issue and held in the fall every year. In the last few years, regional, one-day events have also been added, as well as a podcast hosted by AVAIL CEO and Founder Randall Stevens and TRXL Media Director Evan Troxel.
