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The last episode made the case that your project history is worth something. This one asks why you can't use it. Two reasons keep coming up: the data means different things to different systems and different people, and it's scattered across far more places than anyone planned for.

Ariel Cooke-Zamora at Bimbeats explains how a data dictionary keeps an AI from misreading your data, and I add a caveat about keeping it pruned. Randall Stevens at AVAIL describes a customer running 180 applications, and says the best information is at the edges of the network. Aaron Vorwerk and Mike Soldan at Egnyte cover where the reasons behind a project's decisions end up, and why governance has to come before AI touches your files. Ross Wagner at Pirros asks how a firm captures what its one all-knowing person knows. Sasha Crotty at Autodesk talks about getting data out of Revit files and how much confidence you can put in it. Andy Rahden at Bentley, Dimitrie Stefanescu at Speckle, Chris Razzell at dRofus, Marty Rozmanith at Skema, and Jesper Wallgren at Finch take on shared language, minimum standards, and where the data should live. Matt Wash at Bimbeats, Scott Reynolds at UpCodes, Campbell Yule, and Theodoros Galanos add the habits, the documentation, and the reasons Theodoros says RAG doesn't work.

This episode is especially relevant for CIOs, BIM managers, and design technologists who've been told to get their data AI-ready and want to know what that means on a Monday morning.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/247

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Arc 3 of the Next AEC Tech Stack series is about your data. Most firms are sitting on years of project information, and every company in this arc says it can turn that into an asset. This first episode asks what that history is worth, and why so little of it gets used again.

Marty Rozmanith at Skema starts with lawyers, whose old cases keep their value for a whole career. Randall Stevens at AVAIL calls project knowledge a capital resource, and says the part firms never capture is why a decision was made. Aaron Vorwerk and Mike Soldan at Egnyte separate a pile of files from data you can use. Ross Wagner at Pirros and Dimitrie Stefanescu at Speckle describe what leaves when your most experienced people do. Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora at Bimbeats show what firm data can tell you about your own time and fees. Sasha Crotty at Autodesk says to start with the question you want answered. Chris Razzell at dRofus takes on who pays for good data. Roderick Bates (Chaos), Scott Reynolds (UpCodes), and Theodoros Galanos weigh in on small firms, public data, and why waiting for clean data is the wrong move.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, BIM managers, and design technologists who know the project archive is worth something and can't say how to get at it.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/246

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German Aparicio, Jr. of Trimble joins Speckle's Virginia Senf, Neuron Factory's Salil Pandit, and Pelles.ai's Yael Meretyk Hanan to talk about Trimble's equity-free 0-60 Challenge and what it takes for startups to build real integrations inside a large AEC platform company. We explore founder time versus accelerator upside, Trimble as a system of record looking for systems of action and intelligence, why trustworthy model data matters more as AI gets faster, and why risk reduction is harder to measure than hours saved.

This episode is especially relevant for AEC founders weighing corporate accelerators, practitioners who want to understand what Speckle, Neuron Factory, and Pelles are actually shipping into the Trimble stack, and firm leaders headed to Trimble Dimensions who want a preview of the Demo Day conversation before they get to Las Vegas.

To learn more about German Aparicio Jr., Virginia Senf, Salil Pandit, and Yael Meretyk Hanan, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/245

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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This is the last episode of Arc 2. The first two asked what these tools can do. This one asks what happens when they get it wrong, who is still on the hook when they do, and what that means for the people coming up in this profession.

Mike Soldan at Egnyte says the bigger risk now is reference content that's five years old, not a hallucination. Randall Stevens at AVAIL points out that running automation across a whole drawing set can leave someone checking every piece of it. Oliver Goldman at Autodesk says the accountability stays with whoever delivers the work, whatever tools they used. Holger Kreienbrink at Graphisoft expects people to check AI output less and less until they sign without looking. Scott Reynolds at UpCodes tested its review against the 1981 Hyatt walkway collapse and the Champlain Towers collapse. Theodoros Galanos asks whether we hold AI to a standard we've never measured ourselves against. Then the harder question: who do firms still hire, and how does the next generation learn when the grunt work goes away? Roderick Bates (Chaos), Marty Rozmanith (Skema), Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora (Bimbeats), Prasanta Bose and Michael Jansen (TwinMaster), Jesper Wallgren (Finch), Gavin Nicholls, and Campbell Yule weigh in, and close on the firm of 2030 and why billing by the hour gives the productivity gain away.

This episode is especially relevant for principals who put their stamp on drawings, firm leaders deciding how much to trust these tools, and anyone responsible for training the next generation when the work they learned on is disappearing.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/244

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Espy Harper, David Spehar, and Anthony Hauck join the podcast to talk about data-driven design for healthcare, where a missed clearance or a misplaced outlet stays built into a hospital for decades. We explore why firms treat every project like their first, how as much as 90% of room requirements can be templated and reused, and how a live link between a room-data database and a 3D planning tool lets one equipment change ripple through every affected room. We also get into bringing nurses and department heads into early design, and who should own the data once the building opens.

This episode is especially relevant for healthcare planners, design technology leaders, and firm principals who know their best knowledge lives in a few senior people's heads, and are wondering what it would take to turn it into something the whole firm can use.

To learn more about Espy Harper, David Spehar, and Anthony Hauck, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/243

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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This is a special partner episode, produced in partnership with dRofus and Hypar.

dRofus

dRofus is a planning and building information management platform that helps organizations and design teams in healthcare, aviation, government, retail, and more manage room requirements, equipment, space data, and project standards throughout the building lifecycle. By connecting owners, architects, engineers, and contractors around a shared source of truth, dRofus improves collaboration, reduces costly redesigns, and ensures projects remain aligned with operational and capital planning goals. Learn more at dRofus.

Hypar

Hypar is 3D space planning software for complex buildings, built for early design. Drop in your program and CAD, then drag rooms into place with walls already sized. Hypar is intuitive enough that clients can help shape the rooms in your design meetings. It checks areas and equipment clearances as you go. Hold several options in one model and change one on the spot. When a client spots a need pre-design missed, fix the requirement and design together in the same meeting. Revit takes over for construction documents. Learn more at https://hypar.io/

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I asked the same partners you heard last episode two questions back to back. When a vendor says AI, do they mean autocomplete, a copilot, or something that acts on its own, and does the distinction matter to you? And further out, can you describe a building in plain English and get something real back?

Oliver Goldman at Autodesk isn't sure the three terms mean much beyond branding, and explains why Revit's MCP server started read-only when both you and the agent hold the pen. Greg Demchak at Bentley describes an agent driving a headless MicroStation, and argues for a new interface on top of a proven geometry engine instead of a rewrite. Matt Wash at Bimbeats shows an agent flagging a model with 50 hours of work from one person and no second reviewer, while Ariel Cooke-Zamora explains why his crash-report agent ended up as a Python script. Marty Rozmanith at Skema says the AI writes deterministic scripts and then runs them, and calls Revit a data entry tool. Scott Reynolds at UpCodes says stacking agents in a line is a software architecture mistake. Jesper Wallgren at Finch gave this episode its title. Mike Soldan (Egnyte), Prasanta Bose and Michael Jansen (TwinMaster), Roderick Bates (Chaos), Holger Kreienbrink (Graphisoft), Gavin Nicholls, Campbell Yule, and Theodoros Galanos (Aurecon) weigh in on where the prompt-to-building idea holds up and where it breaks.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and design technologists who are being sold "agentic" this quarter and need a way to tell what ships today from what is still a demo, and for anyone wondering how far a prompt gets you toward a building.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/242

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Every company in this arc has AI in their marketing. So I asked all of them the same question: in a real firm today, what can it actually do, and what can't it?

Michael Jansen and Prasanta Bose at TwinMaster open with why firms resist adopting new tools at all, and Roderick Bates at Chaos separates real capability from social-media hype using a story about his son and a magnet-fishing YouTube video. Holger Kreienbrink at Graphisoft wants AI on the tedious tasks, not the creative ones. Marty Rozmanith at Skema says 90 to 95 percent of what they do is deterministic math, not AI at all. Ariel Cooke-Zamora and Matt Wash at BIMbeats can actually measure adoption inside a firm instead of guessing at it. And Oliver Goldman at Autodesk admits he isn't sure autocomplete, copilot, and agent mean anything different beyond marketing, before Greg Demchak at Bentley and Theodoros Galanos at Aurecon lay out what a harness actually is and why it might be 90 percent of the real work.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and technology decision-makers who are tired of vendor claims that expire the moment they're spoken, and who want a straight answer to what these tools do in a real firm this week, not the demo.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/241

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Two questions close out the BIM 2.0 arc. When a tool generates a design for you, where does its output stop and your judgment start? And what does interoperability actually deliver once you strip away the vendor promises?

Roderick Bates at Chaos draws the clearest line anybody in this series draws about what a generative tool should not be allowed to do — his team won’t let AI touch geometry or materials without the designer’s direct input, because that’s “the bridge too far.” Campbell Yule pushes back on the whole premise of AI-assisted design: a model that satisfies every constraint is a starting point, not architecture. Jesper Wallgren at Finch says the architect’s role is shifting from craftsman to curator, and that quality — not quantity — becomes the competitive edge once AI can produce endless options. Gavin Nicholls walks through the build-versus-buy calculus at his firm and lands on an analogy that sticks: even Excel is lock-in, we just don’t think about it that way.

Then the episode turns to interoperability, and Dimitrie Stefanescu at Speckle gives me the line I’d put on the poster for this whole arc: let’s liberate our data. He and Marty Rozmanith at Skema both argue the old goal — perfect file translation between platforms — was never the real point. Carl Christensen at Autodesk has to answer for what actually survives the trip between Forma and Revit, and Holger Kreienbrink at Graphisoft previews an open collaboration platform meant to make that handoff invisible. Randall Stevens closes the loop on where AI-generated imagery is heading, and Clifton Harness at TestFit makes the case for a constellation of people over any single tool.

Three episodes, and the people in them agreed on almost nothing except that the tools are changing faster than the contracts are. This one is for anyone who has ever had to ship a project on a deadline that didn’t move while the tools underneath them did.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/240

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Episode one ended with the pitch: new tools give architects their day back. Episode two asks the harder question. If a firm stops running one platform and starts running ten, what happens to twenty years of muscle memory while that shakes out?

I put some version of that question to nine voices building and using the BIM 2.0 stack. Gavin Nicholls calls the sunk cost a serious blocker and describes his own Revit add-in work as "polishing the prison bars from the other side." Carl Christensen at Autodesk has to answer for why the company that built the industry's center of gravity is choosing to hold customers' hands through the transition instead of moving faster. Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora at Bimbeats bring real adoption data — a firm's AutoCAD-to-Civil 3D migration climbed from thirty to seventy percent, then flatlined, and the people who were going to switch already have. Campbell Yule lays out the Catch-22 underneath the whole BIM 2.0 pitch: a new tool only earns the years of trust Revit already has by getting used inside Revit first, not by replacing it. Clifton Harness at TestFit calls Revit "a masterpiece" and then argues that's exactly the problem — it's a parametric propagation engine, not a design tool, and adoption "costs everything" because firms almost never budget for retraining. And Randall Stevens, Jesper Wallgren, Holger Kreienbrink, Marty Rozmanith and Dimitrie Stefanescu all answer from inside the products they're building, sometimes conceding more than a pitch deck would allow.

This one is for BIM managers, firm leaders and anyone who has to defend a software line item — the people who feel the switching cost in their calendar, not just their budget.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/239

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The first episode of The Next AEC Tech Stack opens on the number nobody wants to say out loud. Randall Stevens of AVAIL puts the mundane overhead of an architect's day at somewhere near fifty percent, and he admits it's hard to measure because it disappears in seconds and minutes at a time. Looking for a file. Marking up the same PDF three people already marked up. Waiting on a license.

Across this episode I put one question to ten people building and using the BIM 2.0 tools: does this let architects design, or does it move the technology tax to a different line item? Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora bring project data showing where a documentation crunch actually went. Campbell Yule argues the real progress is much narrower than the marketing suggests. Jesper Wallgren, Holger Kreienbrink, Marty Rozmanith, Dimitrie Stefanescu and Clifton Harness answer from inside the products, sometimes conceding more than you'd expect, and Gavin Nicholls prices out what adoption actually costs a firm with a fixed tech budget. It closes with everyone answering the same three questions about the firm of 2030.

This one is for practitioners, BIM managers and firm leaders who have watched a new tool arrive and quietly add work.

Get all the show notes, links, and enter to win a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, courtesy of series partner Graitec, at trxl.co/238

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