Speaking at AVAIL’s Confluence Lexington 2025 in October, technology leaders from both global architectural design firm Populous and global engineering firm IMEG discussed how they are navigating high growth in their respective companies and intentionally building technology systems to scale … with people as their top priority. As technology changes and adapts at record speed, this is an important discussion for all AEC technology leaders to engage in. We’ve collected the key takeaways from both Confluence presentations below.
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AVAIL’s signature professional development event Confluence Lexington 2025 brought together speakers from two large, global firms — Populous and IMEG — that are currently navigating high growth and the need to meet that growth with intentional technology systems and onboarding processes.
Architectural design firm Populous stretches across three regions and 30-plus offices, to boast 1,500 employees and 100-plus billable label categories. “We are growing, and we’re going to grow,” Confluence speaker and Populous Associate Principal, Regional Digital Lead, Americas Jason Gardner says. With the potential for Populous to double in size in three years, Jason says, “It's awesome. It's also scary from a technology perspective.”
With 2,800 employees worldwide over 90-plus offices mostly in the U.S. and India, engineering firm IMEG has been on the growth path for a while. Software Engineering Team Lead Stephen Germano and Corporate Data Manager Jeffrey Arant spoke about their approach to the technology issues they’ve faced — which Jason and Populous are starting to battle — such as:
How do you field requests for new technologies?
What is the best way to introduce a new technology across the firm?
How do you structure technology systems for growth?
Exploring the theme AEC Platforms: Elevating the Dialog in their Confluence sessions outlined below, Jason, Jeffrey, and Stephen answer these questions and more.
When it comes to scaling technology systems, they all agree, the grounding principle has to be people. Assisting, supporting, communicating to and with, and building systems for their fellow firm mates.
When firms turn to technology to solve problems, communicating upstream to leadership and downstream across the firm becomes critical. Leadership needs to understand the need for the technology to justify spend, and the firm as a whole needs to understand the reason for the change and be on board with implementation for the technology to succeed.
“Tech is evolving. People and process lag,” Populous' Jason says. “You can create the coolest code in the world, but if your people don't understand it, it does not matter.”
Just as important to ‘why we are using a technology’ is ‘why we are not using a technology.’ At Confluence Lexington, Jason's call to his fellow technology leaders was, if people are asking for a new technology, “tell them why they can or can't have it,” he says.
At Populous, every new technology goes through an evaluation process, including a legal and technology review—so technology leaders know the risk of buying and using the technology. Jason challenged Confluence attendees to share that information across the firm, so everyone knows the risk and reward.
Populous has about four AI tools in its practice. “That's it,” Jason says. “We let people ask for them all day long.” After a review, the team communicates why the technology doesn't work for Populous’ needs. “We tell everyone why we bought it or why we didn't buy it,” Jason says, which he claims to be a very effective strategy.
As IMEG has grown, so has its technology needs — which has led the firm to invest in building software internally.
The stakes to communicate the why behind this proprietary software and teach people how to use it, then, feels even greater for Stephen, Jeffrey, and the IMEG technology teams.
In his Confluence presentation Sandboxing Innovation + Firm Integration Stories, Stephen reiterated a point Jason had made earlier that day, “We can build the coolest piece of software … and nobody uses it because there's no training, there's no support.”
To meet this challenge, IMEG has dedicated an entire change management team to train the company on proprietary tools. As the development team completes projects and software enters a beta phase, the team starts to gather feedback on the tools. Then, the change management team develops tutorial and walkthrough videos.
How are firms like global engineering design firm IMEG introducing innovative new technologies across the practice? IMEG Software Engineering Team Lead Stephen Germano tackled this question and more with co-presenter and colleague Jeffrey Arant in their Confluence Lexington 2025 session Sandboxing Innovation + Firm Integration Stories.
As Populous continues to grow, they too are developing their own software. Beyond the need to spread the word about their own technology to their people, Jason notes the importance of regular communication with leadership to align development time and goals with the firm’s budget.
“The budget required to do that development sometimes causes friction,” Jason says. Leadership doesn’t always realize the cost of building or maintaining a single tool or piece of software. Storage costs, as well, can start to add up.
“It's very interesting when you start to have those conversations up and down the stack,” Jason says. “The people in the practice, they just want to do better work.”
“For me,” Jason says, “that's what I'm focused on: How do we help them do better every day?
| “The people in the practice, they just want to do better work.”
Stephen wrapped up IMEG’s Confluence session on a similar note to Jason’s statement above. “That's really how we look at AI and IMEG,” he says. “It's not to reduce head count, replace people, and increase profits, it's to help create or use AI technologies as a force multiplier — so every engineer can do more.” The goal is for engineers to focus less on the busy work and more on creation.
The following are some examples of IMEG’s technology initiatives, designed for the firm’s employees to iterate and scale themselves.
As a global company stretching across disparate systems such as Salesforce, Workday, Deltek, Zendesk, and SharePoint, IMEG’s team sought to unify all the firm’s data into a single data lake built on “radical simplicity,” Jeffrey said in his Confluence session. His team’s guiding principle was clarity over complexity.
“People default to complexity,” Jeffrey says. “They don't know to take a step back and actually make things simple for the person that's next.”
With IMEG users in mind, the team sought to achieve supreme ease of use across the firm. “By employing that radical simplicity, we make everybody else's life easier,” Jeffrey says.
This philosophy guided IMEG’s evolution from reactive reporting to proactive intelligence. They replaced manual data pulls and one-off emails with centralized dashboards and dynamic distribution lists that update in real time.
“Simplicity leads over to everything else that we do,” Jeffrey says. “If it's simple and it's centralized, then that means that we can make everybody else's job easier.” Once the data is sanitized through this process, it becomes incredibly easy for anyone at IMEG to then utilize and report on it with the firm’s custom tools.
While the process was painful at times — especially in the inventory stage of logging all data and systems — the pay-off was great. A firm successfully acquired by IMEG even pointed to these proprietary data tools built by Jeffrey’s team as the reason for the deal.
Leveling up IMEG’s technology efforts, Stephen’s software engineering team took that data foundation from Jeffrey’s team and built tools that scale across the enterprise. The prime example of this is Meg, IMEG’s in-house AI agent that connects knowledge, projects, and people across millions of documents.
To set Meg up for scale across the organization and its growing needs, the development team built an agent library and agent framework where anybody can build their own agents.
“We realized early, as a small dev team, we can't build everything you need as a large organization,” Stephen says. So instead they built a framework, very similar to OpenAI’s custom GPTs.
The team is training the firm to employ context engineering strategies. Stephen likes to think of the agent framework like a paint palette. The paints are the context teams give it (like a bank of historical case studies for a marketing team), that allow the agent to perform within the realm of responsibility. “And then the artists are every person in the firm,” Stephen says.
By creating a framework that allows anyone in the firm to design their own AI agents, IMEG has turned every employee into an innovator. At the time of this Confluence presentation in October 2025, the team had just launched this capability, and Stephen was already seeing great organic growth across the firm.
At this level, IMEG’s proprietary tools are already saving people across the firm time, as they are able to find the answers to questions themselves and quickly. Additional value is achieved, Stephen says — as the work produced with these tools encompasses fewer errors and omissions. The firm will see a reduction in legal fees as a result, he projects. “That's the stuff we're really interested in quantifying,” Stephen adds.
It’s almost counter-intuitive, but the process of scaling technology systems at IMEG actually offers greater autonomy to teams and individuals. Everyone can iterate and build the tools they need to do their work better and faster, thanks to the reliable, intentional efforts of the firm’s data and development teams.
Centered around the same theme as Confluence Lexington 2025 — AEC Platforms: Elevating the Dialog — Confluence Seattle and Confluence Chicago will be hosted by AVAIL in the spring. Within AEC firms, technology platforms all too often exist as disparate silos of information. Confluence spring 2026 events will explore how we can increase the dialog between various platforms, reducing redundancy and bringing the silos together in new ways.
Additionally, AVAIL’s signature, invite-only Confluence Lexington event will be held October 8-10, 2026.
Register interest in joining the conversation at one or all of the 2026 events below. Tickets for Confluence Chicago 2026 are now available to purchase.
Confluence Seattle
Theme: AEC Platforms: Elevating the Dialog
Date: TBD
Confluence Chicago
Theme: AEC Platforms: Elevating the Dialog
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Confluence Lexington
Theme: TBD
Date: Thursday, October 8-Saturday, October 10, 2026
Confluence Podcast
Season 3 is coming soon!
Hosts: AVAIL’s Randall Stevens and TRXL’s Evan Troxel
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.
Founded in 2016 as a solution for architecture 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, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D 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.