Name: See 2027 Coming: The Data and Tools Decision-Makers Actually Need
Uploaded: 2026-09-21T18:16:37.471Z
Duration: 50 min 20 s
Description: See 2027 Coming: The Data and Tools Decision-Makers Actually Need

Transcript for "See 2027 Coming: The Data and Tools Decision-Makers Actually Need": Good afternoon, and good morning for any of our, non East Coast folks. We are gonna get started. I hope you loved that intro video. So thank you for joining us today. We are gonna be talking about planning season. You are here for the C twenty '27 coming. It's going to be a fast hour of planning and tips and tools to help you be ready for 2027. For those of you who are long time ConstructConnect users, thanks for being here. We've got a lot of great things to share. For those of you who have never heard of ConstructConnect, you've come to the best webinar you're ever gonna be at. ConstructConnect is a complete preconstruction suite software with services that will help you with everything from finding projects to, take off and estimating, managing projects at the GC level, and even having access to the largest database of construction data. So today, a lot of great things we're going to cover. First, what does it mean, what does successful annual planning look like? What are proven planning best practices? How does ConstructConnect support that planning? And then what's next in a really cool demo? And then we're gonna close out with a Q and A and some final thoughts. Real quick housekeeping items. The lines are muted. That just gives everyone a really great audio experience. It is being recorded. Tomorrow, everyone's gonna get an email with a link to that recording. You can go back at any time. So if you need dip today, that's that's great. Or if you want to go back and rewatch any of it, you can. We are gonna have some fun polls. We love audience engagement here. So when you see those come up, just take a look on the right hand side of your screen. There's gonna be a polls tab that comes up, and you can select your answers. And then we will share those. It's really great to get your guys' feedback and thoughts. So we love hearing from you. And then today we've got some amazing speakers. I'm so excited that you guys get to hear from these folks. We've got Asia and Jack who are going to kick us off in just a minute with those three, great tips for how to help have a successful planning season. And then a little later, we're going to hear from Michael, who is our product manager who handles our background on what they do, and then we'll get going. Alright. Hi, Asia. Hey, Jack. Who wants to kick us off? I'm gonna hand to Asia first. Okay. Thanks, Amanda. Hey, everyone. I am Asia Burrows. I'm a senior customer care manager with. I work closely with our enterprise customers in the building manufacturer segment. So especially around helping them get organized around their markets, find the right opportunities for them, and just make better use of all of the information that we provide them. So I'm really here to give the customer perspective. I hear how the teams are actually planning, not just what that plan looks like on paper, but where they get stuck, the obstacles that they're overcoming, to get out of that place, and then how they prioritize accounts and opportunities, and how they actually take action on their planning. Great. Yeah. Thanks, Asia. And before Asia gets to start working with their clients, I work more on the upfront side of things. So every day, I meet with manufacturers. Some are smaller regional players to, some of the largest in the nation and world. So I get to meet with them. I kinda see who's doing this process very well and who needs some improvement. And I start providing some coaching to them to leverage a lot of this data. And a lot of the best people are really using this project level data that we're gonna be talk about to go into their planning, seeing who specified, what products they have specified, and even to their competition, which we will be continuing to talk about. So thanks, Amanda. Awesome. Well, super excited. So before we jump into our, best practice section here, we're gonna throw up the first poll. So we wanna know which of these items are part of your 2026 planning process today. Got a couple different options. It is a multi select. Feel free to start clicking in and letting us know. This is just fun for us to to get a sense of our audience and what's top of mind for you guys. Alright. Top two. Resonating. And you're already in the right place if you're doing any kind of, next year planning. We just want to expand on that some more. All right. So it looks like the top two selections are winning. The, segmenting by market growth potential, not just historical share. Building pipeline coverage around early stage, planning stage, project visibility. So very cool. Thank you everyone for answering that. It's really helpful. We are now going to do a fun fireside chat with Asia and Jack. We're gonna discuss what good planning looks like. So, a lot of the things we just talked about in the poll are gonna slide right in here. So to kick off, what are good trends that you guys are seeing with the most involved customers when it comes to planning? Yeah. So I'll start off start us off on this one. Would like to introduce everybody to a term that we refer to as spec share. So really starting generically is to understand a few things about that. What spec share is is how, much of the total addressable market is appropriate to your business and your products, how much of specification do you have, how much does your specification overlap with other players out in the market, for example, your competition, and then also, to just compare those numbers. So where we sole spec'd, where's our competitors spec'd, where we both spec'd, How are we addressing the, the data and projects where we're listed and going and attacking those? How are we growing against our competitors where we're both mentioned? And then how are we really going after and chasing where competitors spec'd? So it really understands with and really starts with understanding kind of the spec presence of that. And another thing we're seeing people do is instead of just addressing your products and your competitors' products, is addressing industry terms. So are there any, UL regulations you meet? Are there any safety standards that you meet? You'll be able to search, and you can search those specs, and you'll find some new areas to market yourself in. So those are kind of the three instances of spec share you really want to figure out, and our best clients are understanding about their business before they continue to enter this phase. Yeah. And, that's massive. That's something that I also see on my side of the business as well. The other two trends that I commonly see, first, it they're actually the two, top answers in the poll. So first, the customers are realizing that broad industry averages, can hide what's actually happening in their market. Right? Even if the overall industry is growing, that doesn't mean that every sector, geography, product category, or whatever is important to you is growing at that same rate. So the question's becoming more about where is that growth actually coming from, does it matter to us, is the national and overall industry number. If that's looking positive, does our segment of that number look positive as well? Is it going along those same trend lines? So it's kind of really deep diving into the numbers versus just taking that national average. Second, teams are looking earlier. So they're putting more value on planning activity, early stage project visibility instead of waiting until things are in the bidding pipeline. If you're only looking at the closed business and current backlog, you're mostly looking in your rearview mirror. Right? If you're wanting to plan, you need to look at what's coming up. So those are kind of along with what Jack said, those are the main trends that I'm seeing. Perfect. So then once they have the data and understand the numbers, how do you execute the plan? Yeah. So what you need to do is, identify a team. So if you have a team ready, that's great. But a lot of the clients that we talk to are still in the early stages of, hey. How do I use this information? We just call it a champion. So oftentimes, putting a champion around this information, to kinda spearhead it just to start, and you'll kinda hear me talk a little bit more about that later. But a lot of the times, hey. Is there a rising person in your company that comes to your mind? You know, a lot of people on this call are leaders, executives, vice presidents, managers, of different segments. Is there somebody in your organization that is raising their hand and asking for more responsibility? It could be a salesperson. It could be somebody in marketing. Right? So just kind of identifying who that person is, and maybe it's somebody who's been there for many years and, has taken really great interest and has an analytical approach to things. It's a great place to start finding that person. Yeah. And then once you kind of have that plan in place and you have that person, I think for me, quarterly review processes and trigger points are going to be the the main thing. You really wanna make planning that living process. The annual plan provides the direction that you're heading, but those quarterly reviews and those trigger limits are really where you can actually impact the outcome of it. Instead of it just being a number that you're writing down on a spreadsheet and saying, oh, here's our goal for the next year, and then it kinda gets filed away and forgotten about. Right? You have trigger points that say, you know, if you see competitor activity change really heavily above or below a certain threshold, you start diving back into that plan and reevaluating it. Or if your team grows or no longer has the capacity to support the opportunity or things like tariffs are put in place and you really need to kind of dive in and reevaluate that plan, you have those trigger points already set to say, if something like this happens, we're going to take a look at this again. And then also you have that quarterly review that's saying, do we need to kind of evaluate it? So the quarterly review process is, you know, what's changing, what does that change mean to us, what action are we gonna take, who owns that action to Jack's point, and when are we gonna check back in? Do we need to set a new trigger limit, or is this something that can wait for our quarterly review process? Yeah. Okay. And and from there, we kinda look at it in two segments with some of our clients. At the end of the day, you know, where is the sale coming in in the process to you? So look at it as a short term win and a more long term win. Some of that short term win is protecting that spec share that we talked about earlier. Right? It's using tools to identify when we are being spec'd and when jobs are starting or starting to start your process and making sure our products are picked. So you have some very actionable, tangible, short term sales cycle information to deal with. And then that second portion of that is understanding architects and engineers. That's who's specifying your materials, who's specifying your competitor materials, and playing the long game. And that's really where our clients see year over year growth using systems and planning like this, making sure you're targeting these architects and engineers successfully. And we have such great tools that have come out that Michael's gonna talk to you all and show you how people are doing that, after Asia and I are done talking here. Awesome. Okay. So final question. So what are some improvements you would recommend customers start to incorporate? I have a nice short one for us here, around that champion as well. We get to talk to a lot of people, and some people are slow to execute, and some people are quick to execute. One of the items we've adopted, especially with developing products here, is to stop waiting for the perfect plan, and just start doing and start having these conversations internally. Put the meeting on your calendar. Start doing the research. And, to wrap us up on this, right, when's the best time to plant a tree? It was a year ago or twenty years ago, and the second best time is today. So that's that's the last piece of advice here. And, yeah, for me, I would say that I teams should and I know this is some of the poll answers, so I'm sorry. I'm not trying to call you out. But, teams should should stop simply just rolling last year's numbers forward. Taking what you did last year in that sales number and then slapping on a target, like, eight percent growth and calling that the planning process being complete, is something that we really need to kind of dive into a bit more. Why where did that 8% come from? It it may be reasonable. It may not. But by itself, it doesn't tell you where that growth is actually happening. If you, for example, have a product that works in data centers, but you weren't targeting that last year, that's gonna be a much bigger planning gap than simply adjusting your goal by a few percentage points. Right? So you need to ask yourself, what are we missing? Where are the gaps that we're missing? What does that market trend look like? How much of that do we actually think we can get on top of just our normal additional sales? And then who's influencing that opportunity and how are we going about it differently. So you wanna build goals instead of just the revenue that you've had previously. Give it more of a complete view. That's what I think. And that actually does kind of I don't know, Amanda, if you were gonna segue to Michael, but as Jack mentioned earlier as well, perfect segue into what Michael's gonna talk about because all of that starts coming together in analytics. You get where the market's moving. You get to look ahead at future starts, understanding specification positioning, and even identifying those company relationships, all to the opportunity. So we'll pass it over to Michael to show you that now. Perfect. Well, thank you, Asia. Thank you, Jack. We do have one more fun poll that we wanted to share with you guys. We're curious. So what's missing from your annual planning process today? And as you guys are answering this, we'll transition to bringing Michael on. He's got some great demo and additional planning, thoughts for you guys to consider. So your options to pick from are visibility into early stage planning projects, a clear view of specification share and how it's shifting, state or territory level market trend data, and a way to track plan versus actual throughout the year, not just year end. Okay. We have a lot of votes for what's missing being the visibility into early stage planning projects. Okay. Cool. Thank you, guys, for taking this poll. It was really helpful. And with that, we are going to have Michael on here. You're gonna get the next one. And I'm gonna leave it up to Michael. Hey, Michael. Thanks, Amanda. Thanks, Asia and Jack. One of the things I love about working here at ConstructConnect is not just all of 100 of customers to work with, but such a talented team, of peers. So we're gonna work through just two slides, and then I'll kinda jump into the demo. I wanna give you a little bit of context on the demo. So, one, very much in conjunction with how Jack and Asia were framing up kind of planning. We're calling it annual planning, but it could really map to quarterly as well. But is, you know, these questions and I think Asia had kind of even better terminology about, like, trigger points. But where do we stand? What's our position in the market? You know? And I think the first poll kind of jumped out that that was a a really hot topic for everyone. And then from that market position about where we stand, like, where do we wanna focus? Where are we targeting? Where where is our competitor, etcetera? Those target areas. And then how are we gonna track our progress? If we decided to go into particular territory with marketing funds or to reshuffle some territories, how are we gonna know it's working or not working? So these are kind of, you know, like, just a little bit, of planning steps or questions to kind of what Jack and Asia were kind of elaborating on. So if I go to the next step, a lot of what we're doing when we think about our analytics solutions is really thinking about not just providing them a bunch of data that we have, a lot of rich capable data that most folks know about, is how do we actually support some of the workflows, the planning workflows you're describing, all of the information that we kind of have available? How do we position it so it's easy to get to? Planning can be kind of a a rigorous and kind of frustrating process sometimes. We talked your second poll question had to do with things that are missing. So how do we kind of supplement, you know, what we have is from rich data and and to support the planning process? I'm gonna go through Keith's four different dashboards, you know, the market overview and what we're planning to do for forecast. You know, where do we focus about how do we target companies? And then lastly, the monitoring piece that Jack and Asia emphasized a bunch on specification positioning. So I'm gonna take a moment just to kinda share my screen. Hopefully, it's gonna go really quickly. I'm gonna stop sharing this button, then I'm gonna share here. Okay. I think oops. I'm on the wrong tab. There we go. So I'm gonna walk you through a couple of these dashboards. The first one is very much about market position. This dashboard is called market overview. I'm gonna walk you through that quickly. But first, I wanna take a step back. When we're thinking about kind of not just the dashboards themselves, we're thinking about how they work and collaborate together. So if you'll notice in this left hand panel, we're starting to think about market overview, company targeting, specific specification positioning, and eventually forecast is how they work together. And so if you notice a little bit from a design standpoint, you it almost lines up about how your annual planning or how your quarterly planning set of slides might be. Probably not quite there yet, but this is how we imagine this idea about can we support kind of customers with the all the data we have about in their kind of planning process. So I'm gonna go through market overview really quickly. What I've done is I've pre filtered all of these so you're not waiting for kind of the screens to load, be, sensitive at the time. But in this case, the market overview is a dashboard that's just looking at our robust project data of 1,600,000 projects. I filtered it down already, and you can see what I've done. I've decided to kind of filter by start date. I could have picked bid date, but in this case, I picked start date for a couple of reasons. I wanna do a comparison about last year, year to date to this year year to date. So through kind of August, first couple few weeks of September, I wanna compare last year to this year. I've specifically picked data centers for, a hot topic we all know about. And then I'm gonna focus in on project type, which we're calling new construction. And so what I've done is I've pre filtered this already. And what this is telling me is things what we already kinda largely know. The project count year over year is up 95%. The project value, the app is up, you know, a big number. The average project value is up tremendously. I can see some of these charts, but what we've done is we've started to incorporate a little bit of AI to not kind of do anything kind of fancy other than summarize the page. And so you can see over here in this dashboard summary, new construction data centers for this year totals 273 projects worth four sixty six. Where do those numbers come from? They're right here. Two seventy three to four sixty six. And I can see how it compares to last year. What's interesting is we're now putting some bullet points here to say, like, the third quarter of this year led quarterly activity at a 126 projects. Right? Project values at greater than a 100,000,000 accounted for the bulk of the volume, reaching a 181 projects up from 73 last year. Texas and Virginia paced state level distribution. Let's just glance at the the map. Texas and Virginia. If I wanted to see more about those specific projects, I can click here, and I can look at them by MSA or county, or I can just see the list of the projects. You can see the trends. You can see how project value, particularly in q three, has gone up. You can see average project value. I can see the distribution here about count tremendous kind of year over year growth and count project value and average project value. If you remember earlier in the summary, it's saying how much those $100,000,000 plus projects have grown. Look what the the value distribution shows us. Again, I can click on this to see the detail of that, Nick, but I can get a quick glance. At any point in time, if I want if I'm doing my planning process, I can kinda take this sheet, and I can kinda summarize it. I can take this chart if this is what I wanted to say, and I can download this and just take the little screenshot, incorporate it into my slides. Or what you can do is you can just take a PDF of the whole page. And so if you had something about data centers in the in the Southwest, you could put together a one pager story and to kinda incorporate that into your story or share with an executive. So, again, this is where we're kinda trying to align some of the planning workflows that y'all kind of have to go through. Let me show you kind of you know, obviously, when we look at the market overview, you know, it's giving us this historical year to date. We can see, project count and value increasing year over year. But what does that what does that mean going forward? So it's not here currently, but what's coming, later the latter part of this year is we're gonna have another dashboard supporting a forecast start. We currently have a forecast starts offering. We have twenty years plus of data that's used in our forecast, but we're gonna now start to bring in an interactive dashboard. Let me show you that a little bit. So it's not available yet. It's gonna come probably in the early to latter parts of November. And in here, what I'm gonna do is just take this, and this is a mock. So I'm just showing you kind of what it's gonna look like. I'm gonna take a couple of years of forecast. You can see it's got a little bit of the forecast sector trends, where the trends are by map, by subcategories, and I'm gonna pick a particular category. Let's see if I can pick data centers. Oh, I'm gonna refresh this. Data center is not working on the prototype. That's okay. I'm gonna refresh this a little bit just to see it. Here it is. Again, this is still a prototype. This is how you would imagine. So now I filtered these results in this prototype down to just seeing kind of what it looks like. I can expand that to the years to see a forecast. 2027, '27 and '8, '29. I can start to do that. So this is an interactive dashboard that we're planning to kind of make available. So much like Jack and Asia talked about earlier about planning, we have this other dashboard that we're kind of, focused on on called company targeting. And it's exactly what you you think it, it it means. You know, who are the organizations that we should be targeting? And so what we've done here is we've aligned to a certain number of keyword searches in the search platform, and we've aligned those kind of searches based on HVAC brands as an example. So you can see familiarity wise is that the market overview and the company targeting are kind of similar and kind of look and feel because we want the familiarity about learning. So as you figure out one dashboard, you should be able to figure them all out. And so in this case, what we've done is I picked these, four or five keyword searches related to HVACs. I picked big date. And to Asia's point earlier about, like, you know, don't tell me about what happened. Tell me what's happening. I picked a forward facing, the second half of the year on date range on these HVAC projects and vendors. I particularly focused in on engineering role companies that may be aligned with me. And so what I've done is I've now kind of start to see, like, well, how many planning stage projects are these? What's in bidding? And then what's in post bid based on, you know, going from July to the end of the year? So I'm getting a kind of robust mix of projects. Again, we're doing the the AI summary. It's not making a recommendation. It's just kind of highlighting the facts in all of these summaries. We think it's a really effective way of just leveraging AI to kind of help a user to just understand what's happening with all the data we're putting in front of them. And you can see things like where momentum is changing, which particular kind of, engineering firms are kinda leading the way. All of these things kind of, like, are highlighted in the summary. But I wanna kinda you know, just having the summary kind of, isn't enough. We wanna explore these companies. So you can see what I've done is I've kind of if I'm really interested in carrier and, let's say, Daikin primarily, I can kinda see how those company distributes in terms of my counts of projects across these stages, you know, for, carrier, Daikin, etcetera. And I can kind of hover over each of these, and I can see, well, that's a structural engineer, maybe not relevant to me. They have a lot of planning projects, a lot of, you know, carrier projects. Well, Henderson, these guys are kinda interesting to me because they're civil and that we've done civil work before potentially. And I can kinda see, you know, they have some planning projects, but they have an equal balance of these two projects. Maybe this is interesting to me. So what I can do is I can drill into this, and I can learn more about Henderson in this example. And what happens when you drill in, you can eventually get to a detail page about Henderson. And what we've done recently, as of July is to enable users who can tap into the 600,000 companies that we have, working with the platform. And you can see of those, you know, here's a little bit about, Henderson engineers. I can tell who their top candidates what does collaborators mean? So numb it shows the other companies this company works alongside most often on projects, requires at least two two shared projects to to appear. So now I can see they're very heavily engaged with Walmart. There's another architect firm in Kansas City. I can see who they worked with before. Very off oftentimes in our trials to date, we've seen customers say, oh, I know those guys or I know a person over there. So we're trying to kind of evolve the interest in Henderson and Henderson Engineering from not only just a cold call, but kind of a warm kind of touch to outreach. You can see below in those same keyword searches, I can see which keyword searches they hit on. Again, like we saw, terror and daikin the most. Interesting that they've done a lot projects with Mitsubishi before. I didn't even list that in my search, but I've kind of, captured that as well. So this is kind of a way we're seeing a way to kind of engage, not just kind of like, you know, you start with a plan and you start with your focus here and, like, okay. So what am I what are my guys gonna go go focusing on? You know, what are the companies? And you can do these company targetings both at the regional level, national level, regional level, territory level to be able to find the companies that are making the most sense. On the company targeting, you'll see we have about 15 plus filters to enable kind of, you know, be able to kind of, you know, be really, really specific about what you're looking for. The keyword searches are kind of fundamental here. Jack and and and Asia and I work often together. They're really key because we're looking at the documents that we have to kind of really pinpoint, get the right kinds of projects in the right organizations. Let me show you kind of a little bit about where we're heading on specification. We have an existing specification dashboard, in place. And the specification positioning, we're using the term specification, which is gonna be a little bit manufacturing centric. But, really, the idea is we're taking these kind of various keyword searches. You know, Jack emphasized that it could be a a an engineering technique. It could be a variety of things. And we are allowed to kind of, like, get those and then be able to kind of evaluate. We're loosely this will probably come out in the coming weeks, but you'll see where this idea about where are we winning and what's driving our position. The language might change, here as we get closer to release. But this idea of the same thing, I've got this summary. I've got the total project count, project value. I can select those. Again, I'm sticking with my carrier example. You can see I can hover and see, you know, which carrier excuse me, which HVAC provider is kinda leading by state based on the color. I can look at specific trends. Again, this is the kind of the monitoring element that you'd look at quarter over quarter based on the decisions you've made. You know? Where do we have overlap? What's the value distribution? What's driving our position? This is where we can see, like, is it in health care? Is it in education? You know, what CSI division is are we kind of, making the most impact or, affect where we're seeing it show up? This probably the next two tables where we see the most excitement from, initial folks that we've talked to on planning is looking at, specification share by state. So we've taken those various items, carrier, train, Lennox, etcetera. We've kind of pivoted on this table, and now we can say the total projects in the specs here by state. And if we have it by state, we can then take those search tags, and we can kinda compare it year over year to see how it's changing. This is where we really think we're supporting the the planning process with the with these dashboards. Let me I'm sure, Amanda's wanting me to go faster, but I'm gonna kinda go show you one more thing. We talked a little bit about those keyword searches. We talked a little bit about data centers, and HVAC. But there's a way to kind of in some of this, my colleagues on the search side, Jared and Darcy, they're working to make search a lot easier and much more compelling. So in this case, I'm I maybe I do HVAC work, I'm interested in tapping into the data center, how do I be able to get there. And so you can use kind of these specific keyword searches in a really robust way. And it's gonna get easier to be able to kind of search things like very high end HVAC that would only be used in data centers. So you see, I've done some things like, you know, things that I only I'm not even familiar with, like hot aisle, cold aisle kind of things. But you can start to see these kinds of projects kind of list some of the data centers popping out here. So it allows you to be creative. So, like, folks like Asia really kind of this is where they they shine, where they can kinda help you get really specific, really kinda target target kind of what your searches need to be and how you can go, you know, support planning. I'd be remiss if I didn't show Darcy's feature about search assist. This is where you can use AI in your own language versus kind of writing some detailed kind of writing in a doc in a keyword search to use your own language to be able to kind of search on projects. Amanda, I'm gonna pass it back to you. Thank you, Michael. And I'm pretty sure we all know Darcy and Jared by name now, so thank you for that. Really great stuff. I don't know if you could see all the thumbs up and claps, And I know you couldn't see the QA chat that was blowing up. But you got a lot of great feedback from that demo. So thank you. We have one more slide that you can help me with, which is the, additional planning support that we have. We've dropped several of these links in chat for you already, but we wanted to mention that we have great economic insights that our economics team puts together and shares out. There's a link for our economic resources in the chat as well as the documents tab. We also, this fall, have the construction economy outlook, which is where we take half of the year's data. We look at what's happened and what's coming up. We get the biggest economists in the industry together, and we have a lot of fun. And, you should join that if you have any questions or need any forecasting, historical trend data, to look at what's coming up. And then we also have a very new data center construction market report. So if data centers are on your radar and you wanna know more and you wanna know where things look like they're going, hit us up. There's another link for that in the documents tab as well. Okay. So we are gonna get to the last and I don't know if we can top as much fun as what we've done already, but we're going to try. This is the Q and A section. I'm going to invite all of our speakers, on the stage. And, when we were going through all of the questions submitted, there were quite a few economic ones in there. So we actually have a special guest today, Devin Bell, who is our senior economist? We're gonna go with that today, senior economist. And he's gonna help answer some questions that y'all submitted, as well as some product and other planning questions. So strap in. The first question is for you, Michael. How can AI help with planning models? Well, in this context, models can mean a couple different things, but we'll take a good stab at it. So, really, I think where AI can shine on a planning standpoint is a lot of what you'll get from executives is this what if situation. What if we did Texas? What if we went to Miami? What if we did this? And so I think using AI models, particularly off the shelf ones, can kinda help you kind of take the data you have and be able to kind of run these kind of what if scenarios. I mean, that's probably, like, one of the easiest things to do. The second thing I I think is relevant here is about, assessing risk. Right? You know? Hey. Where's in this data that I'm working with and in this kind of plan that I have? Where do I think my risk is? Think of it more as as the AI solution or the model kind of just offering it, a different perspective. It may not be right. You may have the information. It's you should have information that it does have, but it might offer kind of a slightly different perspective. So I think, you know, Amanda, it's really kinda like the what if scenarios and then the risk kind of, you know, evaluation or kind of assessment. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. We're gonna go to Jack next. And people wanna know, what is the easiest way to find out a spec that's called out for an opportunity? Yeah. That's that's great. So, as you saw in that video when we started, there's over 2,000,000 projects you can sort through. So, I think it's 15,000 new updated jobs and specs a month. So, it's overwhelming at times. That's really where myself and Asia come in, and we start to get hyper specific on your segments. So filtering down by, hey. Do you wanna target schools, apartments, civil work? And, what Michael showed you with that search assist, I often refer to that on my demonstrations as a Google search bar for every active construction project. So being able to apply those filters kinda takes thousands and thousands of scary opportunities, really can filter them down to maybe just 50, maybe just a 100, right, depending on how large your sales team is, Setting those in place. Once you set them, they're done. And then, lastly, once you set those filters, you actually get daily email updates when new projects hit that. So your specs mentioned, your competitors' specs are mentioned, every morning you wake up and there's a new list of projects that, hit what you search. So once you search it once and set them, which we help you do, they kinda just work in the background. Alright. We're gonna punt it to The Economist for a moment. So what is the forecast for multifamily construction starts in 2027 looking like? Yeah. Thanks for having me. 2026 has been a bad year for, for multifamily construction. We we've observed, 12% down year to date so far, compared to the same period last year. And, that's that's been for a for a couple reasons. Big part has been still high financing costs. So at the beginning of the year, it's pretty ubiquitous that the, the expectation was, interest rates cuts were coming this year from the the Federal Reserve. That did not materialize. You know, if you've been following the news last week for the first time since 2023, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. So, you know, that has not helped, the multifamily construction market. And that leads me to, you know, what what we're looking at for 2027. So compared to the the the drawback we've seen in 2026, we are expecting, you know, modest 3% growth, for 2027. Awesome. And I'm sure we'll have even more fun details like that for the full, construction economy webcast. So perfect. Alright, Michael. We're coming back to you. So how can AI be used in helping, pull all of this information that we've seen together? Couple a couple of ways. I think most folks when they probably went through planning in previous years, when they went through planning, we'll say something, I wish we were able to get to this data, or I wish we could have done this analysis, or I wish we could have a variety of things. I think AI, because of its broad reach and then access to be able to data, can probably bring in some variables that previously you you may not have thought were available to you or were difficult to get to. So I think that's a, definitely one way to do it. The other way I I mean, this is what we're actively using too, is to is to do better quality checks and better checks. Like, I'm bringing all this data. Does the the data of my slides match the data of my spreadsheet? You know, very simple kind of just QA and quality control around, you know, scanning my data. Like, hey. Before I go to present this, is there anything that doesn't make any sense? So So I think those two elements, I think that incorporating new valuables, even to Devin's point, like, new macroeconomic stuff that you would have never considered, like, is it now available to you in a in a model that you can pull in? And then just better better checking of your work, better quality checks. Awesome. Good context. Alright. Asia, I have one for you. It's kind of a long one. So how can I use ConstructConnect not just to chase individual projects, but to identify the design firms and engineers who are repeatedly influencing lighting specifications across multiple projects so that I can build relationships with those firms before the next project even appears? Yeah. So, there's a few a few different ways that we have, that you can do this. I I know in the chats, people were asking. They're still on Insight, and so they were asking about the analyze segment. And then I know some people don't have access to Michael's, analytics yet. So the easiest way is going to be analytics. Right? Michael made it really simple with the company targeting and specification positioning to kind of go in and select either if you have a tag set up, specifically for lighting keywords or, you could have one for yourself, one for some competitors all within the lighting industry. Having those tags set up and pulling them in and kind of seeing all of your specifications for that as well as the companies that are doing those specs, that's gonna be the easiest, most straightforward way. Alternatively, for the people that don't have access to that yet, you can do, some cross searching. So you could do a search for the keywords within a document and then toggle over to see the companies. Instead of seeing that project list, you would see a company list, and you would be able to see how many matching projects each of those companies have. So you could kind of go through that list and see who is doing it the most. It's not gonna put in a nice, neat little order with all of the graphs and everything like that that Michaels has, but you can get similar data that way and at least give you a place to start. And then for the people on insight, in the analyze segment there, kind of same way you would utilize the tags in CCPI, you would be able to enter in yourself, your competitors, the generic keywords that Jack mentioned at the very beginning, just kind of keywords for the lighting industry as a whole. And if you ever need help coming up with any of the keywords, whether you're on CCPI or Insight, your customer success manager can help with that. But through the analyze segment there as well, at the very bottom of it, there is a company section, and that's where you can go to see all of the companies that are speccing it. From there, you can narrow down, in both of the analytics. You can narrow down if you're wanting to see architects or engineers and kind of fine tune that a little bit more. So if you're wanting to look specifically for electrical engineers in this example or lighting consultants, you can do that. So that was very long winded, but there's there's multiple ways. Analytics makes it really easy, though. It was a long question, so I think that was perfect. Okay. We're gonna circle the Devon again. So what's the state of the construction economy? Are we at the bottom of the downturn? Yeah. So, I I think it really depends on where you're at in the construction economy. Asia made this point earlier about, your growth isn't uniform. You really have to pay attention to where you're at in the market, and and target growth opportunities. So we we've seen 14.8% year to date growth in nonresidential construction starts. A big part of that has been data centers. I I think everybody knows, data centers have become such a big part of the construction, industry. But we've also seen several other construction categories like, like prisons, like, hospitals, sees pretty significant growth outside of data centers. So it it's really about targeting, the right markets for your business that are expected to see growth, and it it's it's approaching the market with Nuance, is really important at this point. Yeah. Awesome. We've got a little bit more time. So, Michael, there was a question about, does your AI solution make recommendations? Yeah. No. We're trying to avoid the idea of recommendations at at at the current time. What we're doing is basically just trying to summarize the facts. I think what you'll see soon or next is probably this we're wrestling with the idea about making project recommendations, like what's the right project that might be a fit for you, but not doing in a kind of a, you know, an overbearing way, almost like a very suggestion like, hey, what about this project? It seems like it's fit, you know, and then having the person kind of thumbs up, thumbs down. I think that's something that we're we're experimenting with right now. And that's probably kind of the first that'll be the first foray into kind of recommendations. I think you'll see search assist happen first, which would just like using your own language to kind of search projects that'll happen first. And then from there, I think there's next logical step. Well, why search if you already know who I am and and what I do? Can you just suggest some items? And I think that's that'll be the natural evolution. Awesome. Okay. We just had one come in for Jack. So can we expect a way to create a search by more specific CSI codes? For example, 0772 is a rooftop item, but there's hundreds of subcategories. Yeah. That's wonderful. So you're not alone. When it is to find your specific products can be challenging. And one of the reasons why I love this system is you can I'll get to, like, the specifics of that, but you can actually use that as an in to talk to architects and engineers. Right? A lot of times when you're searching that specific, a different a and e could specify you in the wrong section. They could specify it incorrectly. And, a lot of things we do on the customer side is Asia will will coach people to use that as you're in to do your lunch and learn and to get on the specs and to fix their spec up, specify some competitive advantages you have that your competition doesn't, whether it's warranty, product type, different standards. But, Natasha, on our new platform, it does get pretty granular. We'll take a look after this and, really see if your section needs to be there. But there are hundreds of CSI codes now to scroll through and select, and we can also use that search function to search that exact code, and it will show up, that code when it pops up on specs. But that is a very common question and not just, your industry. So thanks for asking it. Awesome. Thanks, Jack. Alright. We're gonna do one final q and a question, and then we'll wrap and let you go and be back to your day. But this one's for Devin. What are the conditions of the commercial real estate market? Are commercial projects still getting financed? Yeah. So I I think this builds off, my answer to the last question about, approaching the market with Nuance. So I I took a look at the Federal Reserve's senior loan officer outlook survey. We it's, overall, the expectations are are getting looser, which is a good thing. And also demand has has increased in the the nonfarm, nonresidential, area of, commercial real estate financing. But but there's still big variations, in the in in what is getting financed. So so, yes, commercial projects are still getting financed, but it it really depends on what the project is, and those sorts of things. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Well, I think for the sake of time, we're gonna wrap it there. If there were any questions in the Q and A we didn't get to, we will do our best to reach out to you after the webinar. I will let all of my fine folks head off stage if they are ready, but we would just wanna thank everyone for joining us today. Again, this is recorded, so if you miss anything or need to, go back and rewind, you absolutely can. We will, send that out in an email for you tomorrow. And, again, if there's anything we can do here at ConstructConnect, with our suite of pre construction services and software, we're more than happy to help. Drop us an email, head to our website, hit that get demo button, and we will be more than happy to help you. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks.