AI in AEC: Note-Taking & Meeting Efficiency

My name is Jeff Eccles , I'm a senior advisor at KP Ready Co and today I am once again joined by Frank Lazzaro , who is one of my teammates here at KP ReadyCo , and , as we explained in episode one of this version of KP Unpacked , we're spinning off a different series here .

We're starting to do this more and more and more guests to add more content that's focused on how the built environment is designed , built , developed , operated , all of the things and we're really looking at this in terms of unpacking all the trends , the technologies , all the discussions and strategies that are shaping the built environment and beyond .

So what Frank and I are doing now , once a week , is we're coming to you to unpack the tools and the technologies , the trends , that are driving AEC firms . So one tip

every week about some technology that AEC firms are using , might want to use . Maybe it's something that Frank sees on the horizon . We'll find out every week . One tip , frank . Thanks for joining me today . We'll find out every week . One tip , frank . Thanks for joining me today .

I guess maybe I'm going to call it that . If you've got a different term , it'll be good to hear that . I'm going to call it that . If you've got a different term , it'll be good to hear that . But note-taking is something that's essential in our world . So what about these AI note-takers ? What are they for and why do we need them ?

And so the AI note taker is really just an extension of that , but to the point to where they become extremely more useful to us . You know how often do you actually go back and watch the video of the of the meeting , right , like people ?

Just , you know , I've I've personally never done that , but I've recorded plenty of meetings , you know , trainings and client meetings , yeah , useful kind of sort of , but not so much .

These AI note takers take it to a whole nother level , because what they do is not only do they record the audio or record the video , but they also transcribe everything that's being said .

Now , the important part to all of that is that once you have the written word or the typed word , the AI tool can then actually analyze the text , pull out action items , pull out summaries . It can create emails based off of those conversations .

So what you end up having is that you go from just being able to record a conversation , where we were a few years ago , to actually getting a written transcript of what's being said , to where the AI tool now can have actionable things created from that copy . So to me I think it's a super useful tool .

You can go from capturing your meeting notes to writing a summary , to sending that summary out in an email within five minutes of getting off a call .

So it's one of those things to where it ends up being that time saver , to where you know we've all been there , right To the point , to where it's like , hey , I just got off this meeting with Jeff , let me send him a recap of what we talked about in those action steps .

Phone rings , I jump on another call , I go back to back calls and next thing you know the conversation I had with Jeff on Monday . It's now Thursday and I haven't sent you that summary . Ai helps me kind of streamline that process .

It was just the defaults , I suppose but it's full of red and green blocks and I see that I've got a a one o'clock and a two o'clock and a three o'clock and so on and so forth , which means , like man , that's a lot of meetings back to back .

You know kind of fills up my day and also there's a lot more to a meeting than just the time in the meeting , right ?

up to or over 40 hours per year . So when you're thinking about finding or manufacturing time , this is one of those things to where , if you used an AI note taker , you could save those times . So let's take a great example , live example of your calendar . Right , you have four or five meetings on there .

If you could save five minutes for each of those meetings by capturing the meeting notes , writing a summary and sending out an email , your five meetings times five minutes , you've already saved 25 minutes of time this week . So you start thinking about how that could be very additive very quickly .

So if you're constantly in these meetings now this could apply to anything . Use it during your internal proposal kickoff meeting , so you're capturing notes and you know who's responsible for what and you can send out those summaries a lot quicker .

Use it for your client meetings to where they're talking to you about a change order or something along those things where you can capture the action steps , write the email and send it out . So it's all about finding those efficiencies . So , if you're looking to find those 12 minutes per day , about finding those efficiencies .

So if you're looking to find those 12 minutes per day , the AI note taker is probably the easiest and fastest place to find unlimited amount of time because we seem to always be in a bunch of meetings .

They've got to put together their meeting minutes . You know , respond to to any RFIs or or things , things that pop up , that popped up in that meeting . And you know , on one hand it might get a little bit debatable . It's like , okay , well , what if that's billable ? And what if that is not billable ?

You might say , well , it's all billable , it's all applied to that , apply to that project . All right fair enough , yeah , so if you , if you're saving 12 minutes , four hours or whatever , whatever the time saving is , did you , did you save that number of of billable hours ? Sure , um , does it mean that you're not billing for those hours ?

No , we know that's not the case , because you're going to fill the hours no matter what , right . But maybe what it did was it opened up more time for to do more impactful work in those billable hours . I think that's a way that we may not always look at it .

The laundry in the AEC space really kind of focuses on those administrative things , right , the things that aren't really billable anyway to begin with , but we just know how to . We know that we have to do those things right Writing a follow-up email , attending a proposal kickoff meeting .

You know there's so many different things that you can think about , like year-end performance reviews and being able to summarize that meeting and then draft responses to performance . Those are all the things that we know that we have to do . We're being asked to do that . It's interesting , right ? What's the average utilization rate in our industry ?

Somewhere between what ? 60% and 65% on average for the firm , some a little higher , some a little bit lower , but that just means that there's 35% to 40% of our time is being treated towards non-billable and a lot of it has to . Honestly , I think a lot of it falls in the meetings .

How impactful is our use of that time ? Billable or not ? Fantastic , right , if we can make , if we can drive our utilization rate up , or if we can make our billable time or non-billable , I guess more impactful .

Because I think the expectation is is that we have to focus on everything , and what we do find is is that there's not enough time in the day sometimes to be able to do everything . So these tools can kind of help facilitate some of that .

And I think that's where you know , again , it's not replacing a person or a workflow , it's just adding that tool to an existing workflow so that you just become more efficient at doing it that time on the calendar , of course .

some known ones that you know we've been around for a good bit , that have added some AI features , and there's some new ones . I think let's start with the known ones that you know we've been around for a good bit , that have added some AI features , and there's some new ones . I think let's start with the known ones .

Right , if your company uses Zoom , you've probably noticed that there's a little AI thing that pops up on your Zoom calls now , right when this kind of sits in the corner , I think it looks like a star or something and it kind of blinks . It's giving you an AI summary . It's doing the things that you know , taking those notes for you .

So you know , zoom's a pretty good , established tool . That's one that is incorporated in it . Teams gets a little weird . I think Teams is weird in the sense that in the base version of Teams there's not an AI function .

You can record a conversation , you could do some things , but in order to get the transcription and the summary and all of those things , you need to upgrade to a Teams premium license , which includes then their version of Intelligent Recap . So , basically , it does the same thing that Teams that Zoom will do It'll transcribe the conversation .

It will create a summary . It will do all of those things for you . There's an additional licensing think people need to be thinking about is some of these third-party tools .

I personally use Otter , otterai , and the reason I do that because as you , jeff , you know that as an advisory company I'm dealing with clients that sometimes I'm on a Teams call , sometimes I'm on a Zoom call , sometimes I'm on a Google Meet .

Otter is that third-party tool that's pretty flexible to where it kind of works with any video conferencing tool that I'm on . More importantly , there's an app for my phone and if I'm in an in-person meeting I could use it . So there's a variety of different ways to do this .

Now , one use case that's very interesting and I've been talking to a firm actually in Alaska that is looking at for their field techs , where they're walking around taking notes via Otter or some other tool while they're doing an inspection of , you know , a waterway or the road or building , whatever it is .

But what's really cool about Otter is there's a camera function . So while I'm talking I can hit the camera function , take a picture of a column or the riverbed or whatever it is , and then I'm basically taking those notes and I'm basically just building a report .

So that client report that I get to build on the backend , that AI note taker is transcribing me visually saying what's happening around me . I could take physical photos and then export that into a report . So you think about it from a meeting perspective yeah , meetings are important , but you start thinking about it more broadly .

You know that's a really fascinating feature that I can verbally talk to the AI . It writes my report as I'm talking . I could take pictures of what I'm looking at . Get talk to the AI . It writes my report as I'm talking . I could take pictures of what I'm looking at .

Get back to the office I already have everything that I want to talk about some formatting , put it in a template , do whatever I need to do . It streamlines my day . So Otter's another one . But then there's , like Fireflies , fathom I think there's another one out there readai . There's a bunch of them out there .

I think you just need to kind of look at the ones that are there and not only think about your AI note-taking your meetings in particular , but think about , like other use cases , like taking field notes and photos and those things . A lot of these tools can do that for you today .

The way that I think about this and you know , listening to you and understanding what you're saying here is how do I work , right , how do I work and how do I use ? Or how do I do what I do and what tools ? What's the best tool to insert here in the fill in the blank ? In this case , obviously we're talking about note-taking , but but how ?

How do I go about that with ? With a pen and a pad of paper , maybe right now ? And what's the best replacement for that particular tool ? The formatting and all the things I love . The I didn't know about that the camera feature on Otter .

So when you start thinking about that right , those are pretty fascinating use cases , right . And I think to your point where you were just kind of going with is that the thing that I encourage our clients to kind of focus on when we're having these conversations is stop thinking about the tool and think about the problem you're trying to solve .

Yes , once you can kind of figure out the problem , okay , this I'm , I'm I want to be able to streamline my field note-taking and be able to capture photos . Now , that may be an AI tool .

It may not be an AI tool , but if you start with the problem and then kind of figure out the tools that help solve that problem , then you realize it's just fitting into your workflow and you're not reinventing the wheel , right ?

I think a lot of people don't like that kind of change , to where it's like I don't want you to change my process , I just want you to make my job easier , smoother , faster .

You know the way and , and you know you and I have talked about this and I'm sure we'll talk about it on a future episode as well . The way that I approach any of these ai tools is how do I use this as my assistant ? If this were my intern , if this were my assistant , if this were whatever , how would I interface with that that person ?

Um , as an extension of the way that I I already do this , so I love that , or I think about it as how do I make it an extension of me , right ?

Some do some things , some do others . You know things you need to be aware of . Some of these things require another subscription . It's just another piece of software , right ? And I think there's an underlying concern within the industry that everyone's being subscription to death .

You know , I have my Revit license and I have AutoCAD license and I have an Adobe license and I have this license and this the next thing . You know they have all these licenses . You know I encourage you to kind of , you know , use the tools that your firm has .

But if you can build that business case or that use case on how you can save time and money like an otter , because it's streamlining your reports , don't hesitate to try to build that case .

So just know that the tools all do something slightly different and some of them do require additional expense each month , but that shouldn't be a deterrent in the sense that if it's solving a bigger problem and it's streamlining something , it may be well worth the investment .

Who knows , right , that's for you to decide . But we're here to give you the tips . We're here to talk about the tools . We're here to help you make more informed decisions as we start to unpack the tools , the technologies , the trends that affect the way that we do business here in the AEC world . Frank , thanks for telling us all about AI note takers .

This has been fun , it's been enlightening . I know something new . I learned something new about Otter and I'm looking forward to next week and learning more tips .

If you know , frank talked about Otter , he talked about Teams , he talked about Zoom's , ai Companions and Fireflies and Fathom and some others . If you have other tools that fall under the category of AI note takers , drop it in the comments wherever it is that you're consuming this . If you have something that you're wondering about , hey , would you cover this ?

Would you talk about this ? Put that in the notes or in the comments wherever you're consuming this . This is going to be an ongoing series where we're bringing you one type of tool , one tip every week

and , um , we want to bring to you the things that you want to know about . So make sure you let us know that . And , um , big thanks , big shout out to producer Ethan , because he's the one behind the scenes .

That one makes us sound good , makes us sound intelligent , but also packages all of this up and gives you the links in the show notes and everything else that you need to make use of this particular episode . So for all of you out there listening , thank you Frank . Thanks again , look forward to our next episode and we'll see you all next week .

Thanks everybody .