.png)
KP Unpacked
KP Unpacked explores the biggest ideas in AEC, AI, and innovation—unpacking the trends, technology, discussions, and strategies shaping the built environment and beyond.
KP Unpacked
AI in AEC: Transforming Presentations with AI-Powered Tools
🎉 Special Offer for KP Unpacked Listeners: Get 55% off your ticket to the 9th Annual AEC Summit on October 29th at the Diverge Innovation Center in Phoenix! Click the link below and use promo code UNPACKED55 at checkout.
Don't miss this opportunity to connect with top minds in AEC and beyond. Tickets are limited—act fast!
Hey, welcome back to KPUnpacked. This is where the biggest ideas in AEC, ai and innovation they all collide at this overlap in the Venn diagram. It's powered by KC Redico. This is the podcast that breaks down the trends, the technologies, the discussions and the strategies shaping the built environment and beyond. My name is Jeff Eccles. I'm a senior advisor at KP ReadyCo and many times you come here for KP Unpacked and you see KP Ready, the CEO and founder of KP ReadyCo and also the founder of Shadow Ventures. But we've got a couple different versions of Unpacked now. So today I am joined by my teammate, another senior advisor and, I think, head of advisory at KP Reddico, frank Lazzaro.
Speaker 2:Hey.
Speaker 1:Frank.
Speaker 2:Hey, jeff, how are you?
Speaker 1:I am doing really well. We talked about this last week as we were recording the first couple of episodes last week. This is a version of the podcast, an unpacked version that I'm really excited about because we hear a lot about AI. In fact, as we're recording this, we're recording this on Friday. On Tuesday, we had our Q1 one-day mastermind event. It's our in-person mastermind event. It was in Phoenix and at the very beginning, we had about 50 people in the room and if you go around the room, it's people from all over the AEC world that are all focused on innovation. It's exactly what we talk about in our work and in the podcast, and we went around. We had everybody introduce themselves and it was who are you, when are you, what do you do and what do you want to get out of this? The term AI if there were 50 people in the room, the term AI came up 65 times right, and that's where we are.
Speaker 1:No, not at all, not at all surprised by that. That's where we are and one of the things that I know and you can talk about this, obviously but one of the things that I know that you're doing is you're going out and you're talking about AI a lot. Kp goes out and talks about AI a lot. His most recent book is called the Intangible Enterprise. It's about using AI. I'll say that's like the most surface level scratch I could possibly make on what that book is about. So go to Amazon or wherever you buy books and get the Intangible Enterprise by KP Reddy.
Speaker 1:But Frank is out there talking about AI. Kp's book is sort of a 30,000 foot strategic view, foot strategic view and what Frank is doing is really digging into the weeds on what are the tools, how do you use these tools, what can they do for you? And that's why I'm excited about this version of the podcast, because I get to sit down with Frank and he and I get to unpack some of these tools. So, frank, why don't you talk a little bit more real, quickly, about what you're doing and then we'll jump into today's topic?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's interesting that you kind of bring that up right. Like you know, we're KP's kind of talking about those those items right at the high level, strategic level, and I think people are starting to really grasp those concepts and understanding that AI is really here to stay. There are some real benefits to it. What I've found over at least the last year being on the speaking circuit and I even wrote a book around kind of more of what we're talking about through this podcast is like just finding those real practical examples to find those efficiencies.
Speaker 2:I think what you find is that people are waiting. They're waiting for those big specialty AI applications. Where's the one that's going to help me do design? Where's the one that's going to help me figure out compliance and all this other stuff? But there's some real value, particularly with AE firms or even professional services firms in general, around how do I find more time in any given week to actually either do more, have better work-life balance or do those things?
Speaker 2:So I've really kind of leaned into just like, hey, let me talk about the tools that I'm using and what we use here at KP Ready and what I'm seeing other people using to kind of figure out. You know, let's find those. You know I love the concept of 12 minutes. You know, if you can find 12 minutes per day, that's an hour per week, that's 40 plus hours per year of efficiencies and there's no specialty application. So that's what I really love, that you and I dig into when we have this conversation, is this talk about those tools that can find you those 12 minutes per day, and I think that's where we can't underestimate the value of what that can drive to an organization with those kinds of efficiencies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you brought the 12-minute rule up because you know you just said right, 12 minutes a day opens up 40 hours of efficiency per year at least. And you start multiplying that right, many professional services firms start thinking in you know they're trading hours for dollars. They start thinking in billable hours. So if you open up 40 billable hours per year per staff member towards whatever their rate is, whatever their billable is Now we've got some real numbers going on there. So what's the ROI?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think back to our conversations in previous episodes. You know we kind of talk about that concept of dirty laundry. Right, we all have dirty laundry that we have to do. We know we have to do it, but no one wants to do it. If you think about where that falls from the AEC perspective, our dirty laundry really is administrative work. Right, the billable folks are like, well, I know I have to do it, but I don't want to do that. I don't want to have to get pulled off of a project to write a project write-up for a proposal. I know I have to do it because I know we have to submit the proposal. I know we have to do it, but it's like pulling teeth to get them to get there. So utilizing some of these things that we talk about can kind of help focus on what we would call the administrative work or that dirty laundry that none of the AEC professionals want to kind of focus on, but knowing that we have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So for those of you that are listening at home, whether you're listening to the podcast or you're watching this on youtube or you picked it up on linkedin or somewhere else, this gets posted. Producer ethan does a fantastic job of slicing and dicing and producing these episodes and getting them out there in the different, different places, but wherever it is that you're consuming this right now, here's my estimate right, if you follow Frank's 12-minute rule, 12 minutes a day leads to at least 40 hours, a return of about $6,000 per employee that uses this 12-minute rule. $6,000 per year per employee. So, wherever you're consuming this, you do the math and post it into the comments. Hey, this is our math, right? That's so you know.
Speaker 1:I know there's a lot of math geniuses out there. I'm not a math genius. I counted all that up on my fingers, so the way I did it was 40 hours times 150 hours. Dollars an hour is a billable rate. I'm pretty sure that you're probably billing it higher than that. But you do the math, you put it in the comments wherever you're consuming this and let's see what sort of ROI people can realize if they follow Frank's 12-minute rule. Now, before we jump into today's topic, you mentioned your book. What's the title of your book?
Speaker 2:today's topic. You mentioned your book. What's the title of your book? It's the title of the book is called uh finding 12 minutes using generative ai to create efficiencies all right, and it's interesting, there's nothing magical about those 12 minutes, because you mentioned that it's.
Speaker 2:I'm a lot like you. It was simple math, right? 12 times 5 is 60, right? If I would have came in and said, hey, you save 17 minutes if, if we have to do the calculation, then people don't understand the concept. So the whole con like I say 12 minutes, but that's like the bare minimum right At the reality is is that you know, we, you, I, we both know that we could easily save way more time if we had the right tools to kind of help us throughout our day from the administrative perspective. So you know, you could, you know, I honestly believe that most firms will see more than the six thousand dollar in terms of roi if they are integrating it into their workflows, um, the way they need to. And you know our, our goal here is to kind of show you tools to kind of do that all right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. It's 12 minutes by design simple math, yeah yeah, where can they pick up your book?
Speaker 2:uh you can pick it up anywhere that you you can buy books at. Barnes and noble, amazon are, are, you know really kind of you know the go-to places for my uh those, obviously, if you uh all the books are actually available on Kindle Direct. So if you do have that subscription, you can actually read it for free with your subscription. But, yeah, amazon or Barnes and Noble, you can go find it.
Speaker 1:Excellent, all right, so we've given you two book resources already in this episode. We haven't even gotten to today's topic and, as usual, producer Ethan will put links to everything that we talked about uh in in the um, in the show notes. Here again, wherever you're consuming this, uh, ethan Ethan knocks it out of the park when it comes to uh, getting you all the information that you need. So just check down below and you can find a link to KP's book and a link to Frank's book and, I don't know, maybe even a calculator so you can figure out what, out what the ROI of your 12 minutes is, if you can't use your fingers the way I did. All right. So, all joking aside, a lot of us have to do presentations. Maybe it's from stage, maybe it's in the boardroom, maybe it's to a client, maybe it's to our in-house team. It doesn't matter why we have to do presentations, but we have to build presentations. So let's talk about how we can use AI to create better presentations faster. What tools, what tools are we using for that?
Speaker 2:So you know, interestingly enough, right so I don't know anyone that actually enjoys using PowerPoint, right? It's one of those tools to where it's that necessary evil and we never really had a lot of options, right, powerpoint was kind of really the only tool If you were going to create a presentation. It's really the only tool that was kind of readily available and, honestly, it's not very user-friendly. It's good, I mean, you could do a lot of things with it, but with AI, particularly in the genitive AI, what you're finding is is that this pivot to tools that make it easier to create compelling presentations, right, and I think it started, I think the trend started with Canva, right, so you had Canva and it was like I can create something that's visually compelling, it looks good and it was a lot easier to use, right, because I'm just kind of typing and using a tablet and it was driven, I would say, in the last year or so.
Speaker 2:What you found is a lot of these new tools that have come up that are basically started on AI, which is interesting, right, so they're not in a pre-existing tool. That's adding AI, right. So PowerPoint co-pilot is basically PowerPoint adding AI Tools that I've been seeing, and particularly the one that we've been trying to really kind of honestly start integrating into the KP Ready, kp ready co is. You know, tools that are basically that generate from an AI foundation, which completely changes your mindset in terms of how you use it. So one of the tools that that's out there that I that I've been using personally a lot of is typesetcom and the.
Speaker 2:What I like about that is is that, built into its name, you're focused on typing and the tool does the design for you. So you have a little bar on the side and all you do is just type in your content and it automatically creates the slides for you designed and they look pretty. It simplifies the content creation. And then I learned somewhere along the way is that you know you can actually just take like your proposal, put it in chat, gpt, and say, give me bullets on this, and then I can take those bullets and then paste those bullets in the typeset and they create slides. I remember a couple of weeks ago I was with KP and I was showing them how I created this white paper and then I created this, this 10 page slide deck, and he's just like, well, why aren't we using this? And I'm like we should be right. So there's tools like that. So typeset's one of those tools that's out there that just kind of makes the whole presentation or slide creation thing very simple. Now it's a mindset change, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I'm not worried about design. I'm really kind of focused on the content, or the or the typing aspect of it, which I think that to me it just saves me time Cause I'm not worried about moving boxes around. It's doing it for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one, one thing that I find interesting about that. You know, and you and I have talked about this a lot, we were just talking about it before we hit record. You know I haven't been on the speaking circuit lately, but I spent a lot of years on I call it the alphabet soup speaking circuit, the AIA the.
Speaker 1:ACEC, the SMPS, the PSMJ you know that whole circuit and my delivery style when I go out and speak is very storytelling. So when I design a presentation, I start with the story. And so with these tools that you're talking about you're talking about typeset and you're talking about typing, and I know that we can go about this a little bit different way. We can go about this a little bit different way. I would actually sit there, turn the microphone on and tell the story so that I don't have to type right, because this is the way that I work, right, so I can tell the story, have it transcribed, the story, and then go through this process that you're talking. I love that. You said it's a mindset shift, 100% Right. I need my slide deck to support the story that I'm telling. So why not start by literally telling the story and then work it that way?
Speaker 2:Well, let's connect this to a previous episode that we did. Let's go back to the note-taking. Right, you could use one of the AI note-takers to basically just talk to me and it can transcribe your notes for you. You can then take that, use the AI tool to basically create your summary or your slides, and then you're pasting. So you know one of the things I tell people like well, what's the one AI tool that you use? And I'm like I use like six it's. They're all purposeful for certain things. And so I have this unbundled mentality of I have one tool that helps me do this, and what, and all I'm doing is basically focusing on what my problem is. What problem am I solving? Can the tool solve that problem? And then I move along. So for me, when I you know, I think the nice thing about this that if you actually watch this season right, episode from episode to episode, what you're going to find is is that all of these tools, they're not independent. For me, they're all stacked right.
Speaker 2:The note-taking can lead to the email writing. The email writing can lead to the SOWs. The SOWs could lead to a presentation. So they all kind of work in conjunction together, right, and that's the power of some of these things. Now there's other tools out there. Typeset happens to be one that's out there, but there's Gamma. I think Canva is kind of getting into the AI PowerPoint presentation game, tomeapp is another one, even Microsoft Copilot right Now they have the PowerPoint. Again, still not a big fan of how they've integrated it into it, but you can see that each of these tools are kind of are kind of starting to have that AI component which is going to make it easier for us to kind of create. Now you think about that. How often and you know, jeff, go look back at your career how much time did you waste, you know, just fiddling with a PowerPoint to kind of get it to look right or to focus on content and all that other stuff? Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, I, I mean, I think about you know, back in the day, and I've always been a keynote guy or I'm sitting here working on a mac, but, um, I, I think back to you know, these presentations from the past and looking at the transitions, yeah, from slide to slide, and then you realize, you know what? And this happened to me. I was speaking at a big event in Nashville. I'm up on the stage and it's one of those stages. It was super intimidating. It's Nashville, tennessee, and I'm walking up the stairs like stage left or whatever, and here's all these photographs of people that had played that stage before and I went, whoa, okay, okay, I'm not sure I'm worthy to be on this stage. So I get up there on the stage and there, I don't know, it's a thousand people in the audience or whatever. It was it what? It obviously wasn't. You know the size to fill the whole theater, but. But I get up there on the stage and they had an AV tech, right? No?
Speaker 1:fantastic right, this is super cool. He had taken my presentation and thrown it into something else and reformatted it from, you know, my presentation format to whatever it was that he was used to using, and he puts the first slide up on the screen. I didn't even recognize it. I'm like whoa, wait a minute, what happened? And so you go from. Okay, I'm using Keynote, I've got all these transitions to now. Well, I better just put it all in a PDF so somebody can just, you know, just do the dumb thing and throw it up on a screen and we start to understand what's really important, right, you know, if you have total control over your presentation environment, that's one thing, but I think when we're talking about efficiency, we start to really start to think about what matters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so there's other features in this that I think are kind of not spoken of enough but I think show a lot of value. When you're, like, in typeset, if you just type the word logo, it then prompts you to say, oh, if you give me the URL, I'll go get the logo for you. So you're trying to create a logo page of all the clients that you're working with or whatever it is, and what do you do now? Well, you go and you Google, you go to the website and you're basically just downloading and copying and you don't know what kind of logo quality you're getting. It's just kind of there. What tools like typeset are doing now is like we're, so we know that you do that. So just type the word logo in and if you give me the URL, I'll go get the logo for you and they'll clean it up and and so it's. It's again. It's just that time saver where I don't have to go out and find all these logos to create that logo sheet, or I don't have to. If I'm creating an SOW or a presentation for a client, I don't have to go find their logo, like the tool does it for me, which is, I think, you.
Speaker 2:I think those are the underrated features that once people start recognizing that they're there, it makes, like the creation process even that much more simpler. Right, it's like, oh, it's just not formatting the slides. It's also, you know, all of these tools are connect, like typesets, connected to getty stock imagery, and so if I need a stock photo, all I do is type in image and then I type a search and so it's like oh, now I don't even have to go out to some other tool to go get a stock image, you have to help me find it. I don't have to go find a logo, it's going to get it for me. All of those things stack up to really create those efficient tools where I think that's where the power of someone like a typeset or like a beautifulai is really going to shine over time, because they're built with that mentality in mind and time because they're built with that mentality in mind and it's just not transitioning an old app to have new technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that. And again, as you're listening to this or watching, and if you're seeing the video version of this, producer Ethan will put a list of these tools that Frank is talking about into the show notes below, and so you can just link to them and check them out. Now I assume, like any good AI tool, that I can set up templates, I can set up my standards and things. So, hey, I need a new presentation, but it needs to follow the brand guidelines, which that's super important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and some of the tools do a better job than others, right, and you know most of them allow you to kind of set your brands, brand colors and logos and stuff.
Speaker 2:But that's where the mindset change comes in a little bit too, right, you, like you're, you're only giving it enough information, right? Brand colors, brand guidelines you don't have a lot like with types, that you don't have a lot of control over the design. Right, you can't specify certain elements, and that's something that people have to get used to, because within PowerPoint, I can create the templated slide to look however I want, right, like you have like the ultimate control. Some of these tools, they take that away from you and it's like, and then you say, well, the tool doesn't really work for me because you're still working in that old mindset. So it's almost kind of like, if you're looking for the efficiencies, these tools will give it to you, but you also realize that you have to give up some of your, your creative control, because that's it almost kind of like it's not your responsibility anymore, it's the AI's responsibility.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, the other thing I like too, is that it'll it'll if you put too much content, and this is good for the engineers. If you put too much content on a slide, a yellow bar comes up at the bottom that says too much content.
Speaker 1:It says nobody's going to pay attention to that slide.
Speaker 2:No, it's not but, but again, you can see how they're starting to put those, those guardrails and those parameters. So if you're open to finding those efficiencies but also open to losing some control over the design and kind of stay in your lane on how you create these things, some of these tools will really kind of help you really kind of create content faster. And going back to what you mentioned earlier, I was called on a Monday to come up on on a Wednesday to speak at a conference because one of their speakers got caught in a snowstorm. And I'm like, okay, great, I'll, I'll, I'll do it, I, you know I can get out of Atlanta, um two out. I get into the hotel and I'm at the, I'm sitting in my room and I realized that I gave this same presentation and a virtual webinar to the same group in November and I'm like, oh, I can't get the same presentation.
Speaker 2:So, but using AI and a bunch of other stuff, I was able to kind of create brand new slides within like an hour, hour and a half. So I went from like panic of oh my God, like like, like I'm coming in the pitch, hit for them because they they ran into a bind and needed someone to speak, but then I realized I've already given them this content. What do I do? Ai was able to help me to kind of create new slides and create something unique for their event at the last minute. I don't think I would have been able to do that. If I wasn't using AI to kind of help kind of format those slides, I would have probably spent. I would have been up all night doing it. Sure, yeah, which would you know? That would have probably spent.
Speaker 1:I would have been up all night doing it. Sure yeah, which would you know? That would have been normal a few years ago. Oh, absolutely so those are some of the pros and you mentioned. You know. You mentioned having to change your mindset and let go of the control of certain things. What are a couple of cons, if those are pros? What are a couple of cons to some of these ai tools?
Speaker 2:well, this it's, it's ads with most ai tools and this is something that you're finding that that most firms are starting to recognize. It's just another subscription at this point, right? So you're adding. So you're adding in, right, another twenty dollars per month, another eight dollars per month. So at some point I think you know it's it's. It's hard to sit there and say, yeah, I'm going to have all these tools, but you know, it's almost kind of like the. You know like I'm getting, I'm cutting the cord and I'm not going to have cable anymore. But all we've done is this rebuild it in the aggregate through our Netflix or Disney plus and all these other subscriptions. We're just paying the same exact thing for what we had previously.
Speaker 2:So, it's another subscription. Right, there is a learning curve. I think that's another aspect of a downside. It's like it's just one more tool that I need to learn, right? So there could be one of those things to where I'll just use what I have, because I know how to use PowerPoint, I don't, you know. So those are some of the negatives. Right, another subscription, you know, a learning curve on these tools. And then it's one of those things to where it's like how do you know, how do I integrate this into my, into my workflow? To justify that, justify that kind of change.
Speaker 1:Got to wrap it up because the promises that we keep these episodes a little bit shorter. So what? What is an action step? That somebody that's listening to this right now, whether it's them individually or their team or their firm what is something they can do this week to get better at this, to implement this and to to realize some sort of benefit from ai tools that help them build presentations?
Speaker 2:yeah. So again, you know, one of the things that I'm a big proponent of is, you know, start with a problem before a tool, right? So understand what you're trying to solve. For if you find that you are creating a lot of presentations for a variety of different reasons, a lot of these applications do have trials. They do have, you know, a a lot of presentations for a variety of different reasons. A lot of these applications do have trials. They do have free versions of it.
Speaker 2:Make sure that you have the people that are leading your innovation, that are leading your AI strategy, to make sure that they're evaluating these things, to make sure that there's not a tool out there that's not solving the problem that you're trying to solve for.
Speaker 2:So the immediate step is to kind of, you know, just one, just identify the problem you're really trying to solve and then get your team to kind of, you know, check these things out and evaluate them to make sure that you know they're not, that they would be a right fit for your firm, to kind of help save those times. What you're going to find is is that if you can solve the problem with the tool, the investment is well worth it, right? Go back to our initial conversation around. If you can generate $6,000 per person, that extra $20 per month is a pretty good investment at that point, right. So it's one of those things to where just understand the economics of it and don't assume that the tools that you have are the tools that you know that you should be sticking with. There are some really good tools out out there that you could be taking advantage of.
Speaker 1:All right, that sounds good. This is a fun episode. This is a fun version of this podcast. Again, if you have been listening to the KP Unpacked podcast for a while, you probably noticed a different sort of intro. Today we're expanding the scope of the KP Unpacked podcast and this is where the biggest ideas in AEC, ai and innovation collide. It's powered by KP Redico. This podcast breaks down the trends, the technology, the discussions, discussions and the strategies that are shaping the built environment and beyond.
Speaker 1:And now, once a week, I get to sit down with Frank Lazaro he's my teammate here at KP ready Co and we get to sit down and unpack I'm gonna say unpack technology. It's often going to be unpacking AI tools, but we'll leave the door open a little bit in case there's something that doesn't technically fall into AI. But this is meant to be a time where you can get the tips and the tricks and the action items, as you just got at the end of the episode here on how you and your team can implement AI tools. Just 12 minutes a day might lead to $6,000 per person per year in your firm. Think about that as ROI. Frank, thanks again for joining me on this Unpacking AI Again, fun. I'm learning a lot as we go and I hope everybody that's listening is getting a lot out of these episodes. So thanks again. I hope everybody that's listening is getting a lot out of these episodes. So thanks again and we'll be back again next week with another episode of KP Unpacked the unpacking AI version. Thanks Frank, thanks everybody.
Speaker 2:Thanks.
Speaker 1:Jeff Yep, absolutely See you next week everybody.
Speaker 3:Want to explore the AI tools we covered today or need help integrating AI at your firm? Reach out at kpreadyco contact. Not sure where to start? Take our free innovation assessment at kpreadyco dial that's kpreadyco dial to find the best AI opportunities for your firm.