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Digital Transformation & AI for Humans
Welcome to 'Digital Transformation & AI for Humans' with Emi.
In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation, and most importantly, the human spirit.
Each episode features visionary leaders from different countries who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch—nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence, soft skills, and building resilient teams.
Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes.
Visit https://digitaltransformation4humans.com/ for more information.
Digital Transformation & AI for Humans
AI enhanced BIM Mastery: Winning Strategies & Best Practices for Successful Project Delivery
In this episode we focus on AI enhanced BIM Mastery. We are going to discuss Winning Strategies and Best Practices for Successful Project Delivery. I’m honored to welcome my fantastic guest Juan Tena from Abu Dhabi (UAE), a multi-award-winning leader and Digital Services Director at KEO International Consultants.
🏆 Juan has been recognized as the CONSTRUCTION TECH LEADER OF THE YEAR at the Construction Innovation Awards 2024 in Dubai.
KEO International Consultants, Tech-Savvy Firm of the Year at the Design Middle East Awards 2024, is renowned for building legacies for a better tomorrow — from shaping iconic skylines to crafting sustainable communities. Ranked among the largest global architecture firms and the #1 firm in the Middle East for three consecutive years, KEO is at the forefront of innovation in the construction sector.
Key Topics Discussed:
🔹 Strategic Integration of AI and BIM – How organizations can align AI-powered BIM with their digital transformation strategy for streamlined project execution.
🔹 AI-Enhanced Workflows – Automating tasks, improving model accuracy, and delivering real-time insights for efficient project management.
🔹 Data-Driven Decision-Making – Leveraging AI-powered data management for better project outcomes, predictive analytics, and resource optimization.
🔹 Winning Strategies for Digital Twins – How construction leaders can use digital twins for real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and scenario simulations.
🔹 AI-Powered Visualization for Collaboration – Enhancing stakeholder communication with AI-driven visualization tools, 3D modeling, and immersive environments.
🔹 Overcoming BIM Data Challenges with AI – Tackling data overload, ensuring accuracy, and maintaining integrity throughout the project lifecycle.
🔹 Expert Insights & Best Practices – Key recommendations for leaders on successfully integrating AI with BIM, fostering innovation, and driving impactful digital transformation.
🎧 Tune in for expert insights and actionable strategies to elevate BIM practices with AI—ensuring smarter, more efficient, and future-ready project delivery.
About the host, Emi Olausson Fourounjieva
With over 20 years in IT, digital transformation, business growth & leadership, Emi specializes in turning challenges into opportunities for business expansion and personal well-being.
Her contributions have shaped success stories across the corporations and individuals, from driving digital growth, managing resources and leading teams in big companies to empowering leaders to unlock their inner power and succeed in this era of transformation.
📚 Get your AI Leadership Compass: Unlocking Business Growth & Innovation 🧭 The Definitive Guide for Leaders & Business Owners to Adapt & Thrive in the Age of AI & Digital Transformation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNBJ92RP
📆 Book a free Strategy Call with Emi
🔗 Connect with Emi Olausson Fourounjieva on LinkedIn
🌏 Learn more: https://digitaltransformation4humans.com/
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🔔 Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes
Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation for Humans with your host, amy. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. Today's conversation is going to focus on AI-enhanced BIM mastery. We are going to discuss winning strategies and best practices for successful project delivery. I'm honored to welcome my fantastic guest, juan Tena, from Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates multi-award winner, executive director at Keio International Consultants. Working with digital technologies, digital transformation and innovation for the built environment. Keio builds legacies for a better tomorrow, from shaping iconic skylines to crafting sustainable communities, and has been ranked among the largest global architecture firms and the number one firm in the Middle East region for three consecutive years. Welcome, juan, it's great to have you here today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Irina. It's my pleasure to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies but our ways of thinking and leading. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. It's amazing to have you here today, juan, and I'm so looking forward to this conversation. But to start with, I'm sure that our listeners and viewers are very curious about your life journey and everything you can tell about yourself, to let us understand you and your path a little bit better.
Speaker 2:So I am an architect. I did study my master's in architecture in Spain, in Gran Canaria, and I did use technology since my early studies. I did see the benefit of using technology to achieve my objectives, and not only that, I used that as well in order to be able to help my colleagues. Something that I do see as a benefit of using technology is to increase collaboration and communication as well between all the different members of the supply chain who are involved into design, construction and operations, and through my career, I've been working as an architect, working on projects and applying technology since the beginning of my career, and since then, I've been focusing more and more on the use and application of technology and how it can help businesses in being more efficient, being more sustainable and performing better.
Speaker 2:So with time, I've been, as I said, focusing more and more on this aspect. I've been for the last 10 years in the Middle East. Before I've been working in some of the mega and giga projects in the regions, working with companies worldwide, collaborating with them into these really interesting projects and working with amazing teams here as well, locally, who has been really helpful in the adoption of technology. And, similarly, I am a person who is very proactive into sharing those experiences, being part of conferences and events sharing best practices. I think it's very important to be open and to share any of your experiences to help others into going through the same path and the same maturity of being able to see how technology can help them in their journey.
Speaker 1:Sounds amazing and I'm just curious could you share a few words about the most impressive, most amazing project you've been working on in your life?
Speaker 2:Well, I've been working on quite interesting projects in my career, from airports to football stadiums which have hosted the World Cup final, or I have worked as well on digital projects. So all of the projects have the same common understanding, regardless of its complexity. Its complexity might have an impact on the different type of team members involved, into other consultants and partners who might be working on projects. So it's a matter of having in place the right strategy and the right mindset for the job.
Speaker 2:I think that it is not only about the size, on scale or complexity of the design of the project, on scale or complexity of the design of the project, but, most importantly, on how collaboration will work in a project, because I can see that the best experience for anyone working on a project is about the experience that they have among their team members, and I think that's the most important factor, more than the complexity of the project, regardless if it's an airport or a football stadium or a giga project in any of the countries where we are here in the Middle East.
Speaker 2:I think it's more about that experience with the teams, and I can say that I've been very lucky to work with various teams members internally within Kayo or with other previous employers, but also this experience with other companies that you collaborate with, and that's, for me, the most important. That's why people, at the end of the day, is really important when you work with them, when you collaborate with them, because, when it comes to the project itself, I think it might be looking different from outside looking at the type of work that you have done, but in my view, it's more relevant about how was the experience for the teams working on the project.
Speaker 1:Your words are warming up my heart because there is so much depth in wisdom in everything you just shared with us. So thank you so much for highlighting what really matters, and that is universal. It doesn't matter, I totally agree. It doesn't matter what is the project you are working on. It doesn't matter, I totally agree. It doesn't matter what is the project you are working on, it doesn't matter how big or small it is, but it matters how your experience is and how you are communicating with your team members, how you are collaborating while creating that magic together. And speaking about creating magic together, let's take one step in depth and take a look at the BIM. How can organizations strategically leverage BIM, enhanced by AI, to ensure seamless integration across all phases of a project, from planning to execution and beyond?
Speaker 2:Well, we know that BIM, which stands for Building Information Modeling, is being used extensively. We are now looking into areas where companies can use AI to help into enhancing the process of using BIM through planning, design, construction and operations, and similarly, from the client point of view, on how can AI be used in order to review and understand the products of their consultants and contractors and their supply chain as well. So we can find several tools from early planning, where you can iterate what is called generative AI, where you can easily trade through multiple options of designs to understand what will be the impact of the different design options, from better lighting analysis, comfort when it comes to wind analysis, when it comes to wind analysis, energy consumption, carbon CO2 as well and multiple analysis, where you can easily and quickly iterate through multiple options and you can choose from X number of top options and the client can decide on which of these options could be preferred. So that can, at this early phase, shorten the period of being able to understand what is the best arrangement for the plot or the community for that development. Similarly, when we come to a smaller scale of building design, once we know, understand the different requirements, we can again iterate through generative AI through multiple options to develop a more efficient program and increase the number of units by looking at a certain area, optimizing the energy consumption based on the orientation of the building, and all these different factors that can help to make early decisions that can help into developing the project further in a more efficient way with less rework. It's one of the main benefits of that as well.
Speaker 2:Now, when we progress a bit further through the design development, ai is being used in BIM in order to automate and generate certain routine tasks or tasks that can be used through AI. That can help into making the teams concentrate in more meaningful tasks and leave all these other tasks to AI tools that can help them to visualization or production. When we move into the construction phase, we can see AI tools that are helping with safety mainly. I was referring in the previous podcast to tools for health and safety, where workers can easily, using their phones, understand what are different safety factors. Safety factors we can just see the use of AI through cameras, either through pictures or through video work again for many safety reasons. You can identify basic factors that you can notify someone if they're not wearing a helmet, if they're not wearing their hippies or any other safety factor that can be triggered by analyzing the images that are being processed on site. And similarly, another use of AI on construction is through photogrammetry we are currently using in our construction supervision team and frame management team, where they are using 360 cameras in order to take records of the sites on a daily basis, where these 360 cameras will recognize the path of the worker going through the site, will capture all these pictures and will be recorded on the environment where you can easily compare at the end of the project of what was the status on a certain area and comparing how was the progress of that.
Speaker 2:And lastly, for operations, we can use this use of AI on BIM through digital twins. Digital twin is, in my view, the end of the lifecycle of the BIM process. It can then continue, of course, through the refurbishment and relativism of any asset, but the end goal is to use all of this information produced for asset management and operations. And now, with the use of digital twins, we can see as well that there are different maturities of digital twins, and one of them is the maturity that we will use AI in order to make autonomous decisions based on historical data or other data that can help you into the digital twin, make decisions by itself based on that previous history or rules that you can set so that you can actually improve the performance of an asset by understanding how it has performed compared to the previous year or the situations within that space. And these are the different AI tools that we have evaluated and seen as potential tools to use with it.
Speaker 1:It's unbelievable how those technologies are changing our ways of working and collaborating, and the efficiency level is absolutely different. But how does the integration of AI with Beam create more efficient and insightful project workflows? Can you dive a little bit deeper into that part?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 2:So one of the most time consuming tasks by any of the teams is to go through a reiterative process or a task that has a clear process of doing the same task multiple times.
Speaker 2:So AI tools can help us into either that process to make it automated or to simplify it, or to automate by itself.
Speaker 2:So all these tasks that are repetitive, that can be done through a process that can follow certain steps we see how these are being implemented right now that are helping people working on projects into focusing more on the task that can help into improving the spaces, the quality of the spaces, onto the design of any asset, more than spending the time into producing the information that will be used by contractors or by any other party for coordination or collaboration or for building that asset. So the teams will be spending less time into how to represent the work that they want to convey and they will be focusing more time into making that design more effective, more sustainable, more livable. And that's the main outcome of using AI that now people working on projects will focus more on more meaningful tasks that these repetitive tasks that may not be that proactive and meaningful for humans to be continuously doing throughout time and, similarly, it will be easier to manage and to understand how the design may be more fit for purpose than others as well.
Speaker 1:Impressive and now for all the result-oriented individuals In the context of BIM. How can AI-driven data management strategies improve decision making and lead to better project outcomes? Can you share a few examples?
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely so. As I said, bim stands for Binding Information Modeling. One of the important aspects is the I, the information. We do produce a lot of data and information as part of what we developed, and that area is one of the most important aspects on how parametric modeling and that information contained within the models is being used. So AI will help us into being more effective on understanding all that data, understanding how that data can be used for decision making. As an example, as I was explaining earlier, if you want to understand what orientation can be better for a building to be more energy efficient, you can use AI to iterate through all the different options and analyzing the data extracted from that outcome on what will be the best orientation for the building and thus understanding what could be the cost impact as well.
Speaker 2:So extracting all that data, analyzing the data and being able to make decisions from that based on the information that we produce is going to help us into making these informed decisions for a more sustainable living and, of course, a more efficient way of designing as well, to make more informed decisions and not decisions based on not analyzing the data. That could be very complex when we talk about large projects or bigger projects. It's important to be able to analyze this data quickly to make these decisions faster as well. So we can now do faster decisions. We can make decisions based on analysis of the data. Now it is very important to have a very well structured data as well, so educating people on how to enter data within those BIM models in order to make that analysis effective and realistic. It's important for people to be aware of the importance of data and how that data has to be structured in order for us to make this analysis more efficient.
Speaker 1:This is a great reminder. Data is our everything and especially when you are planning to work with artificial intelligence and create amazing success stories, data is in the core of that success and, of course, all the other factors and I always highlight that the human factor is so important but data it's my passion, love and data is the defining factor if you are going to create something amazing today and you mentioned digital twins a little bit earlier, so digital twins are transforming the construction industry and many other industries. Can you share some winning strategies for using this technology to achieve successful project delivery?
Speaker 2:So the first winning strategy is to understand the operations of the asset. So engaging facility management as early as possible within the design is one of the key factors to achieve a successful digital dream. Something that we do at yes and recommend highly is that factor, because within the Nivea List it's a common practice to have a procurement where you procure the design, then you procure the construction, then you procure the operations of the asset and therefore the facility management and operations teams are not involved within these two phases of design and construction of the project, and that can have a big effect on the use. At the end of the day, a digital twin is another tool, another platform that can help certain tasks to be delivered more efficiently. But, most importantly, you need to have the understanding and the involvement from the facility team involved earlier in the process so that you can understand we talk about data and this is one of the key aspects of digital twins, not to say them the most important aspect and how that data is a structure.
Speaker 2:It has to happen from the beginning of the project, so you have to have your data structure strategies set at the beginning of the project so that then can follow all the other steps that will happen during the design and construction period.
Speaker 2:Similarly, these data structures can be different depending on the different systems that you will be integrating with your BIM models. You may be having your BMS, your SCADA systems, your Lightning, your Gaffer solution each of the different systems that you are going to integrate with your BIM model to create a digital twin they will have to share some elements in common. You need to understand what type of data types you will be using and having, as all of these strategies are more efficient to be set at the beginning, so that you don't have any rework or any challenges later on when actually implementing the digital twin. So I think this is one of the key factors for a successful digital twin story, in addition to having a good understanding and planning for the different systems and integration of the different systems and the different security factors that the asset owner might have as well.
Speaker 1:Speaking about data and coming back to the topic of visualizing data, it is a crucial component of BIM. How can teams leverage AI-powered visualization tools to enhance that collaboration and communication among stakeholders?
Speaker 2:AI is being used now to produce images in a faster way.
Speaker 2:So that communication how do you communicate the visualization of any design is one of the tasks that you can easily do nowadays with AI image generation through basic sketches or basic models by doing a prompt of what type of architecture you would like to represent, the environment where you want that to be presented. We can see tools that you can easily integrate with either big models or even with sketches, or without having any of those, where you can easily prompt different messages and the outcome will be quick output that you can easily prompt different messages and the outcome will be a quick output that you can easily use to communicate to internally your team members on what is the type of architecture or design that you want to achieve or to provide to the clients in order to understand your vision for their development. So nowadays, you can easily integrate these AI tools to communicate the visualization of either early sketches, big models or simple and massive models, to communicate that message of intent easily, without much effort to being able to convey that message to the different team members involved.
Speaker 1:But what challenges do teams face when dealing large data sets in DIMM, and how can AI assist in maintaining data integrity and accuracy throughout the project lifecycle?
Speaker 2:So, as we were talking earlier, it's important to educate people involved into the data entries. That will be the first step to set the strategies, to educate people on how that has to be done effectively. But then, of course, you have to manage and control and to monitor how that data is being entered, and AI can help us with managing and analyzing large datasets. So if we have a clear structure that we can easily follow, analyze with tools as visual tools to analyze the data, easily digest, understand where there are areas that we have to improve, where we have to amend, where it can be used to make decisions, ai there is no need for even advanced AI tools to analyze data. There are tools that can easily just analyze data visually if you have a clear structure and clear guidelines to understand what is the status of that data that you may have.
Speaker 1:Amazing. As we wrap up today's fantastic conversation, what expert advice would you offer to leaders working in this space? Could you summarize the key winning strategies and best practices for ensuring successful project delivery?
Speaker 2:So, in my view, a key willingness strategy is to plan. It's very important to plan ahead, to spend time planning. That's one of the key studies that you have always to set. Spend time planning, as that time that you spend planning will be very effective for later on managing the project. Communicate effectively with all your team members so that they do understand what strategies and practices to follow.
Speaker 2:Communication is key for any project success. So communication, collaboration and coordination are the three most important aspects for a successful project delivery, as well as the planning of all of that on how will it happen, as well as the planning of all of that on how will it happen. Then, as I always say, there is not enough communication that is needed. As much communication as you do, the better for the teams. Don't ever assume anything. Always communicate and try to make any assumption go away, as it's important. Everyone may have a different perception of a certain aspect, so it's important to always have this open collaboration with other team members. I think that that's the most important aspects, regardless of what tools you use or the complexity of the project or how many team members you may have. The planning and then the communication, collaboration and coordination strategies that you said are, for me, the key areas for the success.
Speaker 1:It's so valuable to have this conversation with you and you know so much of what you mentioned today. I would recommend to apply it not only to our today's topic. We've been talking about DIMM, mastery and winning strategies and best practices, but if you look besides DIMM actually those winning strategies and best practices you can apply in life and it will be at least equally valuable and will help you moving forward in a sustainable way. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to have this conversation with you today. Juan, thank you for being in this studio.
Speaker 2:It was my pleasure, Amy, and I hope that the listeners found this useful.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation for Humans. I'm Amy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.
