James Benham: Exploring Automation and the Future of Work at JBKnowledge

I am your host, Amy Peck. We have a fantastic guest today, James Bennom , who is the CEO and co-founder of JB knowledge, but it does not end there not by a long shot. He is an entrepreneur. He's a technologist, he's a speaker. He's also a pilot. He's been doing his own podcast for over six years. He's been a city Councilman he's on the board of Regents at Texas Southern university, and he is the father of two lovely daughters. Welcome James.

And what's crazy is I miss a lot of things I had to just,

And so , uh, I have fallen in love over the last 24 years with this great state. And I'm excited to still be a , a pretty active part of it. And I'm , I'm excited that , uh, you know, technologists and that this has become a technology hub. That's exciting for me. Cause I was, I started a company, a tech company here 20 years ago when this was not where you started tech companies. So it's exciting to , to see that happen.

And so , uh , I do have older parents, but , uh, they always encouraged me to do everything that I was interested in. And so you name it. I got interested in it as a kid and that totally carried forward through the rest of my life.

And when you look at my resume and you look at what, I've, what I've been busy at , uh, through college and since college, it definitely, it definitely is , uh , um, because my mom always told me to chase after whatever was interesting and , uh, go, go and explore the world. And so I came over to Texas when I was 18 to be in the Corps , cadets at Texas a and M I thought I wanted to be a Navy officer and I was a Navy midshipman.

So I was in the ROTC program for four years there and had a chance to commission. Uh , this is before nine 11, when bill Clinton was president chose, it was a different military is a different time. There weren't a lot of jobs and it wasn't a big demand being in the military. And so I , uh, decided to intern with , uh , a big accounting firm called price Waterhouse Coopers.

And I did two internships with them as an undergrad and grad student , uh, got my undergrad and master's in business from and M while I was in the Corps and just fell in love with Texas and Aggies and Aggies , or , you know , we put the cult in culture at Texas a and M you know, I mean, it's, it's a , it's a very, very, a very tight knit group. Uh , even though it's a very big group. And , um, I just couldn't see myself going to work for a really big company with 158,000 employees.

And so , uh, when I was a senior, I went to my dad and I said, Hey, I want to start a software company. Will you , uh, will you loan me a few thousand bucks? And , uh, it was, it took about five, five grand and , uh, decided to start Jamie knowledge. I went to one of my high school buddies, Sebastian Costa , who was from Argentina. He's an exchange student from there. And I said, Hey, I'm starting a software business. I know you just graduated. Do you want to come work with me?

And the rest is kind of history. You know, we've spent 20 years building software and , uh, but, but the origin story is it was better than the internship I had and that's all I needed. Uh, nine 11 happened right out , right after I decided to start the business.

And it had me seriously, second guessing my decision to start a business in the middle of the.com collapse and the nine 11 economic collapse and everything else that happened 20 years ago, but decided to stick with it and build something great. And, oh , two , we went to Argentina and opened an office there. And about a decade later, 12 years later, we went to South Africa and opened an office there. And we got into insurance and construction.

I can tell the rest of the story later, but that was kind of the origin story. It was just, I wanted to work for myself and have a chance to travel internationally and have fun and build technology. And , uh , this has been the vehicle that has led me and now, you know , 250 other people that work for me , uh, chase after geeking out every day .

I , uh, learned to play the guitar and tackled piano. And then I started jujitsu and I was like, it was crazy. It was. I mean, I , I really think that, you know, life is , is short. It's so precious. And time is so precious. And , uh , we've got a dis max out every single day. Even if it , you know , a good day for me is I go to bed exhausted because I mean, just exhausted.

I usually sack out about midnight and I wake up at six in the morning and , and I, and I take a one 15 minute nap during the day. And the rest of the day is build tech, sell tech, go fly things , uh, you know, go play some, I do at least an hour of playing music every day, hanging out with my daughters. But I mean, it's, that's what I love about the technology business is that you, you have , uh , this endless pallet of things to go chase after.

And my point is, couldn't you use this time in a more, I don't know, functional way or just something that would make your life better instead of trying to point out to other people, things that are annoying you, but then here I am right now whining about it. So

There's chefs and there's food critics. And, and most people want to be food critics because it's easy, it's easy and it's easy, right? It requires very little skill to be a critic. It very little effort to be a critic. And it requires very little creativity. And so everybody wants to be a critic, but very few people want to go through the training and the reps to be a chef, to be great at doing something to , to develop it out until you have just dominated this.

We all, I mean, I know it always blows my mind when people will say, well, I've always wanted to do that. Well , why don't you do it? I mean, you, you, you love music. You , you don't, you can't sing. Okay. Maybe you can't sing. And I recognize that, you know, that's something you can't control, but, but guitar took me three months. I mean, but I repped out. I mean, it was an hour every day on YouTube. I learned it . I couldn't leave the house.

So I was just on YouTube for three hours a day, two hours a day, repping out chords. But it's, it's a, I think when we look at our time and when we're looking at innovation to , you know, you'll just to tie this back to technology and innovation, every minute you spend in your office, you can either be wasting time or making time. Right. And, and you have to look at it from that perspective.

And if you're going to sit down and watch TV, sit down and watch TV with a purpose, it can be recreational. Like right now, I'm going through the entire Marvel cinematic universe in order of chronology, not in order of the movie was released.

So I can try and stitch the whole universe together because there's a lot of cultural references to Marvel I've been missing out on because I'm obsessed with star Trek, but I've really found that I love Marvel and it's actually, unhinging my Saifai brain and my Saifai brain and my creative brain are close cousins. And so it always gets my juices flowing whenever I watch scifi .

And so that's just one of those things, like, even your recreation can have a really cool purpose while you're having fun. You know, it , it, it has a goal. And even if that goal is entertainment to lead to more entertainment , uh, it's better than, than it's better than being a critic. I mean, everything's better in my opinion than being a critic.

And I think that, you know, we, it leads to a lot of what we're just talking about. It's , it's , uh , I think people need to start getting more involved in technology, not necessarily as a career, but just understanding what the capabilities are because there is now , uh , not only a lot of fear around, you know , automation and robots taking over our lives and you know, what AI could possibly do.

And there are some dangers to that, but again, instead of sort of being a pundit on the sidelines, sort of complaining about, you know , this doom and gloom in this dystopian future, you know, it's interesting that we look at these, you know , scifi stories and then we up sort of building that version of the future because we just don't take the time to think of anything else. And so I'm curious where you see that line of scifi kind of, you know , influencing technological advances.

So since our great, great grandparents, we work now as a society, 50%, fewer hours per week than our great-great-grandparents did 50%, fewer hours. Uh, you know, when our great , great pants or grandparents around there was one day of rest. And that's, if you were lucky, that was Sunday. Uh, the five day workweek is a very modern invention. And, you know, there's a lot of labor laws that changed to enable that, but also mess load of automation and technology that went in.

And you look at like the agricultural industry and the dramatic rise in productivity and the dramatic reduction in workforce there . Now people, people had to find other jobs and here here's the, here's the big kicker, right? Um, there's a difference between unemployment and retraining. And if, if automation truly eliminated jobs, you would have to go back to the beginning of the first industrial revolution couple hundred years ago.

And if you drew a line on the unemployment percentage, if the, if the Luddites who are the textual workers, opposed any industrial automation, if the Luddites would have been correct, we'd be at 50% unemployment right now. But with the most recent situation that aside because of it had a blip on unemployment , a big, big blip, but a temporary blip , um, you know, unemployment has come way , way, way, way, way, way down again, up until that moment.

And March of 2020, we had the lowest unemployment in recorded human history almost, right. I mean, it was like right down there at the bottom. And, and so what that, what does that tell you? Well, automation, because if automation truly led to unemployment, then we'd have sky high unemployment. Now after 200 years and three waves of industrial revolutions , but that's not the case. We are, we're sitting here at the highest level of automation we've ever seen in construction.

And we have the biggest crisis on labor that we've ever seen in construction. So, so in crisis, meaning we need workers very badly because we have , uh, by, by most estimates that I've read and heard two to three people retiring out of skilled trades for every one person entering.

And so we have this massive problem and, you know, people like Steven bucket, advanced , uh , construction robotics who created the Thai baht, he could not, he's a bridge contractor in Pittsburgh could not find people to tie rebar. So he, and he partnered with Jeremy C rock and they formed a robotics company, partnered with a research institution at a university.

And they created a rebar tying robot that has computer vision, the texts where rebar intersects and ties it well that wasn't to eliminate workers. It was to deal with the fact that he couldn't find them. And so you almost have to flip the arguments on it on its end. You don't want people doing dangerous stuff, boring things, menial things are things that don't add a lot of value because the human brain is still still for now.

And for the foreseeable future, the greatest computer ever invented, and it deserves a task worthy of his capacity. And so that's really where I view this entire thing. We are trying to maximize humans. We want to keep them safe. We want to use their brains Wyndham to think we want them to add value. We want them to be able to utilize their resources and not do dangerous work, backbreaking work or mindless work because we have a labor shortage.

So we need them doing the highest value task , and we need to use robotics wherever we can. And , and that's really the, you have to, you have to pay attention to , to labor numbers when you're talking about this and you can't just make a blanket assumption that robots, and by the way, there's software robots and hardware robots, right? I mean, there's a lot of software robots that are automating tasks to , um, through a technology called RPA robotic process automation.

And you've got to look at, okay, what's going on with aggregate unemployment and what's going on in industry specific unemployment. And we can even observe when major developments hit and the timeline. And did you see an aggregate change across industries? And did you see a specific change in this industry? You're just, you're just not seeing it.

That's the, that's, that's the, the, the reality, the reality is look at the last 200 years of employment data and it's , uh , it D it doesn't support the argument that that is the end of employment as we know it, it's just a change.

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I don't even know where it starts to pull that apart, but I w I'd love to kind of go back to this notion of doing high value work and, and that, you know, we're, we're not really here to do these rote activities that we are, you know, putting robots to the task and automotive automation to the task. So what are some of the strategies that you've employed at your company and that you're recommending to your clients

And I see a lot of sarcasm around technology and innovation from , um, far too many executives and construction companies who really make, they'll make a lot of side comments to me and to others, like, well, I'm glad I'm retiring, so I don't have to deal with this crap. That's the most common one that I hear. I'm glad I'm done. So I don't have to deal with this.

And that's just a really terrible attitude to have when you're dealing with a company that is looking to its leader to , to signal, Hey, what's the temperature here in this company on change and improvement. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have some amazing transformative leaders in construction, architecture, engineering that are saying change innovation technology is going to be , uh , at the core of what we're going to do as a company. But I'll tell you this.

I've had a big, a big , uh, lesson than the last two years on change happening to me that I didn't want. Uh, I've always been a huge change advocate. I love it. I , I love being an agent of change. I love being an instrument of change. I love innovating and creating new things. We've created , uh , three commercial products that have had a reasonable or great level of success.

So we created five others that didn't , um, we've, we've done some really cool things in 20 years of JV , knowledge around construction and insurance technology and consulting services and products and our podcasts and the road show and the construction tech report, like all of that's fun. And we've, we've tried to push the limits of our clients and the industry, but the last two years, my goodness, I had a whole bunch of changes, thrust on me that I didn't want.

And , and I , I tell you that was really where I got a taste of my own medicine. And I had to really say, you know, I've got to , I've got to take the medicine I've been telling everybody else to take. And that is sometimes you have to accept that this is happening around you and get on board emotionally with it, cause your employees . So I think step one is you've got to have leadership that sets big audacious goals.

And that creates a culture where changing innovation is something they want rather than a culture that is almost like a, the jock culture from high school, where it's about hanging out with your friends and doing the same thing you always do and making fun of the nerds. Right. And I was definitively on the receiving end of that equation in high school. You know, I was, I was the software nerd. Um, even though I, I played, I played sports and did all that.

Um, I really had a tough time , um, uh, trying to figure out my place until I came to Texas a and M and I found a whole bunch of people just like me and realized that, Hey, this is going to be, everything's going to be all right. And so that, so first they've got to set an audacious goal . Secondly , um, executives have to create a dedicated staff, dedicated space, dedicated budgets that are , are, are driven towards innovation. People don't innovate.

And there , well, some rare, special people will innovate in their spare time, but you know, anything that you want to happen in your company deserves dedicated space, dedicated staff, dedicated budgets. Think about safety. If you just asked everybody in a construction company to just be safe, just be safe, be safe, but you never hired a safety director and you never put processes in place and you never built a safety lab. Would you really be safe?

No, not , I mean, you might be a little safe because you create a culture of safety, but you didn't, you didn't manifest that culture and a process and people in technology that enforce it. And so that's, that's the same thing with technology and innovation is you got to first set these big audacious goals. Secondly, you got to get dedicated staff space and budgets.

You know, then you've got to start putting time into studying problems and learning about lean and how do I identify waste and building a process around it. You know, most companies in architecture, engineering, and construction operate off one process, SOMP see to my pants. They show up to work every day. They put out the fires that go home, exhausted, rinse and repeat. And if you actually have a process for running your business and a process for innovation, ours is a system called EOS.

That's been totally life-changing. The other process that we use is, is lean for identifying waste and fixing it. And when you really become a student of a process, it totally transforms your ability to innovate and get things done and adopt new technology. Other than that kind of a it's like playing pin the pin, the tail on the donkey, right? You've got a blindfold on you're walking around and you might hurt somebody.

Or you might, when you don't know, you know, cause you're, you're, you're just winging it.

This is a, this is a blockbuster Netflix scenario on a grand scale that we're headed towards because the technology life cycle now has, has become so short and innovation cycles have become so short. And, and, you know, companies are , can become dinosaurs within a decade

When I started writing software, I was about 11 years old, learned GW basic in middle school, then then got into Pascal Fortran as well. I went to this really great. I was a lucky kid. I grew up in Baton Rouge. I was in the magnet program, magnet gifted, talented GT magnet thing. And we had software to have , I had computer science classes and six seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade , uh, through the public school system.

But it was, it was all through magnet, GT engineering stuff. It was amazing. It was like I say, it was like fame for nerds. You know, if you were the movie fame where guys dancing in the hallways, we were all comparing our graph . Yes, we were. We actually had coding competitions during our break hours and we actually would compare graphing calculators. And I mean, it was, it was really nerdy.

We had no football, baseball or basketball cause the school considered it a distraction to academic success. I mean, that's what, that's the school, the schools I went to middle and high school and you know, we started coding, a new language would come out every two or three years. There'd be a book published . You'd have a few years to look at it. You know, now we've got a new JavaScript framework.

Every three months, we've got a new coding language, every two or three months, new data storage architectures every month or two new cloud and intrinsic functions every three or four months. I mean the, the, the amount of stuff that's available results in far less code having to be written, which means you can roll out applications way faster than you used to, and you can build things a lot quicker.

Um, but it also means that the pace of competition is it's pretty brutal and it's coming, that attitude is coming at some level to construction. Now there's been some recent events when you look at like the downfall of Katara who raised an incredible billions of dollars to try to bring technology concepts to the construction industry, but they did it in a way that was not financially sound as a business. And so they've tanked right? SoftBank invested money in them.

Same thing with rework , we work was trying to revolutionize , um, the, the building facility owner business. And, you know, they may pull something out at WeWork. Kotara has done , uh, both of them are SoftBank investments and you know, those are some initial stabs someone's going to get it right though. And it's going to be like , uh , it's gonna be a sea change and it's going to happen as continue to happen faster and faster.

There's already a lot of architects, engineers and contractors who are incapable of submitting bids now on even public work, because they do not have the technical capabilities required in particular around BIM and virtual design and construction. When I was a city Councilman, I changed all of our standards.

We moved to cm at risk and RCMS had to prove not just that they had a rabbit license, but that they had the capability to actually deliver a V a VDC department to work on our project and, and really impact, you know, clash and coordination and scheduling and design. Um, and, and it had a huge outcomes, but we also had , uh , a half of the usual suspects that literally couldn't submit a proposal and threatened to Sue the city because they thought it was unfair.

I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want technically competent contractors. And half of them were not. And that's, that's, what's going to continue happening to , to folks that don't want to get with the program.

So you guys don't even know, but we already, these are the new apple glass , the air glasses. You're the only ones that have them,

We invested in millions, upgrading traffic lights, fiber connections, to all 78 traffic lights in college station. We , we took over and controlled them centrally and dropped wait time during football games to get out from Texas a and M from three and a half hours down to an hour and a half using a smart traffic system. We also put into place a completely digital review process for planning and development services. So contractors no longer brought paper in. It was all digital.

And we cut several days out of every approval because we went all digital on approval. We went and we started leasing out our dark fiber so that developers would have fiber up to the end of their neighborhood. They could lease from us on dark fiber, in dark conduit, and we cut their cost of delivering fiber way down. We got two providers to come in and bring fiber to home in several new neighborhoods. We, we just did so much around smart cities.

We also made all municipal data that was subject to foil requests . Um, we put it behind an API so that you could actually hit a public API and get either all the city data and build apps on our municipal data. I mean, it was, it was awesome to see what you could do in six years with a willing government, but the contractors were the ones that were the hardest because we had to get them to where they could submit models to us that we could actually use for our facility management program.

Because when I got elected, we didn't even know how many buildings we owned . Not only did we not have as-builts, we didn't know how many we owned and where they were. And then we, we, we eventually got it to where we had a full inventory. We had, we knew what, how many buildings and where they were and what their condition was. And then we started putting requirements in around them.

I mean, it just, it took years, but there's a lot to do in a , in a real smart city that you've gotta run like 20 initiatives at once. And they all take six to 10 years.

I love building a business and campaigns taught me how to sell, but there's so much to do. You know, there's like, there's so many parts that have to go into place, but there's a big shortage of people who are willing to just start doing, even if you don't have it all figured out, like, honestly, this is how it went. I got elected. I announced a smart city initiative.

And then I filled the gaps and later, you know , I didn't, I didn't have it all figured out because I knew if I took five years to study, it I'd be out of office.

By the time I got started with implementation and, and the same thing in a company, if you're in a construction company, sometimes you just have to start collecting data and make a decision on an app, you know , like start using rabbit, start using Navis, start, you know, start designing something because there's, there's, you know, excuses are like , uh , we'll use the , the, the, the phrase they're like elbows, right? Uh , pretty much everybody has got them .

And, and there's always an excuse of why you can't use BEM . All right . There's always an issue. Oh, well the projects to small projects, to big projects, to short projects too long, not that type of work. And the reality is you can use them . You can, you can, you can apply VDC concepts to just about anything you want to build on the planet, but you have to have the desire to do it. And you have to have the willingness to just get started.

I'll tell you , uh , flying, you know, I know we're running out of time, but flying , uh , if I can just say this to everybody out there, if you're into technology and you're in you're into geeking out, go to your local flight school and go take some lessons because , uh, it is the coolest thing on the planet. And the other really cool thing is that technology is taking over aviation.

I mean, it is taking over everything in the cockpit, everything in air, traffic control, these are flying computers. You still have to have a lot of hand flying skills. And I, I fly by hand a lot to , to keep my skills current, but if you're great at technology , uh , you can be great at flying , uh , because it is a massive math problem. And , uh, it's a , it's a really exciting way to, to express yourself and kind of geek out on something new.

She wants to know what's going on. She loves taking trips. Uh, she loves performing and being on stage and speaking. And, you know, she's got a brilliant head and they're both extremely tech savvy, but I have surrounded them with technology their whole lives. So if it's AR VR, if it's holographic interfaces, you name it, they're into it. Um, and I wanted them to have a passion for that. They're not passionate for coding.

I tried getting them into software development and that's , they're not there like I was. Um, but my oldest is really hardcore into music like me. Uh, my youngest is probably the best candidate for being a architect or a designer. She is a, she's a builder and a thinker. She watches just hours of YouTube videos on how to build things. And then we , we gave her a whole, basically a lab in the house , um , where she just makes stuff.

And she just has project after project where she's, she's built it or constructed it. And , uh , she's hardcore into Minecraft. And she, she she's, yeah, she's really a builder. Like, I think she'd be great in VDC because she is already crazy good at designing environments in Minecraft. She builds entire planets there. And , uh, so I've been really impressed with what they, it's not the stuff that I picked.

Like I was into soccer and programming and they're into dance and cheer, and I got my cheer dad's shirt. I got it blinged out, you know? Um, and so I, you know, you just gotta , you just got to geek out on what they geek out on, but , uh, you know, and try and influence them some. And , uh , certainly , um, I want them to what I want them, I want for them is to do something that matters. Right.

And , uh, right now, one that wants to become a prosecuting attorney for a district , uh , the da in New York. And the other one wants to be a Marine biologist at the, at the Atlanta aquarium and in Atlanta, that's their current career goals, but they're 14 and 11 that could change 20 times. So , uh, whatever it is, I want them to be productive and add value. Right. Um, that's, that's what I want them to do. So whatever that is for them,

Um, but we're gonna , when we get to molecular 3d printing, that's when I really get out , because we can print food. I've already eaten 3d printed food. It's cool . I mean, I've already, you know, I've been down this road a little bit, you have 3d printed sushi now. I mean, there's, there's some cool stuff out there on 3d printing.

So I think a replicator in a transporter, but I think, you know , if you think about it, those two are very closely intertwined because if you can 3d print biological organisms, you can technically transport a 3d print of yourself, but then you have to destroy yourself to transport yourself. I'm not sure how that's going to work. So we're gonna have to figure out something where it doesn't destroy you to transport you. But I think those two things would be amazing in lieu of a transporter.

I think faster than light travel would be amazing. Of course, Elon Musk is making most of my dreams come true already because he's, he's, he's, he's a doer, right? I mean, he's this one who's like, I got to figure it out along the way. Uh , we're going to build the rocket, like build a rocket, you know, and he's doing most of it in Texas, but just make it even cooler. Right. He's a , he's a California textile as well. Right. So he left the Texas. Um, so he , he left and came over here too .

And it's so cool because you know what he's proposing is 30 minute travel around the globe, just using low earth rockets, which honestly, at this point, I think he's going to pull off. And so a lot of that stuff's coming true. So replicate or transporter or super fast travel. I'm all about that because I , I want to go to Japan for dinner and come back, like totally, totally do that. I mean, and , uh, w why not , uh , you know, connect, connect the world and make it a better place.

But , uh, that's, that's, that's probably where I would have .