This episode of The Future Built Smarter features Steve Meyer, IMEG’s Transportation and Bridge Market Leader. “I try to get to know all of IMEG’s client executives and business developers to see where we can help fill the needs of our clients,” Steve says. This holistic approach, he adds, allows IMEG to provide comprehensive engineering design and services as needed for any project—from roadways to bridges to buildings—creating a seamless process for clients. “It makes it easy for the client that they can just hire one firm and fulfill quite a few services. Not only can we design their building, we also can design the road to their building.”

IMEG’s transportation projects include traffic studies, bridge, roadway, and highway design, rehabilitation and inspection, non-motorized corridors, and grant applications that secure funding for infrastructure improvements. In the wake of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, Steve says there have been many infrastructure improvements made across the country but there’s much more work to be done. “Overall, my impression of roads and bridges today is that they’re improving,” he says. “We’re getting better as a nation, but we still have a long way to go.”

Steve points to new techniques in the past several years that now can be used to extend the life of roads and bridges, helping clients get more for their money and delay more expensive replacement projects. Technological advances, too, have played a big role in how services are delivered. “The biggest change I’ve seen in transportation over the last 10 years has been the use of drone technology,” Steve says. “We can use drones to survey roads, inspect bridges, and even explore hard-to-reach areas. It saves time, improves safety, and gives us incredible precision.” Widespread use of 360-degree cameras also has allowed engineers to quickly and safely capture detailed views of infrastructure and sites. “We can even lower these cameras into manholes to inspect pipes and systems without putting anyone in harm’s way.”

Steve finds great satisfaction in helping provide the infrastructure that people need to improve their communities and way of life, one of the main reasons he became an engineer more than 20 years ago. A recent project he worked on in South Dakota, for example, replaced a deteriorating bridge on a roadway through a lake with a box culvert, a more economical, longer lasting, and adaptable solution. “The lake’s rising levels were inundating the road and damaging the bridge,” he says. “By replacing it with a box culvert designed to allow for future elevation changes, we ensured the road could remain open longer, even as water levels rise. This is critical for the community—it connects a rural school with the nearby town.”

Steve expects transportation projects to continue status quo over the next five to 10 years as the country continues to grapple with catching up on projects to repair, replace, and improve worn-out and outdated infrastructure. At the same time, he expects IMEG will play an ever larger role in such projects as the firm continues to grow and add new specialties. “We’ll continue to see a lot of transportation projects, but as more teams join IMEG, we’ll gain even more expertise and capacity to take on diverse challenges. Our goal in the transportation market remains the same: to help communities improve their roads and bridges.”

This episode of The Future Built Smarter examines the intersection of AEC technology and artificial intelligence (AI) with guest Alice Leung, Vice President at Brick and Mortar Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that focuses on construction technology. Alice explains that the firm invests in startups that address existing productivity challenges within the industry. "We're here to invest in startups that are trying to solve real problems in the construction industry—not just crazy solutions looking for problems to solve.”

Alice says the industry is seeing an influx of interest and investment in technology—noteworthy at a time when McKinsey & Company reports continue to highlight stagnation in construction productivity. "The industry is frustrated that the world thinks we are not more innovative, more technology forward, or productive," she says.

AI is the chief driver of innovative construction technology, with current practical applications including streamlining manual tasks to make operations more efficient. This is transforming the estimating process, for example, with some AI software companies using AI to count components such as light fixtures or toilets from PDFs and models, significantly reducing the time and labor required for these tasks—and freeing up technical staff for more important design tasks. “Another low-hanging fruit area is in RFP's—just being able to take past project proposals [and using AI] to help write new proposal material,” Alice says. “So, if you're limited by the number of people that you have putting together proposals, if you're able to leverage AI to speed up a lot of that work, in theory, you can go after more projects, you can win more work, build out a stronger pipeline.”

Alice adds that AI also is being used more and more to quickly create 3D environments to allow architects and engineers to present their designs to clients at an early stage, allowing them to visually understand the design and speed up decision-making. "Generative AI is really good at turning sketches into photorealistic stuff... There is just so much auto creation of virtual environments."

Those in the AEC industry who are looking to innovate with AI technologies should not overlook the importance of governance, particularly regarding data privacy. "There’s a lot of conversation around data privacy... do we share our data with startups?" Alice says. When evaluating working with startups, she adds, “make sure that they have the technology architecture to be able but to swap in and swap out AI models,” which are getting better and exponentially faster—and often updated every six months or so. “The last thing you want is to have a big partnership with a startup that has hard coded their model or has built it in a way where they can't swap it out easily.”

Learn more about Brick & Mortar Ventures at brickmortar.vc/.

This episode of The Future Built Smarter features Matt Malcolm, leader of IMEG’s newest service, IMEG Labs. “With IMEG Labs we are able to offer our clients third-party unbiased evaluation of technology as part of the design process—ahead of actual construction events or implementation on a client's site,” says Matt. The evaluations and demonstrations are conducted at the IMEG Labs testing site in the firm’s office in Naperville, IL. “We can take the different technologies that we're describing as we talk about integration and smart buildings and bring them into our small-scale environment. We can leverage the agile framework and talk about how these things fit together, build out some proof of concepting, and make adjustments before we actually have people installing these things on site.” Owners and clients are encouraged to visit IMEG Labs for demonstrations of their anticipated technology solutions and integrations.

“It's really about all the things that are behind the walls, the things that are above the ceilings, the things that are in the IDF closets—all the different functional boxes and smart pieces and parts that are connected to a network and drive how a business operates, whether it's a hospital or a school or an airport. We connect them together with the appropriate wires to showcase everything it takes to achieve the business outcome or use case that a client is looking for.”

This service, Matt adds, “allows us to early in the process decide what brands or manufacturers work well together, which ones might be a barrier to implementing because there's a huge implementation cost or integration development cost. It's about timely evaluation of how these systems are going to work together so that they can influence the decisions.”

IMEG Labs also can set up mockups for training and continual improvement at a client’s site and can innovate solutions for which there may not yet be a product on the market that allows an owner to push the envelope.

“Clients are coming up with some great ideas and we're taking those ideas and trying to see how they could come to life. We're piloting a couple of different technologies—things that haven't really been done before in certain environments.”

Listen to the podcast to learn more or contact Matt Malcolm.