Inside buildingSMART - The Future of IFC with Eric Bugeja

Andrea Ciaffi

Hi Eric, welcome to the Digital Construction Podcast.

Eric Bugeja

Hey, good morning, Andrea. Nice to talk to you.

Andrea Ciaffi

So in this episode, we sit down with Eric Bujaya. He's A chairperson of Building Smart Australasia. He's a member of the board at Building Smart International. He's a director there. I'm very excited for this episode. Eric also runs his own business, which is focused on consulting and training, and it's called Catherine.

Andrea Ciaffi

He worked in large design and construction firms. He started his career as a mechanical engineer and there is also an interesting story there. I'm very excited he can share with us about the beginning of his career. But he's always, now at the moment he's busy working on open standards and trying to adopt technologies to drive efficiency and supporting the global community.

Andrea Ciaffi

So, I'm very excited for this episode, Eric, and thanks for joining us today on the on the on this episode of the Digital Construction Podcast. Before we start, I have a question that I ask everyone, because I think it's a great opportunity to share a few life lessons.

Andrea Ciaffi

And what is the best advice you've ever received in your career?

Eric Bugeja

Oh, that's a tough question. There's been lots of advice. I think the best thing that I've been told is, well, firstly, always act with integrity. And if you really believe in something that, you know, you keep following it, right? So you just always act with integrity.

Eric Bugeja

But more importantly, and I think that's something that not everybody does is just try new things. Like, don't be scared to try new things. Just have a go. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And just keep trying again. But, and I guess that's partly, you know, sort of relates to what I try to do with people is to just tell them to have a go.

Eric Bugeja

Don't be scared of the technology. have a go. And that's something I've done my whole life. If I see something new, I'll just give it a try. If it fails, it fails. If it doesn't, it doesn't. But I've learned something new. So that's the piece of advice I would give is just keep trying and don't be scared to try new things.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, I love it, love it. And you have a very interesting story about the beginning of your career when you were sitting with your boss in his 60s and you were a graduate mechanical engineer. Can you share with us what happened?

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, I had a bit of an unusual start to my career as a young mechanical engineer. I ended up leaving uni and working with a, I say old, but I don't see him as old now because I'm almost close to the same age.

Eric Bugeja

But he was a very experienced engineer in his 60s, a Dutch engineer, travelled the world. And one thing he said to me, which was quite unusual, is, I will teach you about engineering, but you teach me about the technology. You tell me how we can do things better.

Eric Bugeja

And at the time, I did not realise that that was quite an unusual experience for a graduate to come in and actually try and, you know, teach and learn both ways. So I was, we were a two-man company, so I was just given complete flexibility to go and look at technologies and how we could do things better.

Eric Bugeja

And he just taught me about all disciplines of engineering, so I became quite rounded in what I'd learned. But when I then moved to, when I left him and went to a larger firm, I found that that's not how other engineers experienced it.

Eric Bugeja

You come into an organization and you get told this is the way we do things. We've been doing it like this for a long time and you must comply and do it that way. And I just never accepted that, I guess, because of what I'd learned and how we'd adapted.

Eric Bugeja

And I do hope, and I know when I have engineers work with me in the past, I've tried to learn from them. So I think that's an important message that, you know, learning can go both ways. We can learn from young people, young graduates in terms of the technology and how they do things, but they can learn from our experience.

Eric Bugeja

So Yeah, it was quite a, and I remember just on that, when I did join a larger company and I started using, at the time, started using computers and software and 3D design software particularly, I would get told as an engineer that that's not my role.

Eric Bugeja

Your job is not to use computers and software. Your job is to sketch stuff. work out the calculations and give it to a drafter. And I tried to explain, well, this software is actually engineering design software. It's not drafting software that I'm using.

Eric Bugeja

This is how I do my design. And just one very quick example. I was asked to design and to automate a production line. And I had two weeks to do the work. And I used some 3D design software. Well, I started using 2D CAD to try and design it.

Eric Bugeja

and it was taking way too long. So I won't say how I got the software, but I got a particular piece of 3D design software, had the design done in two days, went to my boss and my boss basically said to me, you can't submit this because we've allowed two weeks to do the work and that's what we're charging for.

Eric Bugeja

And that just gave me an indication, right, of the efficiency and how we run as an organisation. And here we are in 2026 and we probably still have some of those attitudes.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Even in previous podcasts with other people, one of the challenges is in this industry is our job, the job is procured. Like people are expecting to spend time and then at the same time trying to optimize time, which is a bit, yeah.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

You started your career, as you said, like designing physical machinery, but how did you end up leading multidisciplinary BIM team and how did you make this transition and what was the

Eric Bugeja

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

hardest part of that shift?

Eric Bugeja

I guess I'm the sort of person which is more of a generalist. I don't like to stick if one thing, I want to know a little bit about everything. So I was working in manufacturing automation and I joined a consultancy where I was the technical lead, mainly in food processing area.

Eric Bugeja

But I guess I always had that background in trying to adapt technology just through the automation stuff I was doing as well. And just by luck, I ended up leading an industry and resources team, which was specialized across multiple areas.

Eric Bugeja

And then because of my knowledge of some of the technology, I started working to bring together an architectural and building engineering team to get them to collaborate better. And that's where BIM really became the catalyst to help with that collaboration between the engineers and the architects.

Eric Bugeja

So having a team where I could control that a little bit and we all aligned in the way we worked and we just saw the efficiency gain that we had by bringing that together. I made a choice at that point to give up a management role of the team and the project director work I was doing on transport projects.

Eric Bugeja

to focus, I just saw the massive opportunity around, particularly the adoption of BIM, not just the 3D modelling side, but just the efficiency gain. So I gave up that role, took up a role within that organisation to develop strategy for the company. And that's where my career ended up going.

Eric Bugeja

So then worked for a large construction company, basically doing a similar thing. We're trying to understand requirements and trying to drive the efficiency, not just from 3D modelling, but just from good structured data and how that all comes together in collaboration. Like that example I gave to you from my very early days, trying to take that onto the large scale.

Eric Bugeja

You know, this is something that we should have been doing for a long time. And it's It's just almost obvious to an extent the efficiency gain that we can unlock. And we're still almost struggling as an industry to still question the value. And I think we're now beyond that question.

Eric Bugeja

So yeah, the transition just sort of happened a little bit by accident, but because this was always a passion for mine, I've always had a passion for technology and adapting technology since I was a little kid. So Yeah, when I graduated, IT was something new or information technology was something new.

Eric Bugeja

I went into engineering, but I still always had that passion for technology. And here I am now, trying to drive it into the industry.

Andrea Ciaffi

It's exciting. And we mentioned already that you are the chairperson of Building Smart Australasia. You're also director of Building Smart International. And I'm sure many of the listeners are already familiar with what Building Smart is. But I think not everybody understands the structure of Building Smart International, its original chapters, and how Australasia fits in the global picture, the non-profit ethos.

Andrea Ciaffi

But for somebody hearing the name Building Smart for the first time, how would you explain what it does and why it exists?

Eric Bugeja

So Building Smart's been around since probably the late 90s. I think it's late, yeah, I think the late 90s. But it was created, it was actually performed by a lot of software vendors coming together. And there was a demand in the industry to basically have information shared.

Eric Bugeja

So what Building Smart does, we create the open standards that allows for information to be shared across multiple software vendor platforms. So it's an open, you know, most people would have heard of IFC. IFC is one of our open standards. We have other open standards, which we won't go into detail, like ideas for information requirements and BCF for managing issues.

Eric Bugeja

But the whole ethos is just around collaboration and not being locked into any one vendor solution and allowing information to move across the life cycle of a project. Not, you know, there's certain software or vendors that are focused on this particular phase of a project and others another phase, but the whole ethos around BIM, digital engineering information, good information management is for information to travel.

Eric Bugeja

through the lifecycle. So BuildingSmart was formed basically to develop the open standard, which are ISO standards and available to everyone. It allows anyone who gets a file, if it's an IFC file, to always have access to that file. So in 30 years time, you basically could open that file.

Eric Bugeja

You don't need a certain version of a software to get access to the information. It describes the 3D geometry, but also more importantly, the structured information that goes with it. That can be fed into databases, can be fed into asset management systems, can be fed into multiple areas.

Eric Bugeja

So one thing that Building Smart does is the open standards, but the other thing we do across the world is to advocate for BIM for digital, whether we say engineering, but more importantly, just good information management. So that's what we do in each of the countries.

Eric Bugeja

So we're made-up of multiple chapters. There's 40 chapters at the moment around the world, and we're growing. BSI, Building Smart International is the sort of central office that sort of manages. And we develop as a community these open standards, which then become ISO standards.

Eric Bugeja

But yeah, what we do in each country, we advocate, we try to bring people together, we work across all the industry groups, we work very closely with the government. So Building Smart works closely with government around the world, trying to demonstrate particularly to government, the importance of having open standards.

Eric Bugeja

So if an engineer or a constructor is working in one state, say in New South Wales, and then they want to go work in another state, it doesn't matter what software solution they're using, they can still work on that project and information can be shared across the project.

Eric Bugeja

So That's part of what we're trying to do is demonstrate the importance of open standards. And the open standards aren't perfect, right? There are challenges with utilizing open standards, but it's important as an industry that we keep pushing the need for open standards and we make them work and we utilize them the way they're meant to be.

Eric Bugeja

I think, you know, to be in a world that doesn't have open standards would be very challenging. And if you think about an architect trying to work in one software package, trying to work with another engineer, working in another software package, and we're trying to do collaboration and clash detection and bring stuff together would be very challenging without the open standards.

Eric Bugeja

So they are important. So hopefully that gives you a bit of an overview of who Building Smart Art is and what we do. So we're not just about the open standards, but we're also about advocating. The transformation of the industry.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And I think many of the listeners now understand what Building Smart is. I think we have a good opportunity to speak to you, understand what a chairperson actually does at Building Smart. Can on your day-to-day activity, can you share that with us?

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, and I must say, like, Building Smart's my voluntary role. Like, everyone, the majority of people who work within the community do it on a voluntary basis. So, as part of Building Smart Australasia, you know, we're a chapter. We get together regularly and we look at how we can do things like events, how we can educate the community.

Eric Bugeja

But we also, for example, we run working groups now. That's something we're trying to drive more of now. So we have working groups in linear infrastructure. We've developed a working group which we're starting up in airports, for example.

Eric Bugeja

And what that allows us to do is to bring So for example, we take airports, we bring airports from around Australia and New Zealand together to look at how open standards work with airports. And if something is deficient there or it doesn't work, we can feed that back to Building Smart International so the standard can evolve to meet the requirements.

Eric Bugeja

Same with linear infrastructure for road and rail and bridge. The working group gets together, they learn from each other how to use the open standards properly and work arounds and challenges, but they also then get to feed back to Building Smart International, so the standard improves.

Eric Bugeja

So that's the main things we do in Australia, and we're trying to do more of that, and we are doing more of that now is running working groups, running events, running webinars, We just had our exchange conference last year, last week, sorry, in Brisbane.

Eric Bugeja

And we have a lot of good feedback from that conference because there aren't many events in Australia, particularly, where people can talk technical. So one of some of the feedback we got back is we loved having an event where we can have technical discussion.

Eric Bugeja

And we loved having an event where It's not just about people selling stuff or saying how good things are, but it's also about people talking about the challenges and how we solve the challenges and how we move the industry forward. So that was last year, that was last week.

Eric Bugeja

We will hold them up. We do that annually and we're going to run some more regional events as well. We're looking to run one in New Zealand at the end of the year as well. I just recommend people to get involved with Building Smart.

Eric Bugeja

Like, we're a community, right? We're A voluntary community, we're an industry group, and you get to solve problems outside of projects, which sometimes it's hard to solve problems on projects under the pressure of a project. So our working groups are made-up of government, vendors, designers, universities, where we come together to try and solve problems.

Eric Bugeja

problems. So I just put it out there to the community is become a paid member of Building Smart and get involved. You can become a free member, but I'd say become a paid member and then you can get involved with some of these working groups as well and get involved with the community.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's exciting. And you touched on this briefly before about the role of the vendors and the fact that we may live in a, if we didn't have Building Smart, we may live in a world where we only have vendors and there is no open standards.

Andrea Ciaffi

In that world, What do you think will actually break for the engineering practices or the asset owners? What can possibly go wrong? I know it may be obvious, but I think it's I think it's good. It's a good idea to explain it like directly and why do you think also many organisations still tolerate this vendor locked in?

Andrea Ciaffi

Despite like the long-term cost of that decision.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, well, in terms of what can go wrong, I think it's more about making sure we're as open as possible. Like, the challenge you have in any industry is, if one or two vendors, you know, become prominent and we rely on that particular format or that particular vendor, what happens if something happens to that vendor?

Eric Bugeja

right? And all of a sudden, they no longer make that software or they go broke or they go bankrupt. Or we end up in a situation where that vendor can then just charge whatever they want for their software because they have a monopoly.

Eric Bugeja

So this is one of the challenges in the world that, you know, I think most companies realise that now. And I know companies I've worked for, we've made it clear that we, if any software that we adopt must be open, we must have access, no, not necessarily open from a building smart perspective, but just open in terms of the access to the data.

Eric Bugeja

We don't want that data to be locked into that software. So we are then tied to that software vendor forever. Because Again, what happens if something happens to that vendor and they no longer exist? Then we're stuck, right? We can't get access to our software.

Eric Bugeja

It's a big cost to try and get it out of there and into other systems. So I think all of us, and from a vendor perspective, the vendors, like from a Building Smart side, they make up Building Smart. They're all very supportive. We have vendors sitting on our board.

Eric Bugeja

They're part of our Strategic Advisory Council. You know, it's all of us working together because the vendors know that this is what the industry wants and they are supportive in this sort of, because they know that that's what clients want, right? They want to not be locked in.

Eric Bugeja

I think we've moved away from the old days back in the 70s and the 80s, you'd go and get these big systems that you basically stuck with that system for 20 or 30 years and your data's locked away.

Eric Bugeja

So I think that is probably going to be, I think that's what industry has realized now that you create a competitive environment, both for the people doing the work and the software that you're using within your company. And you Adapt, right?

Eric Bugeja

If that all of a sudden that software vendor decides to charge you four times the price, you've got options to go to somewhere else, so it just makes it an even playing field for the industry for people working and people providing the software.

Andrea Ciaffi

And one of the key outcome of the work that is led by Building Smart is these IFC files that now has been around for a while. And many people love them.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

Many people may feel a little bit frustrated around this file format. Where do, where do you think things can go wrong or things can, what's the best way to use it? I guess, because sometimes you know, like the issues, it's basically the user that doesn't

Eric Bugeja

Who?

Andrea Ciaffi

necessarily know how to use it, it's not it's not a straightforward process, so... Also, can you share with us a little bit about the future of these IFC files?

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, and you're exactly right. It comes down to understanding the limitations, right? You know, IFC or open standards is not the solution to do everything. And I think people need to understand the limitations of what it can and can't do. And also, I think one problem we've had is just the education on how to utilize it properly.

Eric Bugeja

So as an example, a client will just say, give us an IFC file with no real information. So the designer, or particularly the designer, will just go into their software and hit export IFC, thinking that they've just done their job, and you end up with this massive file that has everything in it.

Eric Bugeja

It's too large, it's not manageable. So it's very important to understand how IFC works and provide, I guess, instruction on what do you actually need from that IFC file. So you don't necessarily need a 1000 attributes or 100 attributes and you don't necessarily need the detail and geometry, so you don't need everything handed over.

Eric Bugeja

So it's up to the client to exceed train and we did this when I was working with a construction company. We would actually say to our designers, this is how we want you to export the IFC. We just need these parameters, we need it done this particular way.

Eric Bugeja

because then it serves the purpose that we need. Or else it just becomes unmanageable. And I think that's been the frustration in the industry. People have just not understood the limitations of it, both from a geometry and a data perspective, and how to utilize it properly.

Eric Bugeja

And that's something we just need to help with. In terms of the future, We're moving away from file-based transmission of data. We all know that. You know, it will continue for a little while forward, but the world is changing, right? We're moving towards this connected, cloud-based environment where information doesn't just get sent in a file, it just gets accessed.

Eric Bugeja

Like that's what we're going towards. So you can have a design model and an asset register and a GIS system. but they're not three separate things that need to be then reconciled with each other. They're just three views of the same data.

Eric Bugeja

So this is what we've been trying to do for a long time, is that the data is the data, and the way we access that data could be from multiple systems.

Eric Bugeja

So BIM, for example, the 3D model, is 1 visual way to access the data, but you could also access with a GIS, you could access from a database, you could access from an asset management system, but we want to connect the data. Now this means we're going to move away from file-based transmission.

Eric Bugeja

So there's nothing to say that you can't just transmit a... a little bit of what's in a file to that person and another bit to another person, another bit to another person. So the next generation of IFC, that's what's being considered, is the move towards cloud-based, AI-capable, modularized, connected data, not necessarily just file-based transmission of data, because we all know we've moved on from that.

Eric Bugeja

We've got APIs, we've got connected systems. So that's something that BuildingSmart is now working on is the next generation of open standards that moves away from file-based fixed, you know, packets of information that just gets sent as a file. So yeah, that's quite exciting, right?

Eric Bugeja

Because I think that's what the industry needs and what And some of the biggest excitement we have is around the next generation of standards that we're developing.

Andrea Ciaffi

Are you finding this conversation about moving from file-based to AI, sorry, to a cloud-based data, a difficult conversation to have inside the building smart community or everybody's on board? Because usually when you have communities, there is a lot of different opinions, I guess.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, yeah, and it's always going to be a challenge, right? Because we've built a lot of systems based on the standards that we've developed, and those systems will continue. So from a building spiders perspective, it's important that we continue to maintain a lot of our existing standards and keep working on those, because they will be necessary for a long time to come.

Eric Bugeja

But at the same time, we need to look at the future and the transition to the future. So, and this is like across the world, right? Everyone has different needs and different priorities. But what we need to do is to listen to the broad community across the world and make sure that we're servicing both.

Eric Bugeja

So we're servicing the existing and maintaining that, but we're also servicing the future. Now, in terms of how we prioritize that, that comes down to the community, right? That's like with anything in any democracy is, you know, what's more important. Um... Both, for me, both are important.

Eric Bugeja

You know, we need to keep maintaining our existing standards, but just as important, you know, we need to look at the future. And we rely on a community to develop those standards as well. Like a lot of the work that's done in Building Smart is done voluntarily.

Eric Bugeja

So we need to make sure that we... You know, we're utilizing that and we have the buy-in off the broad community in terms of what we do. And that's what we are. We're an industry association. So we need to listen to the industry and understand what they need, what the industry needs going forward.

Andrea Ciaffi

And while we're talking about data, I think it's probably the right time to talk about AI as well. You know, like AI can access unstructured data, but Business Mart is saying, no, we want to we want to make sure we keep on providing structured data.

Andrea Ciaffi

I think it's still probably a good idea to do that because AI can still benefit from the structure that the Business Mart and IFC files and all of the open standard can provide. But I think an interesting aspect is the debate that you propose around the difference between Iron Man and Terminator when it comes down to AI and how engineers should feel about this

Eric Bugeja

The.

Andrea Ciaffi

transition. Can you share with us the vision?

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, so from an AI perspective, and as we all know, this is, you know, from an industry, this is, and I've only come to realize myself, as someone who's been in technology impact, and even for me, someone who dabbles with technology for many, many years, seeing what AI can do now is even blowing me away.

Eric Bugeja

I'm like shocked at what it can do. But for our sector, you know, we've been talking for 20 something years about good information management. The principles are not new for us. So structured data, consistent classification, governed workflows, ownership of information. So, you know, We've built an entire standards framework around those ideas.

Eric Bugeja

I guess the challenge is that, you know... We've always had challenges implementing it, and AI doesn't care about, you know, how long it's going to take us to try and implement. So AI systems are only as good as the data that they are trained on and the data that AI has been given to work with.

Eric Bugeja

So If our information environments are fragmented and inconsistent and ungoverned, you know, and many of them are, then AI doesn't solve that problem. It actually scales it. So if it's using the bad data and unstructured data, it's not going to give you good results.

Eric Bugeja

It actually makes it, you know. harder to, you know, if we keep going down that line, it makes it harder to recover from that. But if we've, and which we're doing that, a lot of the industries now using this structured data and structured information, that gives AI a really good basis to start coming up with some really good results.

Eric Bugeja

One of the challenges we've had, particularly in the construction industry, we don't report really well when things don't go well. So any AI looking at the historical data will just think, that program that we used must have been a good program, so let's just keep doing that.

Eric Bugeja

But if that program was never updated with what actually happened on that project, the AI is going to think that's the best way to go and run that construction program again, as one example. So having structured data as an underlying basis for AI puts us as an industry in a pretty powerful position, better than some other sectors.

Eric Bugeja

You know, if we continue to use IFC and some of these structured schemas, AI knows exactly what things are. Like, you know, that's a door and that's a window. We know, you know, all that information is known. The AI is going to give us some really good results and provides us with a really good basis to utilize AI going forward.

Eric Bugeja

So stuff like, you know, triaging clash detection and developing programs automatically and really giving us live digital twins with live data that's feeding into the structured data, it provides a very good basis and foundation for AI giving us good results. And we're doing it, right?

Eric Bugeja

I've been working with companies where we are now utilizing AI. I'm doing it myself to really drive efficiency. So that Question around the Iron Man versus Terminator scenario. I think I spoke to you about this before. Ten years ago, I presented something about the future of the engineer.

Eric Bugeja

And you could see it as two ways. You could see AI as the Terminator that's going to take all our jobs and replace us all. But the smart people, and this is my perception, is the Iron Man scenario that We are using this technology to enhance us and make us have superpowers.

Eric Bugeja

So an engineer that used to take three months to do a particular job can now do that job in two days or three days or four days, which allows us to do more. And it doesn't mean the work's going to go away because we've been limited by how fast we can work.

Eric Bugeja

as an industry. And we've been complaining for years that we can't build the infrastructure that we've needed to build because we just don't have the resources. So now that our resources can work at five times the pace with the assistance of AI, it means we can do a lot more.

Eric Bugeja

But the people who are going to maintain their jobs are the people who are going to embrace it. the people who are not going to embrace it are not going to be as efficient and not going to be as needed by the industry.

Eric Bugeja

So the advice is to embrace it. It makes your life easier. It stops you doing things that most of us hate doing. And AI just allows us to focus on the really interesting stuff, good design and focusing on the construction and all that sort of stuff.

Eric Bugeja

So I find it exciting. For me, I don't see it as a threat. I see it as something I can really focus on in making sure I focus on the stuff I love to do, not the boring administrative running of most, some people love like running macros and entering data and all that sort of stuff.

Eric Bugeja

But for me, it's exciting. As an engineer, you can just focus on the good stuff, the exciting stuff.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, and you touch, speaking about engineers and the people working in this industry, you touched on this a little bit at the beginning when you mentioned that there are some engineers that still believe that their job is to just sketch, calculate, and hand off the work to a draft person.

Andrea Ciaffi

Why do you think this mindset survived so far? And what can we do to change it?

Eric Bugeja

It's a good question. Like, I don't know. I think you just don't know what you don't know, right? So, and I found throughout my career,

Andrea Ciaffi

Mm.

Eric Bugeja

so when those workflows have been in place, and I've had an engineer in my team that sort of almost refused to go down the, you know, whether it's the BIM side of things, the moving away from just you know, sketching and handing off and any engineer who's transitioned out of that never goes back.

Eric Bugeja

You ask any of them, would you go back to doing it the way you were doing it before?

Eric Bugeja

And the majority of them said, there's no way in the world, even the more senior engineers who are in their 60s and 70s sometimes who are very resistant, once they see that exactly what I said before, that they can now focus on the design and not the drafting and the administrative side and the data entry side of their projects, they get excited almost and say, no, like this has now unlocked that the perspective that now I can now spend my time focused on design,

Eric Bugeja

not on drawings and outputs. And the fact that the software, a lot of the engineering software just allows you to check things and validate things, you know, in such an efficient way that you become a much better engineer. You're not waiting for a set of drawings to come back and then someone else will just set a drawings.

Eric Bugeja

And this old-fashioned way, we used to sit around the table and hand drawings to each other. to check for clashes and we miss clashes because we can't see in the three dimensions on a Shibiri experience. That all goes away and we become better engineers with better designs.

Eric Bugeja

We can, in the same time, we can go through thousands of iterations of a design rather than three. So of course, we're going to come out with better options and better designs. So once people just don't know what they don't know. Once they see and they experience this way of working, the majority of them will never go back.

Eric Bugeja

And I've seen that happen many, many times. It's just, it takes a lot of effort to show everybody what's possible. And, you know, I would have thought by now that we would have had more of the industry working that way. And To be honest, in Australia and New Zealand, that transition has happened.

Eric Bugeja

There's a lot of projects and a lot of government agencies who are doing, if you went to our exchange conference last week, you would have seen a lot of government agencies who are doing some really good stuff on projects. So it's happening. But yeah, it's not an easy question to answer why.

Eric Bugeja

I think it's fear.

Andrea Ciaffi

I think.

Eric Bugeja

Part of it's just fear of the unknown. If you've been doing something the same way for 20 or 30 years, it's difficult to go and say, to do it, do something differently. That's for all of us, right? Something you're familiar with. And the first time you do it, it's going to be tough, right?

Eric Bugeja

Because it's different. And when you're under pressure for a project, it's hard to go and do something different where you Don't trust, because trust is the other thing as well. Trust and fear. If you don't trust that way of working, you don't want to do it on a project because you're under pressure to perform.

Andrea Ciaffi

Definitely. And you've been a pioneer in this space and back in the day when you started your career, but you've also done a lot and you're still doing a lot for the community on the training and upskilling the future workforce side. Can you share with us what you're working on on the training side?

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, so on the training side, and I spent time developing training for construction engineers, but where I think the gap is at the moment is the executive level. And I think this comes down to what we were talking about before. So executive level training.

Eric Bugeja

So at the moment, I'm working on putting together training that's more focused, like even at the CEO level of a company. So there's an awareness of what this is all about, because I think this is where we've been held back, where people at a certain level, middle management and the people on the ground can see the benefits, but it doesn't work its way up to the top.

Eric Bugeja

So whenever there's requests for funding or, you know, approval of a business plan, it gets stopped at that level. So at the moment, I'm putting together a short program, three or four hour program for at an executive level, that just explains what this whole information management, BIM, digital engineering, AI, technology transition is all about.

Eric Bugeja

So we get that final bit because of that final level to get buy-in and then we can move forward because I think that's where a lot of this transition is being stopped. And it just comes down to a lack of awareness or understanding.

Eric Bugeja

This is not about a piece of software that we're trying to implement. It's about a completely different way of working. that unlocks a lot of efficiency in the way we design, construct and handover. But the biggest challenge is everybody needs to get on board.

Eric Bugeja

And if one or two parties don't get on board across the lifecycle or get engaged early, as we all know, it just doesn't work. It falls apart. So that's what I'm working on at the moment is just how I'd get the message over.

Eric Bugeja

to that executive level, to give them an understanding of what this is all about, to help us, to take us forward.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, very excited to see the evolution of this and I'll keep an eye on it. I don't really want to miss an opportunity to speak, to understand your opinion about VR and AR, because you've been leading teams for very large firms. And I just want to know, where do you see The real value showing up on projects today for these technologies.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, I think there's a whole heap of technologies, right? So a lot of these technologies at the core rely on having data available, right? So VR and AR is almost useless unless you've got some 3D models that are accurate enough that they can work in that environment.

Eric Bugeja

So I did spend a few years working with a team that was developing a lot of VR and AR solutions for training, like for emergency services, for example, to be able to rehearse scenarios in that space. We were adapting that to construction, because similar in construction, ideally you want to rehearse your construction before you go out to site and see where it goes wrong.

Eric Bugeja

So we were using technologies for AR, for example, to look at underground utilities. So that was one case study where you could take an iPad, take a tablet, or take a set of AR type goggles or glasses, look at the ground, and then demonstrate to the client, look, here's the complexity of the utilities that are under the ground.

Eric Bugeja

You can visualize utilities on the ground. you could visualize the, say, train station that we're about to build. So people who are not technical, who can't read drawings or interpret, can very quickly see what's going to be there. A perfect case study was when you were developing a hospital or designing a hospital, a lot of people who are medical staff can't read 2D drawings.

Eric Bugeja

That's not how they've been brought up. So A surgeon can look at an emergency operating room, put on a set of VR goggles and have a look at how it's all laid out and say, no, I don't like this here. I think we need to move that over there.

Eric Bugeja

So we don't get to a point we're about to build it and then we have to demolish it and redo it again. So those technologies really are great at bringing non-technical people into the world and get them to understand very early in the stage what we're going to build.

Eric Bugeja

And then we can adapt it and change it very quickly. There's a whole bunch of other technologies. And if we start talking about point clouds and how that's come about and scanning and being able on a daily basis almost to monitor our construction sites, compare them against the design and then change things.

Eric Bugeja

But yeah, the computing power is becoming more and more powerful. And a set of VR goggles now you can get for under $1,000. So it just opens that up to a whole new world. I know during COVID, we were using VR technology to basically walk through designs remotely, like sitting at our desk.

Eric Bugeja

without being in the office, we could do a design meeting in a virtual environment, actually walking through the design and marking up. So those sort of technologies are there. But at the core, they rely on that information being set up so we could do that, you know, good 3D models and good structured data.

Eric Bugeja

So that's what it comes back down to, is getting the underlying philosophy right. so we can unlock all of these technologies that we want to use.

Andrea Ciaffi

And we are close to the end, but before we go, I just want your take on where the industry goes next. You have seen, I think sometime looking at the past, you've seen the evolution of all the changes you've been pushing in the last couple of decades.

Andrea Ciaffi

What gives you the most hope about where the industry is heading?

Eric Bugeja

Well, it gives me the most hope. It's like going to our conference last week, it's just great to see some of the things people are doing. There's some really talented people doing some great things. And I think we're now starting to get the transition.

Eric Bugeja

I think... I think one of the exciting things is that what AI has done for us is open up this technology to people who aren't as technical. So when I say that, you know, if we just take a piece of design software, Revit, ArchiCAD, whatever it might be, for a lot of people, it's quite daunting to open up those software packages.

Eric Bugeja

With AI, you don't have to have an understanding of any of these packages. You can just use natural language and say, go and design for me a building that has this, this, this, and this. And in the background, the technology can do it for you.

Eric Bugeja

So those barriers are now being removed where you don't have to be really technical. And that whole fear about wanting to open up a piece of software and be confused by all the icons and the UI.

Eric Bugeja

It just opens up all that technology now where we can just use natural language and say, go and check the clashes on this building or go and tell me where we are in the program. You don't have to know how to open up a schedule or open up an Excel spreadsheet or run a macro, all that sort of stuff.

Eric Bugeja

It just, it makes all this technology accessible to everybody. now. So I think AI will help transition our industry in terms of what's been holding us back. We've been one of the slowest adopting industries out of all the industries.

Eric Bugeja

I think we've got an opportunity now to be a leading industry and hopefully attract some more people into our industry from school and universities that more people want to get into engineering and construction because of the excitement of what AI can do.

Eric Bugeja

And because, you know, there's so much opportunity here to adapt technology to, we're in a world where we need to build a lot of stuff to meet our growing population and all that sort of stuff. So That's what I'm hoping for the future is that we drive now the technology forward to unlock efficiency and attract some more people into our industry and really start to move forward.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, it's exciting. There's lots of opportunity there. So yeah, get into engineering and construction.

Andrea Ciaffi

Stephanie Bay. Definitely very exciting. Definitely. And thank you, Eric. We are really at the end of this episode. I've learned A lot. Thank you very much for your time. If people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, you can look me up on LinkedIn. So yeah, you'd find my contact details there. Just message me there. We're happy to provide my e-mail address if we want to do that. But yeah, either go to the website through Building Smart or through my own company, Kefron.

Eric Bugeja

Yeah, feel free to reach out. but mainly on LinkedIn, we'll provide the links. Always open to talk to people and spread the word.

Andrea Ciaffi

Eric, thank you for joining us on the Digital Construction Podcast.

Eric Bugeja

Thanks, Andrea. Been a pleasure.