Built Environment Matters

Industrializing Construction: Amy Marks on Productization, DfMA, and the Future of Building

• Bryden Wood • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Join us for an exciting episode of Built Environment Matters, where Jaimie Johnston MBE, Head of Global Systems at Bryden Wood, welcomes Amy Marks, the Queen of Prefab and Head of Industrialized Construction Strategy at Autodesk.

This conversation dives deep into:

  • The shift from traditional construction to industrialized methodologies.
  • How DfMA and productization are redefining efficiency and sustainability.
  • The critical need for standardization and collaboration across the construction ecosystem.

Amy draws on her extensive experience to shed light on overcoming resistance to change and the opportunities for architects and builders in embracing industrialized construction. Whether you’re a design enthusiast, industry professional, or advocate for a better built environment, this episode offers insights and inspiration you won’t want to miss.

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To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Intro:

Hello and welcome to Built Environment Matters, a monthly podcast brought to you by Bryden Wood, an international company of technologists, designers, architects, engineers, and analysts working for a better built environment. Bryden Wood believe in design to value, to cut carbon, drive efficiency, save time, make beautiful places, and build a better future.

Jaimie Johnston:

So thanks for joining us on this episode of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. I'm Jaimie Johnston, Head of Global Systems at Bryden Wood, and this week it's my pleasure to be joined by Amy Marks, who is the Queen of Prefab and Head of Industrialized Construction, Strategy and Evangelism at Autodesk. Hi Amy.

Amy Marks:

Hey, how you doing, Jaimie?

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, very good. Thanks. Very good. I say thanks ever so much for joining this week. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So, first things first, who is the Queen of Prefab? I know you've had quite a few roles around this topic over the past few years, so maybe you can tell a bit about your journey and how you've arrived where you've ended up at Autodesk.

Amy Marks:

Sure, I thought you were going to ask me if somebody else was the queen. Like, I was like, I was going to have to defend my title or something there for a second. Um, no, so I, uh, I actually grew up in conventional construction. And then was lucky enough to buy into a company that did, uh, steel and concrete volumetric modular construction, as well as some assemblies like bathroom pods. After that, I decided that I wanted to open up a consultancy, which I think was pretty much the first of its kind. And it was, we were prefabrication consultants and people said like, what's that, you know, and basically, you know, we put down our tools and decided that we were going to teach people how to enable and optimize, uh, the environment. Prefabrication through design for manufacturing and assembly, uh, principles as well as processes. And I did that for about, I don't know, 10, 11 years. And then, you know, Autodesk came to me and wanted to go over some of their strategy. And I thought, wow, you know, this is really exciting. And, and actually Jim Lynch, who really brought me over to Autodesk, Kind of said to me, not kind of, he basically said to me, listen, you're too small to make a difference. Like to really be, you're so passionate about this, like you've got to join our team. And it took a couple of years actually for me to join. But he was right. You know, I was actually too small to really make the impact that I wanted to make on the ecosystem. And so I'm so happy I joined, honestly, and it also allows me to stay very neutral. So I'm a pretty, by the way, I'm also a rugby player for 15 years competitively. So I love to watch rugby when I'm around, uh, you know, other places around the world and I'm a Mom of a 12 year old people now, so yeah, that's sort of my life. I don't really have a big, uh, hobby list. It's like, say, you know, sort of like change the world of design and construction like and I'm a Mom. That's pretty much, that's it. I'm not sure which is harder actually, someday.

Jaimie Johnston:

I was going to say those are both sort of fairly heavy duty things on your to do list and rugby in the background. I didn't know that about rugby actually. That's,

Amy Marks:

yeah, that's my stuff.

Jaimie Johnston:

So they must have been, the company you joined must have been early adopters then. I mean that must have been, when was that that you started looking at volumetric? Yeah, volumetric.

Amy Marks:

So I started building a volumetric, let's see, I, I was a minority shareholder and bought out the company in like 2005. And, um, I, they, but interestingly enough, they were a 75 year old company at that point, 76, even, I think they were 76 years old at that point. So that's a long time to have been doing steel and concrete volumetric modules, um, back then. And actually. For like, what the crazy part, it's like a huge variety of different kinds of projects, like telecommunications, data centers, schools, hospitals, generator enclosures, you know, like all kinds of stuff that like, I didn't realize how special everything was until we did like embassies for the government and, you know, it's a lot of secure office buildings, like really kind of crazy stuff that no one had ever done. And even now I look back and I think there's no, there really isn't a company like them at all. They don't actually exist. I own all the intellectual property from that company now, but um, that was that management team left and started Exite, which was my consultancy um, after that. But you think about that, if you, in 2005 we bought a 75 year old, 76 year old And people are just thinking this is new and starting some things up now and it's just not true, right? So,

Jaimie Johnston:

no, no, it's the same. I mean, it's been, uh, uh, yeah, certainly last few years, it's been a very hot topic in the UK, but I mean, for 30, 40 years, we've been talking about, You know, some of these issues, you know, post war housing was designed as a kit of parts. Yeah. The Romans built forts that were prefabricated. You go, there's nothing, none of this technology is new. It's maybe just the scale we're trying to bring to it. And the kind of the mainstreaming of it, I guess, is the big shift. It's not inventing the technology. It's trying to land it in an audience of people that are maybe not aware of some of these things.

Amy Marks:

I mean, but what, think about some of the stuff you just used as examples, which is, I think, kind of the downfall of our ecosystem and our industry. Uh, they're kind of quirky, right? Some of the examples we use that it's been around, these, like, this company that I, um, bought, they had done, like, hundreds of schools for the New York City, um, you know, division of school. Like, I didn't do any houses, like, no single family homes, nothing like that. It was all commercial, all multi story. Like Just buildings that bled into the fabric of the world that you wouldn't ever know. And so like, it wasn't like a weird little quirky something or other, it was like really like lots of buildings and lots of big applications that aren't like, I don't know, when we say things like prefabrication has been around for the pyramids, I just said that the other day in a podcast and I was like, okay, that's kind of silly. Like we're not building, you know, like I get it, but it's like, not really like what we, but this company actually that we had purchased had done. You know, not weird little quirky things. They had actually done like, you know, a lot of commercial applications, multi story hardened buildings for a really, really long time. And I think, you know, we don't, we're sort of like into the sexy in this space. Like, so we like kind of talk about the one thing that's the asterisk that no one's ever going to do again. And it's like, why are we doing, why aren't we just talking about the stuff that everyone needs to do? You know?

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, you made a point there which is, uh, maybe not even to do with modern methods of construction or, or prefab, but, you know, hundreds of schools. What we've seen in the UK, we've worked on, um, retrofitting schools that were system built back in the 60s.

Amy Marks:

Right.

Jaimie Johnston:

They had completely standardized designs for schools that were turned into kit of parts and they had round where I live, there's Four, uh, fire stations, I can point to that. They're all absolutely identical. Like, they designed it once. They built it quite traditionally, but they just rolled out that design and people seem to have forgotten that, or there's sort of no, uh, you know, corporate memory at that level. And we're, we're sort of reinventing that in the UK again. Standardized design. I bet that's a good thing, because it will lend itself to these, whether or not you built it using some form of prefab, it lends itself to an efficiency in design. And that, yeah, slightly frustrates me, that kind of learning cycle of going, ah, I'll tell you what we should do is standardised design. You go, yeah, like they did, you know, 80 years ago. So,

Amy Marks:

yeah,

Jaimie Johnston:

we constantly get these kind of recycling of ideas and you go, can we just maintain those ideas and build on them rather than abandon them and finding them again, you know, in 30 years time.

Amy Marks:

Agreed. I mean, think about it. It's funny. I was on a hospital project once. I think it was a billion dollar hospital and they had seven, I'm going to get the numbers not quite right, but it was like 739 different types of bathrooms. And I was like, listen, that's not good for conventional construction either. You know what I'm like? We ended up, we ended up getting it down to like seven types. out of 700 and I think it's even in 790 something types and it's like that can't be good for anyone to try to remember to build and actually operationally it's bad you know like you walk in every bathroom and it looked different and the patients they were different for the patients for the staff like a lot of the principles that we're talking about in design for manufacturing and assembly aren't necessarily specific to prefabrication they're just good design principles and they're just good for everybody but I think that's, that's also where we, we need to stretch ourselves that there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of misconceptions about DfMA, especially over on your side of the, of the pond, as we say, you know, because they use that term to mean prefab, and DfMA doesn't mean prefab. They say it as if it means prefabrication. And actually, um, We'll talk about this later, I'm sure, but the word prefabrication is not my favorite word lately. You know, like, it's just, I think it's kind of made up. It's like a made up word. I'm not sure what it means actually anymore. It's, and we, you know, so I'm sort of, that's a good conversation about, I, you know, I'm like a stickler for language, like, and teaching because it's like, we're all speaking different languages all the time on this, on this planet at this point with this, with industrialized construction or modern methods of construction. You know, I used to say modern methods of construction all the time, but I've stopped saying those words actually.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, so we've always liked, uh, we've always liked DfMA, Design for Manufacture and Assembly, because it's, it does exactly what it says. It's Design for Manufacture and Assembly. So if you want to manufacture and assemble the thing, you have to, you know, it starts at the kind of design process, the very early stages. And what we see quite often is people trying to retrofit it. to a traditional thing, but that kind of early stage process. Um, one of the things that came out just before Christmas here was the government's, uh, construction playbook. And it has a series of policies, one of which is harmonized, rationalized, digitized demands. And it's basically saying, how can we start to, uh, look across all the things we build in the public sector and get a kind of set of technical standards. That are common across a bunch of things. And that's nothing actually to do with MMC. It lends itself to MMC. But you go, if you just did that kind of rationalization piece, with dealing with fewer documents and fewer standards, it would give the market a much better opportunity to respond. That by itself would transform what we do and go, and then that's a really good starting point. Yeah, to build on top of it all this kind of prefab or DfMA, whatever you call it, but it starts at that high level of,

Amy Marks:

yeah,

Jaimie Johnston:

set the process out right rather than, you know, they make the point MMC is not the end in itself. There's some other things we should be doing, but you're right, it's that kind of get the basics right, and then it's a springboard onto all these other more sophisticated things. But if you don't get them right, then you'll be retrofitting, you know, a sophisticated technique to a standard piece of design, and it just never quite works, there's always a compromise somewhere in that process.

Amy Marks:

Well, I think that's fine as long as you're, it depends on how performance based or how prescriptive those standards are, right? So if you're super prescriptive, then you don't have a space for innovation, right? So you could be very standard and make it impossible to get, you know, fabricated elements out there because of how And I think that's, you know, depending on who makes those standards and their understanding of ways in which you can build things, that's the problem. We don't have the people that know how to build things, come, no offense to anyone that's doing it. I'm not, in general, I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about the playbook in and of itself. I mean, but like, I know who the policymakers are and who influences those, and they're not all thinking about prefabrication or DfMA. Or industrialized construction, you know, the way other people do, or they're looking at one particular market application and they're not thinking about it in terms of other applications. So, you know, it's, it's kind of like any, um, I don't want to say a curse word, but it's like garbage in, garbage out, I'll say instead. You know, it's like, it depends who makes those standards. It depends on what they were thinking of enabling in the future. And it depends on what their understanding of what the future might look like. So standardization doesn't necessarily help us. It has a shot at being something that can help us if somebody informs it in the right way. I mean, so again, like, I think it's all about language. Like, I always used to use MMC. I actually, like, I even have a LinkedIn group that I've, you know, titled MMC, but I felt like the second I said the words modern, Jaimie, it feels old. Like, I'm going to be 50 this year. You have to say, like, 21st century design. It's like, what? It's like modern. What does that mean anymore? You know? And like, So, I don't know, and by the way, you know, I say industrialized construction now is the overarching principle for lots of things, inclusive of DfMA, the design methodology, not the, not the end result of the, of the fabricated element, but, um, you know, I don't know, and I, and a lot of architects, like recently, an architect said, well, industrialized construction has nothing to do with me, that's construction, and I was like, no, no, no, it's to the entirety of the, You know, of the built environment. And that includes conceptualization, design, you know, all these things. So then I thought like, Oh gosh, are we going to fight over the terminology or are people just going to get like to do the stuff we know we need to do? You know, it's like, I, we could fight forever about terminology, but I just think as long as we understand there are certain concepts that that need to remain true, whatever you want to call it, as long as the concept and like, you know, DfMA is, is, does not mean the end result. It, it, it, so it's really the, you know, the manufacturing and assembly, the choices you make upfront in design, as you said. And I don't know, I, I think some people go, Oh, is that building DfMA? And I was like, well, what does that mean? Like, I'm not even sure, like, are you asking if they, designed it for use of fabricated elements, then yes, like that's the correct answer. But it's so hard to get people, you know, the word modular always bothers me now. And it's funny, like, because people think that's the, like, it's hierarchical in some, like, it's a hierarchy. Like, I'm like, the best and best is the best of the best is not modular. You know, it's just another tool in the toolkit. You know, it doesn't mean that it's better. Sometimes it's the worst option for what you're doing. And, um, you know, sometimes it's the best. So I think it's just, we have to sort of expand our understanding and. I feel like that's holding us back and it stops like the regular guys and gals out there that have been doing this for a long time. It's like you're trying to teach them this whole new language. It's really reality. It's not so different from what they're doing now. They just need to adapt and change a few of the behaviors they're doing.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. So we, we use a term, uh, in the office,'Design to Value', which is for exactly that reason, because if people get bogged down, even the 'on site', 'off sites'.

Amy Marks:

Yeah, well that doesn't mean anything.

Jaimie Johnston:

You said offsite, I go, yeah, it didn't really mean everything offsite. So we started talking about 'Design to Value' and say, well, if you understood the outcomes for a client, whether that's speed or lowest cost or greatest flexibility, that tells you something about the kind of outcome. But broadly we say that if you're trying to design things with the least amount of material, you know, handle the fewest number of times, wherever that happens, whether it's on site, off site, you know, delivered quickly with the right information without any waste, the sort of lean principle, you go, whatever that looks like, that's what we're talking about. But I think you're right, people get bogged down in the, but you said off site, and so did off site, go yeah, but not if that wasn't the best thing to do, if that introduces too many steps or Uh, yeah, I think we need to, we need to, yeah, cut across the language and say, the outcome I'm after is the following benefit for, you know, clients and society and all the rest of it. However, that needs to happen. Let's make that happen. Let's not get bogged down in the, yeah, the, the granularity of the words, which are often, yeah, everyone has their own interpretation of them and it starts to drive weird behaviors because of a semantic debate. And you go, that's a bit strange, isn't it?

Amy Marks:

Well, and you know, it's funny, especially in the UK, like you can't say offsite anymore when you're seeing what BAM is doing and Mace, that's fabrication done onsite. So like, to me, offsite is just like location specific fabrication. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't, it doesn't mean anything and it's my fault. It's actually in the US I named my company Xsite on purpose. So that would be called like offsite. And honestly, like that wasn't, you know, at the time it was a good evolution, but. It just really means the location. It's like, for me, it's just location specific fabrication or automation. Wherever you're doing in that place, it's done off site. But, you know, it's true, like, words are, uh, They, they drive weird behaviors. I think that's the part that's super important. And we've got to talk about behaviors because you can't literally, I've, that's one of the reasons why I came to Autodesk is that I recognize it would be too hard to change. Like I taught process all the time and I was always facilitating process and teaching supply chain. Like my, I always say like my, My claim to fame is laying out process and, you know, understanding, like being kind of a weird Wikipedia of every fabricator on the planet and knowing them and what they do. Like, it's like, you know, I'm like a database in my head of like, well, that can live at Autodesk now because we've got plenty of, you know, connected networks and things like that. But, you know, the, the, the problem is, is that people hear these words, they recognize that they don't have skill set in that, it steps on their territory in some way, and then they are just vehemently opposed. And I think that's a problem, you know, because We are a very siloed ecosystem. And I like the design for value. I think, you know, it's sort of like Google's designed for X and now they're just calling it X. In reality, like some people, it's not about cost. Some people it's about something else. Like some, it's just, you first, by the way. The, the funniest thing about value that I find when people talk about value is you first have to know what value is, like, you can't just assume that value means cost, schedule, and, and, and, you know, quality. Maybe it doesn't mean that. Like, and by the way, interestingly enough, I had a client once. Very high tech client. And I kept saying like, you're going to be done sooner. Isn't that great? And I was in all these meetings and finally I pulled him aside and I said, like, I don't understand. You're not like reacting when I'm like, you're going to be done this much sooner. And he was like, I don't want to be done sooner. He said, I actually just want certainty of the duration of the schedule so I can start later and end at the same time. And for him, he wanted to make technology decisions at the last responsible moment. So he was just interested in the certainty of the duration. And he's like, I want to start later. I don't, I literally want to like wait until the last possible second. And I was like, wow, that makes sense. And I realized I didn't actually understand what value was to him. And I think that's true of all of us. Like, I don't know many people in the ecosystem that actually sit down and talk about value, like what's, and by the way, it can't be everything. It has to be a little bit like, you have to prioritize it. You can't. Look, you just can't have everything. Like I'm a mom that works and I've been a CEO. You can't be a mom and a CEO and be the best mom at every second of the day and the best CEO, you just, you just can't like, so you have to make some choices and you have to delegate some things and you've got to make some trade offs and like, that's just life. So you cannot have everything you want and, and you've got to figure out what's most important. That's the problem I feel like. We're just promising, everyone's promising way too much and quite frankly, they don't need all that. They just want something of value that they, that you understand and that they understand is value.

Jaimie Johnston:

Now, that's what we've talked about this on the podcast before, but yeah, we had exactly the same experience that, um, uh, pharmaceutical clients particularly say, I just want certainty. And yeah, I need to be making a drug on the day I get the approvals. Any sooner my assets sit in there empty, any later I'm losing money or people are dying. So yes, certainty is my highest value. A driver, whereas an airport saying, no, I need people churning through the facility to generate revenue. So yeah, they have very, very different. So if it was a bit more expensive, but I got a load more passengers through the facility quicker. That more than pays for the expensive bits.

Amy Marks:

100%

Jaimie Johnston:

It's all about speed. You're absolutely right. We spend a lot of time up front with clients to say, What does good look like? What are you trying to achieve? Because it will tell me something about what techniques to deploy and, you know, where to do things, whether it's off site, on site, what sort of granularity of components, standardization, all these things kind of fall out of that front end piece. I think construction too quickly gets into solutions mode and starts

Amy Marks:

well, yeah, you get paid the sooner you build something. thinking of

Jaimie Johnston:

the solution and answering the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amy Marks:

That's like when I was a little girl, my Dad's like, Hurry up, move some dirt around so we can get paid. It's like, hang on a minute, like, we might not want to move some dirt around just to look like we need to get paid. Everyone in the construction has that mentality, like, we want to hurry up and get this deal up, hurry up and, it's like, wait a minute, just because I start sooner doesn't mean I'm going to finish sooner, but, so what you said is very interesting to me, because I'm, I'm, you know, I love to think about really crazy stuff, and, um, It's not so much that people don't agree with what you just said. I think they're a normal person in this ecosystem. Here's what you said. It says, yes, we have to design to value. They're going, who's going to say no, right? Like, there's not a person on this planet. They're going to be like, that's a dumb idea. Like no one's going to say that. Right. So like, I think it's the same thing when you talk about prefabrication in a sense, or if you're talking about productization, which we can get into, you know, in a little bit or later, but you know, it's like, it's not that we don't understand that these are smart things to do. It's that the ecosystem is set up to preclude those things from happening. What you just said, it's like, yes, I could determine value is speed, but then every contract I have, every process I have, every decision making point, all this procurement methodologies, they're not based on speed. So like you could say you want speed, but unless you change the contract, the risk management profile, the processes in order to achieve speed, instead of what you do every single day, you're not going to get speed. So that's, Do you see what I'm saying? Like, it's like, I see, I'm like, we tell people they have to be more like manufacturers every single day, and then I feel like construction, you know, folks walk out and they're like, yeah, yeah, we got to be more like manufacturers, they get to the elevator, they turn to one another, and they go, what's a manufacturer? You know, like, they don't really know what I'm even talking about. Like, they don't, we don't, It's like, you know, it's funny. I was just, what was it? I was just in something recently and they were like, Well, we're interviewing all these people from the ecosystem about how manufacturing will change what they're doing. And I'm like, yeah, but you're interviewing guys that don't manufacture about how it will benefit them to be manufacturers. What are they going to know? It's sort of like a diversity and inclusion analogy I always make. I'm like, if you bring a bunch of older white males in a room and ask them how to get more females or people of color into the space, what are they going to say? They don't, they're all homogeneous to one another. And by the way, I'm not picking on anybody. It's just, that's factual in our space. You know, it's like, maybe you should bring somebody who's 23, who's of a diverse population into the room to ask them, how would we get you into the space? You know, like we rarely change the entropy of processes and behaviors around the good idea. That's why it doesn't happen. Not because it's not a good idea. It's just, everything works against it. In. In every other part of the, you know, the process that we have and and especially because like we have Again, like I keep saying ecosystem because we're not an industry. And that's the mistake that people think that we can chip away at the bottom of this somehow, like the innovators dilemma, and that's not going to work because we're not one industry. We're like an ecosystem of seven or eight industries that have very disparate value propositions, and they don't actually match up. So like, even though you could agree with one group that value means this, it doesn't mean that the next group that you hand it off to across that silo, uh, is going to operate the same way. And so that's honestly why I came to Autodesk, because I felt like, you know, that was Jim Lynch's point to me. You can't make change from the bottom up of one little portion of the, of the, of the ecosystem. You've got to have top down influence, you know, over, and that's why serial owners like, you know, the, the schools program you guys are doing over there for I think 3 billion, you know, dollars worth of schools. I'm not saying the right currency, sorry there. Um, that's important because if you don't have owners that are demanding this, no one changes their process. Now, after they demand it, they have to be involved in de risking things by allowing people to change the process, because you can't just dictate something and then have the same old stuff, you know, after it, that's not going to let you do it. That's the problem, right?

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, that, that exactly reflects our experience over here, um, that either people say, I want innovation, But it needs to be tried and tested with no extra risk or, uh, they want to procure a sort of a sophisticated way of delivering but through an existing framework, an existing set of contracts, an existing set of, um, contractual terms. So, yeah, again, we've spoken about this before, that none of the blockers, uh, really that we face at the moment are technical. No one doubts that you can deliver an asset using some of these technologies, but it's the, it's the, you know, framework of procurement methodology and contract and IP and warranties and insurances, all those other things that need to change. But you made an interesting point about serial clients. Again, that sort of chimes with us, that it's, it's when clients step into this space and demand a better outcome, that's when it happens. It's clients that seem to have to drive this because Tracts and designers don't necessarily do this stuff of their own volition. It needs to come from a client that's demanding some of these outcomes.

Amy Marks:

Believe me, funny enough, I'm actually speaking at a group called CURT this, I think it's this week or next week. I know CURT. Yeah, yeah. I've

Jaimie Johnston:

spoken at CURT before, yeah.

Amy Marks:

And I'm talking about the playbook. You know, I, a long time ago, I was like, listen, you need a playbook. You're like the owner of these buildings. You have to take a more active role. And, and what I'm finding now with, I call them serial owners for a long time. And it's funny, Andrew Anagnost asked me like, what does that mean? Serial owner? And I said, well, I've thought about it like from the beginning as like serial killers. And he was like, Oh my God, do I want to know the rest of this? And I was like, I was like, yes, I'm like, no, no. But you know, they sort of, they need operational consistency over usually large geos, right? So they want to have a fingerprint like on their building so that it looks the same, it operates the same, because like you said, they're just looking to move that many people or they want to make that product at that consistency level in reality, and they're not builders, right? And the problem is They actually understand manufacturing techniques, but they've hired a bunch of builders and designers from the ecosystem that don't do things differently. And then now they just, I always say they have a business card with that logo on it. Doesn't make them any, you know, different than what they were when they worked in the space. So it's like, you know, you need these owners to, What I'm finding now is that they love industrialized construction. They want to understand certainty. So they're starting to dictate and decouple the process of construction and productizing it. They basically want to take, I mean, it's funny. I always use my red shoe as the example. People always ask me about my red shoe now behind me, because I talk about the fact that it's a product and I bought it on a connected ecosystem, you know, and a platform that enables me to have a real time connection with that manufacturer of my shoe. You know, that's really why I came to Autodesk because we need to connect makers and designers so that you, you know, and not just by some, you know, selected distinct group of products that we decided would be, you know, what we chose, but that the algorithms and the machine learning that understands, like you said, look across everything we've built and look to the consistencies of them. You can do that, but you, if you're doing it by hand, like those 799 bathrooms, we did by hand to make them down to 7. I didn't take an algorithm, push a button and say, give me all the consistency and make a pattern of what the actual bathroom should, I probably would have got down to two or one, you know, like we had to do that by hand. The only way you're going to get to consistency is by decoupling some of this process, which is done differently every single time. And it's funny, like we actually have great examples of certainty and understanding in product in construction. But for some reason, we don't, we don't, um, think it could be us. So like, I, I often, as I said, I use my shoe, but then I always exchange the example for like a generator, right? So if you think about generators, they're built on certain horsepower capacities. We already know the size and shape and everything in them and the way in which they act as an asset for us. Because it's been productized, right? It's a product. And interestingly enough, Jaimie, you're a great architect, but you're not going to tell Cummins or Kohler to make a, you know, instead of a 200 and a 250 horsepower, you're not going to be like, you know what I decided on this job, you're going to make me a 217 and a half. You know, like nobody does. And that's not your measurement. That was Imperial, but like, no one's, no one's going to do that. I guess horsepower is not necessarily Imperial, actually, if I think about it. So there you go. So, um, you're making me do math in the morning, but you know, like.

Jaimie Johnston:

I didn't make you.

Amy Marks:

Like, but no one's gonna, you're not gonna decide that some manufactured product should be manufactured to some other capacity, right? You would never do that, right? But the problem is we're only talking at the baby steps of prefabrication or really fabrication at this point. We're not enabling. Productization, right? So there's a difference. And I think we, we have to quickly almost leapfrog over fabrication to productization. We've got guys, by the way, like you and I just said, people have been fabricating for 20, 30, a hundred years, right? We know if you, the problem is everyone wants to get further left in the value proposition. They're like, if, you know, if you got me up front in the process, I could. Make sure that we didn't make these stupid design mistakes and I would make you the best fabricated element there was. And I go, great, you're at the front of the process now. What do you say? How do I do this? And they are, it's like a blank stare. You know, they don't quite necessarily say, okay, here's my scalable product of, of, you know, distribution racks or of elevator lifts or these things. Like you use these products for these things. Here's the scale, scalable capacity. You know, if you look at something like a generator, I can get lots of information around every single product that they make, what the capacities are, how big they are, um, they're all, you know, done in Revit. I can drop those families and some of them are done in computational design, so I can even use generative design to look at the iterations of those with adjacencies. But we have to almost quickly get over fabrication and get to productization. Because think about it, like, what DfMA principles, Jaimie, do you know about generators? You don't really need to know too many because they're productized. Right? The problem with DfMA is that you have to not only understand the um, element that you're figuring out the rules for, but then you need to know the proprietary rules for that element, and you multiply those exponentially. It's too many, as you and I talked about it au so, but if you're productized. That's the product you're designing around and, and architects I think are finally coming to understand, and this is a great thing, that they can design around products to free themselves up, to empower themselves to be, you know, the true architects of the parameters of the combination of those elements and then spend their time on the things that really why they became architects, like on the things that now don't necessarily want to be productized. You know, it's funny. It's funny. I was thinking about this the other day and I use this as an example. Think about stereo equipment. I'm trying to think of something artsy besides my fashion because most, you know, there's not a lot of women in this. I ask men in the ecosystem, like, do you know what couture is versus like shopping at, you know, the Gap or H&M and they don't really know what couture means. So it's hard to like, it's hard to make that example of couture. Not, I'm not being gender biased, but most guys don't know what like, you know, couture means. But, um, especially in our space, but I, I said it this way differently to somebody the other day. I said, listen, it's like stereo equipment. Every man I know likes stereo equipment. I was like, let me try to come up with something besides sports that everybody knows. I'm like, I could go online and buy Sonos today, right? Like I could go and buy a productized, You know, system for my house on Sonos and I pick out the rooms, whatever, and they'll, they'll send me the product. Or I could go a mile up the street in my town where there's a very high end audio consultancy. And I could say, listen, in my house, I want the art of sound. It's got to be different than when I hear sound on Sonos. It's got to be different than when I hear sound at somebody else's house or in a car. I want it to be like, almost I'm in a concert and they go, great. We can design a custom system for your home that is going to make the art of sound. Now that doesn't mean that they're going to manufacture speakers, every single piece and part of the component. No! They're going to go to products and the combination of products, right, for the probably the majority of what they're going to put in my house. And possibly they want to like come up with One or two very custom things that they spent their time that gives them the cachet of being one of the best audio consultants on the planet, right? But most of what they're going to put in my house was manufactured by some manufacturer, right? That's how I want architects to think of their life, you know, especially if they're worried about productization. It's like, do you want to spend the time building speakers or as I say, equivalent fire stairs, or do you want to figure out the best possible building combination of those things I could give you in the software that are going to pick out the right combination of equipment, quote unquote, which used to be called process, and now you get to spend your time on the stairwell that's amazing, or the portico, or the way in which you combine those, or the, the, like, We should be thinking about end user experience and, you know, what it makes them feel in these spaces. But instead, you're worried about drawing fire stairs. What do you want to spend your time doing, Mr. and Mrs. Architect? That's what productization and certainty is going to allow for. And I think if you really thought about it, the people that are most artistic have the most to gain.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, so that is a really good example, actually. I was gonna ask the question, but it neatly ties together. I mean, you were talking about there's the people that write the standards don't necessarily understand the implications. Clients want the value, but don't know how to do it.

Amy Marks:

Right.

Jaimie Johnston:

Product producers of, you know, product know how to make those bits. It's the, it should be the designers that are stitching all those bits together, understanding those standards, understanding what's available, and that's a massive. It's a very interesting role, but yeah, I think we, yeah, we, we often get designers, yeah, the old cookie cutter buildings gets trotted out as a reason not to do DfMA, there's so much to get on with, there's so much to build, there's so much opportunity in this space that designers should be seeing this as a phenomenal space to step into and an exciting place, but it doesn't feel like that's necessarily kind of landing with the design community at the moment. There seems to be more fear than excitement about this.

Amy Marks:

It's so funny. Like, honestly, I was, this is a true story, Jaimie. I was for that. For that DfMA at Autodesk University talk we did, I made that, I don't know if you remember, I made a slide about the new possible and what your role looks like as a new possible and talking about how everybody makes products now, because it's not just fabricators, like owners are opening up big factories, as you know, big developers are opening up big factories, one here in the U. S. that I know of. That's over a million square feet. You know, you've got architects now opening up factories like Canon, my friends at Canon Design and other people at like, you know, lots of places are starting to just fabricate as well as everyone makes products, right? So I was like, okay, that's easy. Everyone becomes a product size. Everyone makes products. And then I was like, okay, there are some people that become systems integrators. Probably the most likely candidates are going to be the super subs that do more than one, um, element, you know, multi trade elements, but also the general contractors, the builders. And then, yeah, some architects will step into systems integration, but that was like, okay, but not so many. And then like the owners, you know, become the influencers, the true ecosystem influencers. And I got to the architect and engineer and mostly the architect. And I was like, what do I call, like, what is the new role of the architect? And I swear to you, Jaimie, the only word I could come up with was, They truly become the architect. Like I was like, that's like, like, I'm not even kidding. I was, I was completely dumbfounded by the fact that the only word I could think about was they now truly become empowered architects when you actually put real things in their hands, right? The, the issue is now is that we're letting people design with things that aren't real. And we're letting them make them less real by stretching them or only looking at geometric shapes, right? Like you actually need discrete data. You need the connection with the maker as the architect in order to set the right parameter. You need generative design. You need multi dimensional CAD like Revit. You need those things in order to make the right decisions. But you, I was like, I was like, maybe I should say empowered architect just so they feel better. But honestly, the only word I could come up with was architect. Is that like hilarious? That like, in the world of the new possible, the only word I could come up with was architect. The true definition of why you became an architect and that's what you get to do every day. Who doesn't want to do that? Of all the groups, you have the most, like, you have value paired with your current skill set and, and love and desire and passion. Like for me, I was like, oh my God, what a great time to be an architect. You know, if you've got industrialized construction, I was super pumped up for the architects when that kind of hit me, you know.

Jaimie Johnston:

We had a similar, um, in the office, a sort of similar discussion a few years ago about the, um, we were, yeah, it was very clear that what we were doing was not what a lot of other architects were doing. We're going, are we architects still? Are we, are we, but we, we were looking at the, if you look at the dictionary definition of architect, or we like, you know, uh, someone mentioned the phrase architect of the peace process or software architect and you go, that word gets used in other contexts.

Amy Marks:

Right.

Jaimie Johnston:

And means something quite different. But yeah, maybe what we're trying to do is reclaim that role of the architect. And it's exactly what we're trying to do and say, actually, yeah, all of these things aren't just new tools, new things that you have at your disposal that help you do a better design, better outcome, achieve better things for clients. So you should be excited about this kind of new things that are available at your disposal.

Amy Marks:

It's more than just having them at your disposal. Right. So like. You actually, and this is the architect part, you have them there. They're in the data form that allows you to apply machine learning and AI to them. And then you, not that they're just available, you set the parameters, you set the combination of those things so that you get, you know, what you want from the performance and the requirements of that, but you are the architect, right? Nobody, but you becomes the architect. Then when you can utilize technology and productization to become the The true architect. And then you can spend your time on the parts that are most custom that you, that only you, as Jaimie Johnston can do, and nobody else can do. And I think that's the part they don't understand that productization really enables them to do aligned with technology and, and honestly, technology, and I don't mean this because I work at Autodesk. And they, you know, I know. It's a, it's a, the word, especially in Europe, a platform becomes a really, again, words matter, right? But what I'm talking about is you have a, you have a place like Autodesk, which has portfolio of products that are sort of anchor foundational products. You have to know in order to, to reap the benefits of what's going to happen on this planet. You have to know how to use multi dimensional CAD. You need connected construction. You have to have digitization. It's almost like when you go to a carnival, you have to be this tall to ride the ride. You know what I mean? Everybody right now, if you're an architect or a builder, you should be working on your foundational skills with the baseline anchor portfolio products so that as the, and this is the thing with, with, with industrialized construction, you know, Phil Bernstein used to talk about Spin, and the answer was Revit, eventually. The answer for IC is not one hero product. There's no one ring to rule them all. It's the connective tissue, and the technology to connect those anchor portfolio products with each other, and other products in the Autodesk platform, which are, uh, Partner products, competitor products, anything that's going to fill in some of those connective tissue of the interstitial spaces to get from design, you know, conceptualization, design to make, to operate, plant and all that. Right. So I think even digital twin, you know, when you're talking about digital twin, you know, you're thinking about it's much easier to digitize the supply chain and the assets that are going to be. Um, up for grabs if you do it correctly the first time and the only way you can do it correctly the first time with certainty is not through process. Like everything we do differently, means and methods, that's got to go away or else we're going to be in the same problem we have been in sometimes with BIM that, you know, you make a big, beautiful model, but it doesn't necessarily, and they pay for it, but it doesn't necessarily represent what's going to be built. Until you productize and you have certainty around that, then no technology in the world is going to make this better for anybody. You know. Somebody was, I know I'm talking for a long time and it's supposed to be a conversation. I agree. I know, Jaimie, but I get super passionate about this because it's like,

Jaimie Johnston:

keep going, keep going.

Amy Marks:

Everybody always uses like, well, it's like a Nike shoe example. And you know, we're at Nike, you know, they're going to do this like bespoke Nike, right? Like, and now you get to, why can't I order a building like they do on Nike? When I go on, I can get any shoe I want. That's mass customization. We've got to move towards that. And I'm like, wait a minute. You basically just, you know, taking. Like the equivalent of like crawling out of the Primordial Ouse and giving us like a spaceship example, you know, it's like, yes, could we get there a hundred percent? Are we getting there first, the first step? No. So I explained to people like that Nike shoe example, those combination of products that are in the generative design software there, and that they actually understand the design for manufacturing and assembly techniques of every, the laces, of the soles, of the colors, of the fabrics. Like you're not putting a combination together that can't be made. You're literally putting together a product that can be made of other products. They understand the parameters and imagine this for buildings, right? So when you kind of talk about it like that, the problem is we've not defined the laces or the soles or the fabrics, or, you know, we haven't done that. And, and again, like what you're doing at Bryden Wood, like, and you and I have had this conversation, Nike's doing it for their products. Like, you're doing it for your platform. You're not doing it for the world and every product that's out there. And that's really what Autodesk, like, I feel it's my responsibility to enable. Take your example, like a Nike shoe example, is what you're sort of almost the equivalent of the Nike shoe example at the moment. You've picked proprietary products, you, a standard system that maybe even a couple people can do because you've aligned on what people can provide, but certainly not for the entirety of the supply chain of the world, you know? And so like, you know, You know what I mean? And I say that with love in my heart. Thank God you're doing that because but for that, you know, people can't see a great proof point of what's even possible.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, it is, it's, you remember back in the early days of BIM, everyone had that slide that showed the kind of the digital threads going all the way around and you go, it was, it's never been like that. So we never get operational data in a particularly sensible format. You know, the statutory approvals process isn't digital. There's all these breaks in the digital chain. And you go, actually, let's get the hang of that. And one of the things that will enable that is that kind of productisation. But again, it's everything we've talked about. Uh, this wasn't planned, but we're not really talking about anything to do with DfMA and the kind of, you know, the systems, all of this has been around value and design and process. And it's all of the kind of, uh, foundational things, as you say, that need to happen and go, let's not even talk about, you know, whether it's a panelised or volumetric or platform system, you're miles away from that. If we don't get Yeah, all of these other ecosystem things in place to support it doesn't matter because you'll never get the benefits. That's quite interesting that,

Amy Marks:

yeah, by the way, I'm not saying the product makes the connective tissue happen. Just so we're clear on the platform. I'm saying to understand what connective tissue is missing and what you can do to fill it in the gaps. It's a lot easier to do when you think about it. pieces and parts as products, because then at least you have something that's not always fluid. Like, you can't put your hand on water and put some, you know, like, everything can't be water. You've got to come up with a raft in the middle of the ocean. And like, the product to me is the raft in the middle of the ocean. It's something you can actually track. through and map and understand the workflows of that generator, of that panel, of that bathroom pod, of that whatever product, right? And truly, if it's a product, not if it's like, well, I can fab it, I don't know. It's like, no, no, you have to define the product. It needs to be understood the workflows, its performance, its sustainability, you know, aspect, everything about that product has to be defined. It truly has to be productized. And you and I'll talk about that another day. Like what do you do to productize? Cause that's a whole other list of like requirements than DfMA. And I think, you know, It's not that that solves everything, it just gives me a starting point to be able to track things, to understand where there are gaps, where the connective tissue breaks down, what people are doing manually, like all those things, and unless you have that, it's too hard to fix something without that. Something being certain without having some certainty. You know, it's funny, I go back to, you know, I love to tell stories because I've built stuff. Like I always say, like, I'm not talking about this as if I've never built anything. Like I've built some really complicated stuff in lots of places all around this world. And I'll never forget one of my first jobs I did bathroom pods on. I've been doing this for a couple of decades just to age myself. I, my very first bathroom pod job, Jaimie, I get on the job and they had just done bathroom pods at this hospital. I was super excited. I was super excited to talk to the superintendent because, you know, I love the guys that work with tools. They're the only guys and gals that mean anything in terms of value, getting stuff done for us. And I said, what was the best thing about Bathroom Pods? I'm like recording this. I'm thinking I'm going to hear all about like reduced punch lists and like all these good things. And you know what he said to me and it stuck with me forever. He said, the best thing about Bathroom Pods were I got seven a day. And I said, what? I don't understand. And he was like, it was the only thing I could count on in this job, period. I knew I was getting seven a day. I knew exactly what they were. I could schedule my work around all those seven pods coming every single day. So there was like, and I called it chaos, like order to chaos, or sorry, chaos to order theory. This is a long time ago. I called it order, uh, chaos to order theory. Why? You put this thing that had order in the middle of chaos, like that raft in the middle of the ocean, and all of a sudden fish start coming around. It's like everything organized itself. Imagine if you put a reef, a man made reef in the middle of an ocean, right? It's like, now ecosystems build themselves around that reef and like all those things. That's a great slide, Jaimie. We should come up with that. That's what productization, honestly, that's what productization is. That's why I come on this podcast I know we're going to come up with some great ideas. But like, if you put that man made reef in the middle of the ocean, the ecosystems build around it. That's what productization is. You're able to see something consistent in order to, that was the seven pods a day for that guy. He could schedule all his other work around it. He knew what was going to happen. It's flow, right? You're adding like a takt time, some manufacturing takt time to a construction site that doesn't necessarily have that. And that's what we don't have. That's even what DfMA is not going to, all that is not going to give us unless we truly, truly productize. And I think we have to, we have to get to that level of understanding. And that'll leapfrog some things, right? Like, it'll allow us to skip over some steps and get to the place that we talk about with every other ecosystem and industry out there that we want to be at, right? And, but for that, I don't see how we survive, to be honest. Other than that, we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as they say, you know?

Jaimie Johnston:

It's interesting. So, I've got a, my bathroom pod, uh, wasn't our job, actually. This was fairly on in my career as well. I watched a job where they had bathroom pods, And they were the kind of millimeter perfect beautiful things.

Amy Marks:

Right.

Jaimie Johnston:

Uh, but because no one had bothered to kind of coordinate the manufactured bits with the normal stuff.

Amy Marks:

Yeah.

Jaimie Johnston:

Turned up and they got sat out in the rain, uh, you know, tiles fell off. But then when they put them into the building, because they had, you know, they were kind of millimeter accuracy, but it was on a kind of additional flat slab.

Amy Marks:

Yeah.

Jaimie Johnston:

They spent more time fixing the gaps between the manufacturing bit, the traditional bit, and inside every pod it was identical outside whether the connection between the, the, the pod and the utilities, they made it up differently every single time.

Amy Marks:

Yeah.

Jaimie Johnston:

And again, again, that was a classic that people hadn't understood that you can't just send it out the factory and go anyway, pods are done. Goodbye.

Amy Marks:

That's the assembly.

Jaimie Johnston:

There's a life of when it lands and you have to plan it in. And if you don't, uh, yeah. Work out how to drop that, you know, the. Manufacture bit into the chaos of the building site, you'll instantly lose all the value. And again, that was an educational thing. I thought, well, I'm doing pods, must be better. And again, not by itself. There's some knockoffs, but again, it's, you know, these things ripple out from the, from the center, don't they?

Amy Marks:

Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I think of things, that's the same job for me. Like, If you think about B2 Atlantic Yards, like those mods were great. It's just, they decided to put them outside at a certain point and put them on horses as opposed to, and then when they brought them into the factory, they didn't reset the shapes of the frames. So they were just waiting before they put the finishes on. And you can hear Arup, my friend, David Farnsworth talks about it. He's like, the mods are perfect when they're fabricated. They set them outside on. Not perfect, um, structure. And then they put them in the factory and did like, they, you know, we had Hilti in there doing like laser scanning, but you had to reset them when they brought them back in because they had been sitting outside for so long waiting that then unless you did that, you know, everything's not square and plum anymore, but that's an easy fix. So instead of going like, Oh, we learned from that. We should keep doing buildings like this. People go, it doesn't work. See, I told you.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Amy Marks:

wait a minute, is the bathroom wrong? Or is the fact that your whole concrete in the example Jaimie just gave wrong? Like, why is the bathroom pod wrong? Cause that's the accuracy, but the site build, shouldn't we be like, how do we bring the site build portion up to the same accuracy of the module? I remember Victoria Hall, like when you guys out in the UK, like, That was, I think, 23 stories of volumetric mods at the time. It was the tallest modular building. And I think guys will tell you, they did a lot of chopping of concrete, like at that, because the module tolerance versus the, the sheer wall, like, you know, the, the core structure, you know, that was, and by the way, I remember that conversation because that's, after that we did B2 and we didn't want to pour, Um, and then attach mods. That's why we did structural steel frames, because at least the steel frame tolerance to the steel frame module, you know, because again, but why are we fixing the part that's not broken? Like we're, we should go and fix the part that's broken or not to tolerance. Because it's possible to achieve tolerances. It's just every process we have is not set up for every contract, every scope, every specification is not set up for that to have an accurate tolerance. Right. So it's like. It's kind of what we went back to before. It's like, you could say you want these things, but unless the, you know, the supporting processes around it support it, it will be nearly impossible. And I think, and look, it would be one thing if we were super successful in our ecosystem when we were like burying at all speeds and like everything was amazing and we're We're totally doing, we're cutting costs and we're don't, we were meeting all our demands. We're not. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you can kind of then say, maybe we don't need to do this. We do. Because not everything, nothing is coming out almost in the way in which we intended it to in the space. So, especially with cost uncertainty and schedule. So it's like, You know, you can't have the same behavior and think you're going to have some dramatically different result that's going to be great all of a sudden. Like everyone says that thing, but it's the doing the work behind it that, okay, what does dramatically different mean? Well, that means new procurement. That means new contracts. That means productization. That means different roles. That means acting differently and not using the same processes and process entropy that we have that gives you tolerances that don't work. You know like that's, that's the, it's a hard, it's like tough love. This is where I think the mom part comes in maybe? I'm not sure if it's the mom or the rugby player part in me, it's like listen. And by the way, you know, in this space, like men love hearing when a woman tells them they're doing something they could be doing better. So it's, it's been an uphill, but that's why I tell the guys I'm a rugby player. Cause I'm like, listen, we can step, we can step outside and talk about those, or I could just talk about it in here. But you know, it's, uh, I'm just teasing, but the, um, you know, it's tough. It's, it's, this is not easy. And honestly, that's, that's the other reason I decided to give up my own practice and come to Autodesk because. The resources available to customers at Autodesk now, and by the way, most people don't know this, my manufacturing, my um, consulting practice that I had in the past, which worked with governments and big end users, now lives at Autodesk. And interestingly enough, it doesn't necessarily live through the AEC consulting group as the, the primary group that does the consulting. Actually, the primary group that I work with is the manufacturing consulting group and with a sprinkling of AEC guys, but the majority of the consultants that are working with our customers and myself on the industrialized construction offering are manufacturing consultants. And for every reason that we just talked about before is that this is different. You have to think of things like systems architecture and you have to understand, you know, things like flow and flow. You know, just, these are guys that live, breathe, eat, and sleep and drink manufacturing that understand how to apply them to these spaces. It's like, right now in the construction business, you have lots of these contractors opening up fab shops. And they're not going to manufacturing consultants to figure out how to set up a fab shop. It's like, wait, why? Why wouldn't you do that? Like, you do realize these are manufacturing consultants that set up things like BMW or, you know, car manufacturers or other things where at least, listen, I'm not saying we're all making cars because I know everybody hates that example, but like, they certainly, I have a friend that builds machinery. He works with us as a partner at Autodesk and he's like, I'm going to show them these cool machines and I'm like, no, just show them the ones that are 20 years old that do exactly what we, like, don't show them anything new. And quite frankly, they're more than impressed with the things that have been around for 20 years that they look just like tiling or look just like welding or whatever, you know, like we've got to, we've got to really understand how to baby step this with people. But, you know, you've got to get the right people in the room. It's like. That's a big part of this.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yes, on that, um, automotives. So I'm working with the Manufacturing Technology Centre, who tend to work with aerospace and sort of, uh, you know, automotive. But they said, look, automotive, it's been on this journey for a long, long time.

Amy Marks:

Right.

Jaimie Johnston:

And it didn't get to six axis robots any time, it took a hundred years or so. It was a long way before they got there and they did some very simple automation. So yeah. There are some steps you've got to go through. Don't try and leap to the end state. There's some basic, again, it comes back to this sort of simplify the process, understand, get the foundations right before you can start to apply these other things. Don't just look at automotive and go, yeah, we should be like that. Because you shouldn't be that quite a, quite a long way to go. So, yeah, I think, I think we were in the, in the same space.

Amy Marks:

I'm kind of tired of hearing about the same old stuff. Like, I can tell you that the same thinking and the same tech, talks that we're doing in the technology, like every, it has to change. You know, the coolest thing, if there is anything that could be learned from COVID is, for me, Like, I could tell you that there's a lot of innovation that happened, like, right away, and that have been, has been going on on the job sites, as well as with design, and the way in which, you know, listen, luckily, two years ago, but even before I got here, Autodesk invested in the cloud products, right? So, it's like, thank goodness, you know, because we can't go on job sites, and connective, you know, construction, and the fact that we need to connect things like BIM 360 to design, and stuff like that, that's just really important. And I don't mean that in any other way, other than to say that, In the last like eight months, new technology hasn't really been invented that, you know, all of a sudden all these cool things are happening with COVID. It's like, no, we just changed our behavior to get, you know, to utilize the technology to a little bit more of the, it's a, you know, fullest extent, not even to its fullest extent, but just using it differently with different behavior. Like I have a friend who owns a big mechanical contracting firm and he was like, we need to go to DocuSign and like, you know, paperless. For three years, he couldn't do it. And they were giving him every reason in the world why this is a true story. He's like big mechanical contractor. He's like, you just can't do it. Can't be done. Can't be done for three years. He's like, you know, riffing about the fact that he can't go there. Three days after COVID, they're on DocuSign and paperless. And it's like, I'm sorry, in the last three days, no new technology has been invented in like paper, like to go digital. And again, it's just everything. The funny thing about what we're doing, like what you just said, like, yeah, there are six access robots like right now, but. Like, we're not ready for that necessarily, not all of us, and like, quite frankly, You know, there's a lot we can learn of existing technology that currently, like you can do everything we just talked about with the current technology that we have, you know, in the, on the planet, with the foundational tools, you can do all that, right? It's just, you have to change your behavior. And, and I'm going to literally talk to the serial owners and the CEOs of all the big, you know, design firms and construction companies. You better not put this in the hands of someone who's a project manager that you told them, like, if you get done on time, on budget and on schedule, you get a bonus. And then tell him he should transformationally change your business at the same time. Like that's ridiculous, right? Like I, I literally get on the phone with people that aren't necessarily the, the leadership or the decision makers. And I'm like, go get your leaders. Let me go talk to them because you're not going to, you can only do so much before you're worried you're going to get fired, you know what I mean? And this is the long game we're playing here. This is not for a project. This is product, product. And I don't mean software product. I mean, product led thinking. This is like, you know, programmatic for the longterm of the health of your business, strategic initiatives. And that's the other thing that consulting, you know, group here does. We're not just talking about technology. Actually the coolest part about me coming over with the consulting group is that there's business consulting being done and systems architecture being done. There's implementation of our products, other people's products. You know, I think they truly understand that. You know, you need an ecosystem of products, ours and other people's, in order to make this possible. But you first need leadership to give you permission to learn a direction, a strategy, the reasons you're doing this, and that rarely, if ever, lives. in one project. We have to stop this nonsense that we're going to somehow change the world with one project. It's like, that's, you know, and then the players change and go to different projects and somehow they're going to repeat that. No, it's just never going to, you can't, some of these are like, and by the way, when you say them, Jaimie, don't they seem logical when I say them? I'm like, we get this, but then we, we somehow then go back to the same process entropy we do to bid and get work and win work. And it's like somebody who doesn't care about their day job for a minute. CEOs, listen up. You know, presidents, directors, managers, listen up. Somebody who's like, you know, you've got to think about the long game and whether or not you're going to exist on this planet. You know, you saw McKinsey's report and stuff.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amy Marks:

You know, if you think, think about that. You know what I, oh, I love this because you're an architect. I told somebody the other day, I'm like, okay, so 50 percent of what we're doing moves to industrialized construction processes, right? And you know for a fact that there's money up for grabs as well on top of the current ecosystem like, what is it, 14 trillion dollars they were saying. There's additional monies that get, you know, that are up for grabs. If you get good at this you can actually increase your value. They were saying like software needs to go from, you know, x percent of your spend to actually double. They doubled the technology spend you have to spend in order, like that's where some of it shifted to because you've got to get the tech. Right. But if you think about it, if 50 per is 45%, actually they're saying 45% moves to industrialized construction. You're on a billion dollar hospital, Jamie, or I don't care, a billion dollar school. If 50% of that moves to toward industrialized construction, do you not need to know the other 50% of the building, how that's going to interact with that? You just said it, bathroom, pods and concrete like fine, the concrete's now in situ. Do you not need to understand how that needs to accept the 45% of industrialized? It's like it's all industrialized construction at that point, right?'cause you're talking about. Interstitial spaces, adjacencies, like attachments, components to other, you know, like, basically when you say a transformational shift, which we know you and I have already happened, it's not projected, it's already been going this way, you need to know it for everything, right? So it's like, this whole like, what's the market really bring? It's this, that's what it is, that's all, there's no research that needs to be done, it's already happening, we see it everywhere, like, and if you have one piece, you better recognize it for the whole building, because you can't necessarily, like we said, It doesn't segregate itself unless you're going to be like that part is the prefab side and this part is the connect. It doesn't go that way. Nothing really works out,

Jaimie Johnston:

you know. So it's interesting because, um, yeah, the problem, the problem you outlined in terms of construction, it hasn't been delivering for decades. Productivity has been poor for decades. None of the technology is new. Why do you think this is happening now? Because you, you've picked up the same thing. I mean, you travel around the world. You've seen this as a sort of global shift that's happening. Why do you think, I mean, COVID's why do you think that, that, that suddenly this time we might actually make this transformational shift we've talked about for decades? I know Autodesk have been playing in this space for a long time, but it was relatively recently that you suddenly sort of formed that industrialized construction group, brought a group of different bits of the business together. I mean, that was a, a sort of, Business strategy, because obviously you saw something happening that Autodesk wanted to capitalize on. Why do you think that is and why do you think it might stick this time as opposed to us talking about it in 10 years and going, yeah, this time, industrialized construction, we're ready.

Amy Marks:

We're ready now. Like again, I think we don't really have a choice. That's the part I think it's finally come to, right? So, and I think COVID accelerates that because you recognize like, wow, you really might not have a choice. Like you, you know, you can't go on site or things happen or, and this won't be the last event that actually teaches us that obviously, right? There's been other things that have taught us that in the past. I just think, you know, there's such, there's a book called, 'It Starts with One' that I just love, right? And it talks about. You know, what used to be the new, what used to be the right thing. Like it's hard to look, I talk and teach with customers that are like, I don't know, 9 billion Euro companies. Right. And, uh, they're like, you were never a 9 billion Euro company as your consultancy. Like, why should I listen to you? And I was like, well, okay, let's read this book. Everything starts in success. You're not going to do things unless you were successful at them. You're certainly not going to get to nine or 10 or 12 billion Euros if you weren't successful at something. But the problem is now, technology has changed, the environment has changed, the workforce has changed, the designs are more complex. Like, there's a lot of things closing in on the space that's creating a lot of dissatisfaction, right? And the people that have the money are most dissatisfied. The big end users, the big governments, you know, think about sustainability. All the restarts are saying three things from COVID. They want digitization, they want industrialized construction, and they want, you know, sustainability mostly in the form of understanding carbon, right? Those three things, if you look around the world, and I think about productization, right? So if you think about 40 percent of construction waste ends up in the landfills, I think is the number. That's a big number. And why is that number there? Because we're cutting things after the fact, we're changing things, we're, we're not, we're not manufacturing things, like, and think about all the ancillary benefits of like, creating a factory, you get workforce in there of different ages and populations, you can target different diverse populations to like, you get economic sustainability for that factory around the world, you get social sustainability, you will end up having industry sustainability, because we can't, everyone's, you know, we always talk about the workforce is like, you know, aging out, you'll get Industry sustainability, and then, yes, you'll also get environmental sustainability. The fact that we don't really have a choice anymore, and that there's so much dissatisfaction, and there's a lot of light being brought to the fact that, you know, we only have so many resources on this planet, whether it's people, or, you know, um, things and materials, and that we can't all live on this planet unless we get better at this, that's what's actually changing this. I think they're finally, people are making that connection. Um, and we're becoming more of a global economy as well. So they're seeing examples, but I think the biggest example that's going to, that's going to be made is, you know, the companies that have been doing business for a long time have been changing their behavior. Now I'm telling you, Jaimie, it's not going to come from like quirky little companies that have been doing prefab for 50 years. That's, those are good examples. And we see cool things. It's when the masses of the big players change their behavior. And by the way, as excited as I am for architects, I'm excited for some of those guys too. Because like, listen, this is a true story. Almost 20 years ago, one of the biggest contractors in the world, I told him, I was talking to their C suite and I said, you can, I can show you a way that you can do more with less people on the job site and make these jobs shorter. This is a true story, Jaimie. And the CEO staff said back to me, Why would we want to do that? Like, that's where we make all our money. This is a true story. You know this company. It's a big company. Now, that's unacceptable, right? That behavior, that thought process, that's become somewhat unacceptable to the owners that want more transparency, that want certainty around the data, right? So, I think the big difference is that everything's changing. But at the, maybe at the heart of this, it's probably that data is the new oil. You know, the new currency, like you can't get data around things like in that ocean, like we said, unless there's a, uh, a man made, you know, um, wreath that gives you some information other than that, it's just water. So it's very hard to get certainty around. process that changes every single time. Funny, I talked to a guy that was the head of VD& C for one of those big companies. He was showing me a two billion dollar hospital and all the cool VD& C they did and it was like amazing and they're tracking all these things and they've got it in multi dimensional cat, all the general, all this cool stuff and I actually said at the end of the presentation, how much of this can you use for the next project? And what do you think his answer was, Jaimie?

Jaimie Johnston:

None of it.

Amy Marks:

None of it. So, I'm like, what, what owner paid for that, that now can't use it the next hospital they build? Why would that be acceptable to anybody? And you know, the only reason it wasn't acceptable, in this case, is it wasn't productized, right? They don't know they're going to build those walls again the same way the next time, they don't know they're going to build those floors the same way, they don't know. And I was like, you know, there are products, there's like eight products I could name off the top of my head you could productize in hospitals right now, that you could then track and define that product, manage it, optimize it as the, you know, maturity matrix goes. None of it. Can you imagine spending all that money and having, if you're the owner of that hospital chain, and again, that's why serial owners are important because they have other hospitals they're building, they want to learn something, they want to operate the same. They have nothing to learn from that in the sense of like being able to reuse it. Who's going to stand for that as an owner? Who, what, what, what government is going to be like, what did I learn from that 3 billion schools effort? And you're going to say nothing. I can't reuse it for the next hospital job I did, or the next time we need more schools, what owner in their right mind is going to spend money and not get any data, consistency of any data to learn from, reuse and evolve to be more operationally efficient. How could that be acceptable?

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, it's interesting. So yeah, certainly I'd agree. Data is the enabler, but yeah, I love that. It's dissatisfaction. We get the same thing. It's, it's serial customers that are dissatisfied with,

Amy Marks:

Yeah.

Jaimie Johnston:

Either the quality they're getting or the value they're getting, it's that dissatisfaction and yeah, the biggest value drivers of all is climate change, carbon, it's, as you said, I think there's a dawning recognition that we don't have a choice. People are dissatisfied and suddenly you've got, you know, the data that allows you to start to do these things. So yeah, maybe I think you're right. It's that culmination of things coming together that's Suddenly is a different set of context to whatever we've had previously, which, yeah, I don't agree. I think that's why it might stick this time or, well, if it doesn't stick this time, then we've got enormous, enormous problems.

Amy Marks:

Well, I, again, I think it's funny when you say it doesn't stick this time. If you think about like, I was looking at a report recently. That's why the McKinsey report is so interesting to me. But in the past three years in the U. S. as an example, three quarters of all specialty subcontractors have experience with multi trade and two thirds of general contractors have experience with multi trade assemblies and prefabrication. What's not sticking? It's happening. How do we make it happen better? Right? So it's like, I don't think it's like, uh, is it going like, it's funny when I first got here, people were asking me and not necessarily at Autodesk, but outside, they're like, what do you think the market for this is? And I'm like, what's this? What are you talking about? It already is like, you want like, what is the current practice of people doing this? It's just the fact that like, here's what happens now. And you know, this like drawings are made. Okay. Because it's not productized necessarily up front, or they don't understand DfMA principles, two totally separate topics, but, you know, let's say they just design a building, they're getting paid, those architects and engineers, on drawing things. Whether or not they get built or not, they don't, I don't want to say they don't care, that's not true, but, you They're getting paid for something that they're not being judged on whether or not it gets built or not at the end, right? That's not a criteria for success. So they're getting paid to draw something. It goes across the ecosystem to the next silo and to the next one. And by the time it gets about two silos down, the person that actually fabricates that draws it. They send it back over the ecosystem, back over a couple of silos. And somebody, again, gets paid to coordinate. The actual things that are going to be built and the thing in their mind, you know, and I don't care, by the way, say BIM, say Digital Twins, say anything. Like, if that process exists in any of those things, we're not going to win, right? It's, and, and, and it's happening now. So like that guy still fabricates, we still build things, prefabricated or not. That aren't what was originally up front in the process. So that's truly like where we're going to see the most change. And it's funny, every time the Queen of Prefab is a fun name and it's awesome and it's super cool, but oftentimes it's a little short sighted. Like everyone thinks like, she just loves Prefab. And I'm like, that's not it. It was just sort of catchy. And also I've evolved, you know, from like, you know, Prefab for me is like, it gave me a Because I love to think about a lot of different things, it gave me like a product really to standardize and to get all these other benefits from things like BIM and Digital Twins and, you know, the way in which we behave. And like you said, you have to be dissatisfied. Actually, the formula, and I think it was Dan Miller that came up with it, it was like, it's dissatisfaction times a vision. Times first concrete steps of action. All of that has to be greater than resistance. That's actually the formula. So like, I actually think we've hit dissatisfaction at this point. Like you can't tell me that construction companies are happy with the money they're making or designers are happy with the role they're playing or owners are happening with happy with the inconsistency there. No, one's really happy. Right? Like, so like, I think we've all come to that conclusion at this point. Okay. The problem we're at now, I think in our, in our evolution is we're What does the future look like? And that's really my job at Autodesk is to help people envision what the future could be and what it is, you know, if they just take our current building blocks and foundational pieces and expand it. So we're, we're really right now trying to move towards a vision of what's possible and get companies on the path to take their first concrete steps of action. Because the one thing I definitely know, and again, uh, we will encounter resistance. You know, and we've got to start thinking about these things in order to combat old thinking, old processes, old, you know, contracts and scopes and procurement methodologies. We've got to be able to like highlight the dissatisfaction, show people there's a potential vision. Nobody changes unless there's something better on the other side, but we should be able to show them there's something better. And then it's not even like it's funny. I like, I talked to a lot of owners and they're like, I want what you're talking about. And then they go to their general contractor and they go that, well, we can't do that for you. That's impossible. And then they're like, Oh, I can't have it. Why? Because no one could tell them the concrete steps of action after the vision to give them what they want. I don't know one owner in the world when I talk about this, that doesn't want this. Right. So if you know that, and you're a general contractor builder out there right now, you should figure out how to get them what they want, because that's what they want. Right? But you, as an owner, you know, I tell them, you've got to take on some risk. You've got to collaborate with them. Just because you push risk onto somebody else, doesn't make risk go away. We have to start opening up our eyes and stop pushing down responsibility onto somebody else. That's, that's why we're so siloed, right? It's part of the, the nature of this. And also we can't keep automating inefficient processes, right? We have to stop and we have to lead. and make sure that we're, we're all leading. Every part of this ecosystem has to figure out their role, you know, in the new possible of the world. And, and honestly, the great part about that is once you figure out the vision of it and what your role looks like, there's amazingly talented people on this planet where you're basically going to be like unleashing their talent onto some things with some technology that is, again, like that architect we talked about. That's amazing stuff. Like who doesn't want to do that? I want to do that stuff. Like, I don't want to keep fighting it out that we should change and not get to the change part. Like, I want us to hurry up before I'm retired and, you know, but I'm not retiring anytime soon, so that's a good thing. But, you know, you and I are about the same, you're a little younger than I am, so maybe after I'm gone you'll have to

Jaimie Johnston:

A little bit younger, yeah. I like that equation, it does feel like, uh, even if we've hit a point where the left hand side of the equation is overcoming resistance, there's still big pockets of resistance. Even if I'm sort of swimming in an ocean, which is generally positive, I keep bumping into these whacking great boulders that I can't get round. And so, yeah, it's not just enough, I think, to have this. When I talk about it sticking, you go, yeah, I can sort of feel the direction, you know, the tide's certainly turning to, I don't know, something makes that metaphor, but there are some big, big lumps of resistance in there that aren't moving. You go, until we get some of those unlocked, uh, it's going to be, it's going to be a hard slog. So certainly in the UK, I mean, it'd be interesting to hear your view on, um, General contractors. So UK's got a slightly different outlook. Obviously we've got government support for this. We've been doing some of these things I think quite well. Mandated BIM back in, back in the days. There's certain things UK's done I think quite well. Government doesn't have maybe that central government support but some of your general contractors we've spoken to are really hot on this and it feels like you're maybe slightly behind in certain things but it gives you the opportunity to learn from maybe what's happening in the UK. Where do you think this is happening particularly well in the world or what's your sort of of US versus UK versus, you know, Asia's looking at this as well.

Amy Marks:

I mean, you know, I'm not, I'm not US based for the most part. Like I I've worked actually on six of the seven continents doing this. So interestingly enough, I think I was just having, it's good. I love, first of all, what a cool question to be able to answer. Where do we think it's where prefabrication is happening the most? Right. It was like, I just said to somebody the other day, I'm like. Okay. 10 years ago, that would never be a question. Like nobody would ever be like, do you think the UK is ahead of Singapore? Is Australia now coming up? Like, like, thank God, thank God. This is a question, you know, like, thank goodness. So like, you know, I think every, every geo, just like every client has a different value proposition of why this is happening. Right. And you have to understand it's actually. Michael Porter did a, he did a study after Five Forces where he talked about Silicon Valley, like what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, right? Like what influence is happening over there to make them Silicon Valley? I think right now that's what's going on around this world. We're creating little Silicon Valleys of prefabrication hubs because of different drivers. Like the UK has different drivers than Singapore, you know, the, and Asia and China. So I think it's, I don't know. I think, When you say ahead, it's like they all have different paths and different strategies for the different value that they need based on the current environments that are there and what they're trying to overcome and with the strategy. So, I mean, the good news is I, I think we can learn from one another. Like, I love my work I've done in Singapore just because I think they're very numbers focused, very metrics focused, and they have a million, uh, You know, like they're tracking every single thing with technology and whether or not it's getting better or worse or they, you know, they're really into like bringing industry and universities together, which I think is incredibly smart, you know, to get all these studios and people looking at all these jobs from different perspectives. Um, I think the UK, they're real, and again, they have real government strength in Singapore to require this. I think the UK has done some great things to require this. Um, I think You know, there's, I talk a lot in Ireland and I think there's some great craftsmanship around the UK and especially in Ireland, some other places where they've adopted, you know, manufacturing techniques. But, um, and then the U. S. is like, how could you lose? I feel like there's so much volume here in this space and we've just got geography. But then you look at places like that are on little islands, like, you know, not little, but like Australia, it's like, Yeah, like they are getting pressure from Asia with product coming in and they want to create, you know, uh, an industry. They lost the car industry there. That's their driver. And they have young people that are going, you know, they bringing young people into the trades and things like that and technology. So it's like to ask that, I just love the fact that I can point to, like, I don't know, off the top of my head, like five or six examples of countries that are doing things. And, but I think the lesson to learn from it, right? Like, it's that whatever your driver is for your, your, your geo. You need a few things that make it work, right? So you need like purpose, you need government interaction to support it, you need, you know, industry academia that makes it super successful because listen, we need young people in this space if you don't know that by now, we need smart people. We're not training people on any of this stuff. I actually just wrote a curriculum for Columbia University that we're doing this upcoming on industrialized construction like an eight week program for them. And it doesn't just talk about prefabrication. It talks about machine learning and AI and platform approach and things like that. And how to look at things like MEP assemblies and how to look at manufacturing and automation and robotics. We're not, you realize like an architecture school anywhere in the world, they're not teaching that kind of stuff. Right. So it's like, You can't expect people to come out and get into the space. Where are they going to learn this stuff? And that's, you know, like I've decided like at Autodesk, like with our team, we're creating a knowledge center because this can't just live in our heads when I'm ready to like roll off into the sunset and hopefully retire in New Zealand. You know what I'm saying? Like I need to live in AI and machine learning embedded in the software and the tech taught in the schools, you know, before we leave. And you know, like that, I mean, I don't have that much longer to make this happen. So, and I don't, and I actually, I think it won't, it won't be a long journey. But you need academia and you need, you know, industry, you need government support, you need support from our complimentary parts of the ecosystem, like insurance and banking and finance and things like that. If you don't get that, we're all going to, and by the way, it doesn't mean prefab won't happen. It means construction and design dies. Like that's the thing, you know, like, but for this, I don't see how we're going to, you know, You know, build the infrastructure that's needed around this planet. And, and, and that's, that's the answer, right? It's not like, will it happen? Won't it happen? It's like, what's the health of our ecosystem going to be? And we know that this is a big part of it, but I think, you know, and by the way, technology and the ability to enable technology, it goes right hand in hand. With, you know, building up a supply chain that can support these, you know, initiatives around the, around the globe. So you need industry, you need academia, you need government, you need, you know, the complementary industries like within our ecosystem that support us. And, and honestly, you need some really strong leaders, you know, benevolent dictators that are going to take risk and be thought leaders. Every CEO that comes to me, I'm like, get ready. This is going to take a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort. You're not going to get here on one project. And if you think that stop now because you can't, first of all, our projects are so long in this space. Like, what are you going to learn one thing in three years? Like, come on, that's ridiculous. Like, uh, guys would tell me like, I'm going to dip my toe in the pool of prefab, we're going to do one element and like, try one thing on this one job in the next four years, and I'm like, What? Like it doesn't even make sense. It's like, the kids that went into college will be out of college by the time you determine whether or not one thing that you never did before, you had no skill set in, you wanted to figure out if you're good at it, if you're going to change it. What? That's like, if you think about these things, they make absolutely no sense. So you need people to be like, And I, and this is going to sound really harsh, because you know I'm from New York and I'm a rugby player. That's just dumb. Stop, like, stop asking dumb questions. Stop making dumb assumptions. Like, you all know it's dumb before it comes out of your mouth. Stop making, like, stop proving your point with something that's just nonsensical. Like, you know what I mean? Like, that's just, when you, when you lay it out like that for people, and in some ways, That's why people either like me or they hate me because I'm going to say it. Like, I'm just going to be like, that's dumb. Like saying that that's the only way you're going to judge whether or not this is good for your company is a bad premise for the decision. Like that doesn't make any sense. And here's why. And so honestly, we need a few more people in there to be like, that doesn't make any sense. I need some challengers in there. that are willing to put their neck out on the line. Thank God for guys like you and like some other guys I know and women in the ecosystem that have really kind of, listen, it's not easy, uh, to be the queen of prefab. I, I can tell you that part. Like I've been, you know, they say Mike Tyson says everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I've been punched in the face a lot, you know, like it's not easy, but like, you know, it's also nothing that's really amazing ever is easy. It could be easier for the record. I get punched. I, and by the way, interestingly enough, I don't really get punched in the face that often at all anymore, which is a, I think a litmus test that things are changing. Like I used to come, I used to joke around that I was going to meetings with a t shirt on that said 'free fights here'. You know, like I'm ready, I'm ready to take you guys on. And now more than ever, I find like. No one wants to argue with me over this. They're just like, okay, we get it. It's happening. How do we, what do we do now? You know? So like the conversation has really changed from like, 'why do I want to do this' to like, 'how do I do this'? What's the best way, what are the metrics I need? You know, like it's, we've evolved. I mean, so I think like. And by the way, if you're still fighting with people and you're one of those CEOs, you better recognize every other CEO is not fighting with us. You know what I mean? Like, they're like, what do I do now? You know, in the, in the thinking of the long game of this, you probably aren't doing the right thing.

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah. Especially in the next, you know, next couple of decades, there's gonna be some incredible shifts.

Amy Marks:

Oh my God.

Jaimie Johnston:

Help. But there's gonna be some big shifts. So Yeah, we, we've talked about this again a bit before about, um, yeah. Companies should be seeing this as massive opportunity in shaping themselves Yeah. And positioning themselves to see it as a benefit and not saying, oh, I hope this passes me by and I can, I can avoid, it's making some of the big shifts. It's, yeah, it feels like it's, it's gonna happen now. It's better, by the way, should be trying to work out how to embrace this, how to adopt it, and how to, how to, yeah. Break down those pockets of resistance and move the whole industry forward.

Amy Marks:

The way, the way, so I'm writing, I think you know this, I'm writing a book called 'The Innovator's Deception', right, it's sort of a condendium, a play on words to Clayton's The Innovator's Dilemma, he said you could change an industry from the bottom up, right, he was like, you could literally change an industry from the bottom up, chip away at the bottom, The fact of the matter is we're not an industry. We, like we said before, we're an ecosystem of lots of different industries. The only way you're going to change things is from the top down. And I'm seeing that. That's how I know this is going to change. Like when I see giant multi billion dollar, or even, you know, even larger than that, Companies saying, this is not acceptable anymore, I need something different. Then you know you're going to change, right? So it's like, I, again, I came to Autodesk because I was like, if you want to lead in tech and you want this to be sticky, like, I couldn't do that by myself. It's funny, like, I don't build software, first of all, but even if I did, I feel like there are very few, if any, companies, honestly, on the planet, I could say, You by yourself can make this change. Like, you can't. Like, Bryden Wood, amazing. You're doing fantastic things. We love being your partner. The two of us can't change this by ourselves. You know, you need big owners. You need government. You need academia. You need all these players to recognize they're very dissatisfied, and they are, and they're making changes. And that means those changes that we talked about. I'm pretty excited about it. Like, honestly, I get super pumped up every time I think about what's going on in the space because I, I don't just feel the shift. I'm like, I'm holding on some days because I'm getting like knocked over from the shift. And I think, I think truly the biggest thing that will end up happening here is Like that will make the biggest difference for me at the moment, you know, is the productization and connecting those products upfront in the, in the, in the, the platform for, you know, that connectivity for designers and makers. And I think that's why what you're doing is so cool over there at Bryden Wood is that we need to enable a connected, um, ecosystem and a connected, uh, tissue between all these foundational products, um, to really make this work. And I think that's what's. I see it. I smell it. I see examples of it all the time. And I know the product roadmaps and what they're trying to enable to make that happen and things like that. And, and that's honestly the cool part about my job. And I don't even know if you know this, Jaimie, like I don't just get to evangelize and talk about, I get to do internal strategy. And like inform the product and the internal stuff at Autodesk, which is even sometimes more exciting than external. And then also I get to work externally with all of our customers and things like that. So it's like, I swear to you, I, I, I have the same executive assistant for 15 years. Everybody knows Karen, like she says to me every day, like. I've never seen you wake up every single day and be more excited about your career and your job and what you get to do. It's like, every day is like, I get to go to a candy store and eat anything I want. It would be like, I get to do that, and it's super fun because you can see change happening right before your eyes. And the meetings I have now in life, I mean, 15 years ago, even 10 years ago, I wouldn't have a shot at meeting with some of those companies. They wouldn't even talk to me. And now they're coming for help. You know, like that's the coolest part about what's happening now. And by the way, it's cool. Cause I can help them and we can help them at Autodesk and you can help them. Like that's the coolest part. Nobody wants. To fail, right? And I think, I think, but what we have to recognize is we're counting on each other and we have to make sure that we're all doing the right things because it is so connected. It is so much about, you know, you know, not just utilizing the right software tools, but creating the right processes, having the right support system from, you know, government and building departments and authorities having jurisdiction and, and tech and learning. It's really, honestly, we're at a time right now that the reason, by the way, I started saying industrialized revolution Because I truly meant it. Like, this is a revolution. You know, like, this is not just, I used to be, I some, there were some days I felt like I was carrying a heavy backpack full of rocks with a sword running uphill. But now there's like an army behind, a battalion. There's like countries with armies, like, behind us. And I think you probably felt the same way in, like, what you've been trying to do. Sometimes it feels pretty lonely out there, but, you know, it's not lonely anymore. That's so good, right?

Jaimie Johnston:

Yeah, and I think, yeah, maybe that's a fantastic place to end, actually, because it's a really good, um, upbeat message, but yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. It's that combination of the, you know, the factors from dissatisfaction and, uh, you know, climate emergency that kind of need to do it, but also all the pieces are in place, as you say, that kind of

Amy Marks:

yeah

Jaimie Johnston:

uh, all the ingredients of, you know, government support and academia and big clients and big contractors, you know, we've never had that kind of,

Amy Marks:

convergence,

Jaimie Johnston:

yeah, the table set or the pieces are all set for this to happen. So, um, yeah, exciting times, exciting times. I think you share that same passion. You've seen the same sort of shift that we have over the last couple of decades, that it's moved very much from a, as you say, conversation you couldn't have, or rooms that you couldn't get into. Suddenly you're being asked into those rooms and asked for your help. And yeah, that's a very, very different, I'm not having to kick down doors now. We're being invited into these places, which is, yeah, it's a very, very different, different feel than it was.

Amy Marks:

No, I actually, you know what, you know, what's making that happen too, aside from these owners? It really truly is that convergence theme, right? It's, you're seeing industries converge, you're seeing companies converge, you're seeing processes converge and products converge. It's, this is a different world. We're a much smaller world than we ever were before and with that comes great opportunity. I think that's important, much greater opportunity with this convergence that's happening.

Jaimie Johnston:

That was really interesting. Yeah, we could have talked for a lot longer actually. We'll have to do another one of these at some point.

Amy Marks:

Any time. Thanks guys.

Jaimie Johnston:

So thanks everyone for listening and please join us next time where we'll be talking about how to apply modern methods of construction to transforming healthcare. So thanks everyone for listening, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did and please join us for the next edition of Built Environment Matters.

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Jaimie Johnston MBE

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Amy Marks (Queen of Prefab)

Guest