Refactoring the development/AEC stack

For a long time, technical BIM work has happened in architecture offices. This has made sense: architects are doing technical design work, so it was natural for them to own and control the digital side of it.

The advent of AI does two things at once. First, there is much more software — more algorithms for more tasks and more occasions. Second, almost paradoxically, it makes those algorithms simpler to operate. Fragile interfaces — wizards, deeply nested configuration menus — are gone, replaced by chat or bespoke task-specific interfaces. Software gets simpler. And Giraffe is seeing this: many of our non-architect customers are doing things that previously I would have considered too technical for non-architects. The safe realm of the architect — the only one able to update the model — is eroding.

This change is a huge opportunity for developers. Controlling the downstream process is the prize in any industrialised system. Say you are building 20 buildings a year. Today you have 20 teams documenting them, with 20 subtly different BIM standards that the contractor and supply chain cannot use except with immense manual effort. Your ability to create a repeatable, efficient process in this world is very low — because the technical work is done by a fragmented, distributed workforce.

Estimates of the cost vary. NIST put it at over

0 billion in 2004. As one concrete example: 5–10% of the cost of fabricated steel is the shop drawing — the model made by the factory, after the architect has made a model, and the engineer has made a different analytic model. The easiest way to reduce this cost is to control the digital workflow. The developer, as client, is in the right seat to do it — and to reap the rewards.

AI changes the economics. You can start to bring more of the digital work under your own control. You can introduce standards and enforce them. Your feasibility, design, tendering and construction workflows are no longer created ad hoc, project by project.

This is not to say there is no space for architects or architecture. The opposite is true. The core skills of the architect — analysis, design, communication — remain core to the development and design process. But the ancillary skills of the architect — BIM management, documentation standards, model coordination — begin to consolidate and roll up into digital systems of record. Those systems are most rationally owned and controlled by the developer, because the developer is the party that benefits most directly from running them well.