Disrupting the $15 Trillion Construction Industry with Autonomous Agents: Dr. Sarah Buchner

00:00:00.000 | Welcome everybody to this little afternoon session of mine. I'll keep it very short but

00:00:17.680 | this is going to be the most exciting presentation of the day because I'm

00:00:20.240 | talking to you about construction. Thank you. We are Trunk Tools. Trunk Tools is

00:00:26.520 | the leading general AI provider for the construction industry which probably none

00:00:31.500 | of you have ever thought about it but you are consuming construction every

00:00:33.960 | single day. You're sitting in it right now, you're driving in it on your day home,

00:00:37.740 | on your right home and it is the most exciting industry in the world. I'm going

00:00:43.760 | to level set the stage here a little bit. This is a building that is being built in

00:00:47.440 | New York City right now and it's using our software. We asked this building to give

00:00:51.120 | us access to all the documentation, okay? Raise your hand if you think they give

00:00:54.920 | us access to more than a thousand pages. Come on, don't be shy. This is not an

00:00:58.600 | engineering conference. Keep your hand up if you think there's more than 10,000

00:01:01.940 | pages of documentation, 100,000 pages of documentation, a million pages of

00:01:06.140 | documentation to build a single skyscraper. They gave us access to a total of 3.6

00:01:12.740 | million pages of contract, okay? 3.6 million pages of pictures and blueprints and

00:01:19.820 | schedules and RFIs and all of this stuff. If you were to print that, a stack of paper, three

00:01:25.500 | times as high as the building itself. That's why I'm super excited about this industry and

00:01:31.840 | that's why this industry is literally built for RAC. That's why they put me up on this

00:01:35.600 | RAC stage here. Why do we have such a problem in construction doing this? There's massive amounts

00:01:40.840 | of people making decisions every single day and they're documenting the heck out of this

00:01:44.600 | because it's one of the most litigious industries that you will ever see. Similar to software

00:01:49.880 | development, right? Like, I have a PhD in AI and construction, so I kind of know what I'm

00:01:53.420 | talking about, but I'm not an expert. That's why we have better people on my team. But similar

00:01:57.420 | to software development, right? You have lots of people writing code, but once you merge it together,

00:02:01.460 | it actually breaks and you have bugs. In construction, that happens once you are in the field and you're

00:02:06.640 | trying to pour the concrete or you're trying to squeeze a pipe into a hole and it just doesn't fit.

00:02:10.840 | construction is $15 trillion a year. Trillion with a T. 10% of it is rework. 10% is because there's data

00:02:19.380 | discrepancies in this pile of data that the people don't know about it. $1.5 trillion US dollars every

00:02:25.060 | single year. And that's what we are solving. We are putting all of this knowledge in one place,

00:02:30.340 | which is what we call the brain behind construction, obviously a RAC product that goes in, perfectly

00:02:35.840 | digest and memorizes all of these construction specific file types. Yes, we built RAC specifically

00:02:41.840 | for a vertical. This vertical, however, is 10% of GDP. Once we have built this, we are deploying

00:02:48.260 | on top of this brain an army of AI-based agents. Agents are more or less intelligent and we can

00:02:54.960 | dive into this if you come to our booth a little bit later. I show you one of these agents live

00:02:59.220 | in practice in the field. This is a traditional copilot. You have all seen this a million times.

00:03:04.160 | You ask a question about your 3.6 million pages of construction data. Within a few seconds you

00:03:09.100 | get an answer and you obviously also want to source the original file document. Used on billions

00:03:15.460 | of the construction volume right now, I'm showing you an example from an actual construction site.

00:03:21.220 | Yes, a very important question on a construction site. The way this works for us, you throw this

00:03:31.600 | question against the system via text message or via web app. Within a few seconds we give

00:03:35.720 | you the enterprise search results and obviously we also give you a semantic answer to your actual

00:03:40.320 | question. Interestingly enough for anybody who actually wants to read what's up there, there's

00:03:45.380 | discrepancies in the answer. The answer itself shows that in the 3.6 million pages of documentation,

00:03:50.840 | actually somebody made a mistake and that mistake is going to be very very expensive.

00:03:55.520 | To give you a sense of the unstructured mess of data we are dealing with in construction,

00:04:00.140 | let me open one of these files. Beautiful. That's how we structure documentation in construction.

00:04:07.320 | Three feet wide tables with a ton of numbers, unusable for any human. That's why we're throwing

00:04:12.540 | AI against it. Obviously I was talking about data discrepancies. Instead of stopping where

00:04:17.480 | we have the data discrepancies, why don't you use an agent that is just actually creating

00:04:21.600 | an RFI and solving the discrepancy for the human so that the human can go back doing their job

00:04:27.380 | and not being a victim of bureaucracy. I'm on a RAC stage but personally I believe that RAC is

00:04:33.000 | completely commoditized. So what am I doing here? I'm here to tell you for whoever is building

00:04:38.860 | RAC that the future of RAC is actually keeping the human in the center and augmenting the human

00:04:44.520 | with an army of agents that is solving real life problems. Because if you actually want

00:04:50.040 | to have an impact in the real life then in my opinion vertical agents solving real world problems

00:04:55.880 | are the future. If you're interested in joining us on that path and being in the sexiest industry

00:05:01.120 | in the world, come join us at our booth in the expo hall. We're called Trunk Tools. Here's the QR code.

00:05:06.360 | We are hiring left and right and we're very excited to be dominating one of the most impactful industries

00:05:10.760 | in the world. Thank you.

00:05:15.240 | We'll see you next time.

Disrupting the $15 Trillion Construction Industry with Autonomous Agents: Dr. Sarah Buchner

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