PDF is Not Dead with Shanoc Halliday

Andrea Ciaffi

Hi, Shannock. Welcome to the Digital Construction Podcast.

Shanoc Halliday

Andrea, thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

Andrea Ciaffi

Today, we have Jedniuk Alide, Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Blue Beam. We will talk about his early days in drafting to working with global leaders across the industry. And in his role, Jedniuk has the opportunity to see how digital solutions are implemented across different companies, and different teams.

Andrea Ciaffi

I'm very excited for this episode, but before we start, Shanak, I would like to ask you, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received in your career?

Shanoc Halliday

There's definitely one standard advice that was given to me. I was a ambitious CAD manager at Arcadis. It could have been Haider back then. And a senior engineer said to me, Shane, you should really do more public speaking. It just creates more opportunity.

Shanoc Halliday

And like anyone else, that freaked me out and, you know, anxiety about public speaking is a concern, but I lent into it.

Shanoc Halliday

So what started from myself inside Revit, just doing lunch and learns with the engineers at Arcadis to present them of what to understand about Revit and what the changes are from traditional AutoCAD and what to look out for, what's a draughty mistake, what a software issue, to then going into build, presenting a build to RTC and then opportunities like for me, I presented in Vietnam, in Japan,

Shanoc Halliday

been to the US several times, been invited over there to present. And of course, podcasts like this. So it's interesting. It's something different. And look, I suggest to anyone like public speaking, it's still makes me very nervous. Don't get me wrong. You know, it's really bizarre sometimes when people afterwards say, oh, you seem so confident.

Shanoc Halliday

You're so good. Like that wasn't me inside. But just have a go at it. It's really good.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, I can resonate with that. I'm doing this in my second language, but that's a good opportunity for us to talk about this today. That's great. And so Shanak, like you have transitioned from, you mentioned you work at Arcadis, then you worked at Robert Dird before.

Shanoc Halliday

Yes.

Andrea Ciaffi

And for those who may not be that's familiar. Can you explain what the role of Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Blue Beam entails?

Shanoc Halliday

That's actually a good question. And I think the word, I think the expression good question gets said too often, but it is because I often find myself having to explain it. So a customer success manager ultimately is really just trying to build the success of the client.

Shanoc Halliday

So, okay, let's talk about from a business case point of view. What we're trying to do from a subscription model, right, is we want people to renew every year. So where I'm focused on the technology, essentially, we want people to stay with us because it's really easy for them to drop off and not renew.

Shanoc Halliday

So if you want to think about it from a mathematical or from a business point of view, if we have, say, 10% of our clients drop off because they just understand the value of our software and they're like, well, maybe I'll just do it in something else, another competitor, when in fact, had they known about what our software can do, they might stay with us.

Shanoc Halliday

Well, that 10%, if we ever want to increase... our business by 10%, we have to then find 20% of business because you have to overcome what we've lost. So I can get a detail of course, or I won't for now, but you know, there's always a drop off or churn rate.

Shanoc Halliday

But my job is essentially reduce that churn. From a more interesting point of view, like that's the business case where I don't get into too much.

Shanoc Halliday

I'm not, I don't get involved in selling of licenses, but A more interesting part that we do from customer success is a whole range, and depending on the different types of CSMs we have within Bluebeam and CSMs in different software companies, right? But for myself, in a global enterprise, the best solutions is when we have a... Customer discovery workshop.

Shanoc Halliday

So we sit down with the business. And so what is your business trying to achieve? What's it like from at a very high level? What's it like at the manager level and a project deliverable level? And we understand what those challenges are, the opportunities as well, and the blockers.

Shanoc Halliday

And from there, we end up building a customer success plan with them to say, right, the next 12 months, you want to, maybe it might be increasing the amount of tenders that we can do. Well, how can we do this more simply? Maybe it's about the collaboration and how we want to do this better.

Shanoc Halliday

And maybe it might be with this new AI and everything coming about that. How can we leverage AI? So we're not really trying to solve. you know, what buttons to press in Bluebeam. It's really about what's the business trying to be to do to be successful and how we can support that.

Shanoc Halliday

So that's tying those two things together. I'm there for the client success, which ultimately I work for Bluebeam. It's for their success as well.

Andrea Ciaffi

So maybe a simple way to express that is that you want to make sure that your customer successfully implements the digital solution you are providing. Is that a fair way to express that?

Shanoc Halliday

Exactly, yeah.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, that's good. And I know you're passionate about this job. And we mentioned like before we started recording that you also want to start a newsletter to educate the industry about

Shanoc Halliday

Yes.

Andrea Ciaffi

your role. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Shanoc Halliday

Well, maybe jokingly, I think it started off when I picked up my son from a party and he was saying he doesn't even know what I do for a job anyway. I just sit in my office in my home studio and just talk to clients all day.

Shanoc Halliday

Well, I like to think I do a bit more than that. So yeah, there's a newsletter I'm going to bring out this month. and the intention there of demystifying what a CSM actually does. And the intent will be to speak to other CSMs about what they do with their clients.

Shanoc Halliday

And I've also spoken to some clients about understanding how they get the best out of CSMs. Like I've got one client, or Stephen Call, that he had on here before. I've got a great relationship with Stephen because he understands how I can actually help his business case as well.

Shanoc Halliday

So look, we are all here for business, but there's also a lot of in between about just general enjoyment in the job, productivity of, you know, we all want to just get home. So how can we do that easier and simpler? So I'm really looking forward to having Steve on because he will talk about how he uses CSMs to his advantage for his own staff.

Shanoc Halliday

And I think that's also important.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, when it's ready, when it's live, let me know because I'll certainly subscribe to your newsletter. It's exciting.

Shanoc Halliday

Yes.

Andrea Ciaffi

And you've been very hands-on in CAD and BIM in the past, so you are somebody that come from the battlefield and you made this transition. So can you share with us how do you... make this transition from that space where you were working hands-on to now guiding other companies to achieve their digital success.

Shanoc Halliday

So I was thinking about this beforehand and I think it's a characteristic of the way I tend to work. I never really want a massive... career change, but I always love the evolution of things. And this is very predominant, even with like drafting standards that I do.

Shanoc Halliday

I think like any procedure needs to be able to evolve. So what I mean by that is, when I got to this, I'm working at Robert Bird Group in the Melbourne office where a lot of support from the Brisbane office to really implement BIM into that practise and then myself and a few others when we got, you know, more confident using Revit.

Shanoc Halliday

And back then in 2009, there was a key word was workaround and understand what those workarounds were to get this software to really function correctly. Then you want to impart that knowledge onto other people and get them confident to deliver their projects. Then moving into Arcadis, That was an interesting change because we got a dedicated resource centre.

Shanoc Halliday

So therefore it was about educating the resource centre of like, well, don't just draught or model, but how can we make this better? How can we have those office standards and really push them through? And that gave me a really strong appreciation where English is a second language.

Shanoc Halliday

So that, then migrating to myself working for a BIM consulting Company. So it was at A2K, and that was moved into the opportunity because I've been working in the Philippines to work then in Thailand, in India, and also in Dubai. Again, training up people as English as a second language, how to use complex software like Navisworks and Revit, and then ultimately into Bluebeam as well.

Shanoc Halliday

So that Bluebeam part evolved into focusing on Bluebeam, and then I got to present, like I said at the very start, I got to present once or twice in the US at the Bluebeam conference back then, XCon. And so I got to know a lot of people at Bluebeam.

Shanoc Halliday

And I, through a blog I was doing and other bits and pieces, got to know more and more people. And then I got offered the opportunity to work at Bluebeam. So yeah, that's how that all came about. But I feel it's been an evolution.

Shanoc Halliday

And what I love about what I'm doing is I still get to talk back to those Beam people. and those challenges. I'm not solving BIM problems, but it's in the BIM sphere, it's in the project deliverables, and understanding software, I guess, is probably the main part in the nuances and challenges of each software that is still applicable to one another.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, and I always find it interesting to see how different people land into different roles, but they all contribute to the digital transformation in the industry. And yeah,

Shanoc Halliday

Mm.

Andrea Ciaffi

I think your specific role is something that people don't talk about, about it much often. So it's also good that you are launching your newsletter. So you described this transition and all of the steps. I'm sure there have been challenges in this journey, but can you share anything with us?

Andrea Ciaffi

It's been difficult.

Shanoc Halliday

Yes. I found it a challenge. I was offered an opportunity before I started at Blue Beam, and that was a technical sales engineer. So that role is really about demonstrating the product to potential buyers of the software. It wasn't a CSM role then.

Shanoc Halliday

And the other role I was offered was a BIM coordinator. So in one sense, it looked like a path, a fork in the path. I could go down a BIM role or I could go down a sales company or a software role. But what, it did concern me because I put so many years, well over a decade into BIM, and am I leaving this behind?

Shanoc Halliday

It took me a while to really process this. And in the end, I would say my decision wasn't about leaving BIM, it was still always about data.

Shanoc Halliday

So, within Bluebeam, there's a lot of data, and if anyone see me present, I preach on about it, but that's where I get the focus on how the software, I'm not just doing a markup, it's the data inside that, so that gave me the confidence I'm choosing the right decision moving forward, and look, it's really interesting working for the software side.

Shanoc Halliday

I must admit, I really enjoyed talking to the product team and making suggestions. And some of them are out there that people are using today, and some of them are contributions that myself and other CSMs have added to the software. And sure, there's also some ideas that product think, no, that's terrible.

Shanoc Halliday

We're not going to implement that. That's fine.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, product managers can be tough sometimes; they have different, different agenda sometimes.

Shanoc Halliday

Well, not all my ideas are great ideas. I'd be open to that.

Andrea Ciaffi

That's a very interesting point of view. You, working at Bluebeam, are in a very interesting position because you can see different clients and how they work on different workflows and different challenges. But speaking with all these, this wide range of companies across the industry, What are the most common workflow challenges that you see today?

Shanoc Halliday

Um... So a big part of what I do is I see a lot of people get caught up in like what individual buttons you can press. And look, this goes across all software. I think Navisworks is a really good example of this. It's really multiple buttons comes together to make a process or a workflow, and that's what makes it really robust.

Shanoc Halliday

Bluebeam is the same. I see a lot of stuff about tips and tricks and they're really good, but add those tips and tricks together, you've got a powerful workflow. So, to your point or your question... The fundamental thing I see across the board is quite simply just the red line markup.

Shanoc Halliday

Oftentimes talking to this about clients. So if anyone's not too sure, it would be the internal QAQC. A red pen means this needs to change. A blue might be a comment about it, and they might go through different highlighters back in the day with pen and paper to go through this process.

Shanoc Halliday

It's not to say people aren't doing it. Everyone is doing it in some format. I'm talking about consistency in what they're doing and leveraging the most out of the software. What I see when I speak to almost every company is pockets doing fantastic work or pockets of excellence, I would call it.

Shanoc Halliday

but that's not consistent throughout the company. Some of our clients are well above the rest in like a higher level of doing this, but many others aren't. And I think it's not because of negligence, it's just time. It's also an element that Bluebeam has seen as so simple that, you know, we don't need to set up a procedure for it.

Shanoc Halliday

It's just a markup tool and I get that. But the ones that go, oh, hold on, there's a process I can put into this. I can actually extract data out of this. I can pull it out. They're the ones getting a lot of advantage from this just very simple red line markup.

Shanoc Halliday

And tying back to what I said at the very start there, and like it becoming an entire process, I often focus with clients like, let's nail this, let's get this as an Office standard, because inside that, There's so many different functions within Bluebeam, it ties into it.

Shanoc Halliday

So to one example, I had a client and I said, look, let's not worry about all the cool stuff you can do with Bluebeam. Nail this down because this is the base level which you need to build upon. You get this right, the other stuff will be easier.

Shanoc Halliday

So the foundations, the education about the redline markup process can be implemented into more complex tasks. Us.

Andrea Ciaffi

And you just touched on a very important point. You try to guide your clients, understand what needs to be prioritized, because I think often there are so many problems that needs to be solved. And part of the challenge is to understand which one do I try to tackle first.

Andrea Ciaffi

So how do you help your clients identify and prioritize?

Shanoc Halliday

Hmm.

Andrea Ciaffi

The improvements in the digital workflow.

Shanoc Halliday

For the most part, the clients that I'm working with, I mean, that's what we got, in all fairness to Blue Beam and the range of clients we have, you know, we have the SMBs, so the small and medium-sized businesses, there might be one or five, maybe even 15 people.

Shanoc Halliday

Their priorities are different. And I might even go to an example of that one. Then you got your sort of mid-level market and then into enterprise and global. So in the enterprise global market, what I see is really about collaboration. They're the ones on the joint ventures or alliances.

Shanoc Halliday

They're the ones that are forced to have communication with other stakeholders. So For them, an example was, I'm really quite proud of the work that's come out of the T2D project in Adelaide. From a process point of view, there's a lot of stakeholders involved in that.

Shanoc Halliday

It's really easy then to lose information, but the team have done really well to... pull that information, I would say they pretty much had the process down pat. I came in with my experience and able to.. . I don't want to say finesse, but just sort of add elements of value.

Shanoc Halliday

And everything I suggest, by the way, it's on the client side. I mean, they can choose to take my advice, or that might go against maybe they got another software that might do something similar, or where they might be holding information. But essentially, that's a good example on that project of just fine-tuning the process, so the collaboration space.

Shanoc Halliday

And that's where most of my clients are in. I guess on another example, years ago I was on, when I was at TSE doing demonstrations and some training. It was, I enjoyed that too because there was a client that was doing fire retardant.

Shanoc Halliday

So their job was basically measure up the entire structural drawings to see how much fire retardant was required on a building. and then get the total tonnage or the amount of bags and people hours required to do the job, price it, and then send it out to site.

Shanoc Halliday

So their priority was really just to do a pricing, but we ended up speaking to them and within Bluebeam, we'll have to do an end-to-end solution from tender to handover. of keeping that data inside it. So I guess somewhere inside this, it really depends on the client, what they're really trying to tackle and just listening.

Shanoc Halliday

I guess that's a big part of the job, just listening.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And many people are familiar with Blue Beam, a very famous product and many people use it. And so really, from my point of view, it's a very special product because it operates with PDF files in a world where we are always talking about 3D models, digital twins.

Andrea Ciaffi

So it feels like a little bit contradictory, right? But still, Blue Beam is a key tool for engineers and BIM team. So can you share with me and with the audience what makes Blue Beam a standout tool for collaboration and project delivery still today?

Shanoc Halliday

Yes, so I'm smiling because part of myself public speaking, I joined the Revit user group, Revic. And I remember there being with one of my friends in another engineering company thinking, you know, BIM is here. PDF is dead, it's going to die. And years later, that same person and I started off the Melbourne Blue Beam User Group.

Shanoc Halliday

And so we were there like 8 years later or something like that, saying like, PDF is here, how can we leverage it better? So it really ties into, well I feel I should say, it ties into the fact that we don't have that BIM mandate as here as such, but even then in Singapore we're still heavily relied upon.

Shanoc Halliday

It's ultimately about the communication. And I mean, there's a lot of things going into it. Bluebeam is so easy to use. It's well loved. But it's also a really nice hybrid between a powerful PDF software and CAD software. I'm not going to pretend that we've got full and complete CAD functionality.

Shanoc Halliday

On the weekend, I did a takeoff for a friend and honestly I found some elements a bit frustrating compared to CAD. But from that takeoff functionality, it was brilliant. It was really easy. So I can see that really easy to adopt. I think engineers like it because they might not have access to CAD software.

Shanoc Halliday

And then also, I've trained up people using Revit; it's not easy, it's not simple. Bluebeam is rather simple, so you know, and a proper library has been set up, it's even faster again, so it's... Why is it? Why is it still relevant?

Shanoc Halliday

I think it's just the simplicity of the communication that really offers and the fact that just the access to CAD live functionality that we can communicate easier.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. And probably sometimes there are projects that needs to be delivered quickly and sometimes a blue beam is good enough for the specific project.

Shanoc Halliday

Well, I think on that, I mean, that's, I mean, you might come into it another question, but that's where the diversity of it. I've had engineer or, you know, procurement push back and say we don't need BlueBin to be a CAD software and we're not going to angle for that.

Shanoc Halliday

The level of functionality is not there. But yes, engineers answering RFIs or even architects answering RFIs. If you don't, if you're not being paid to do an as-built, so therefore you don't need to update your Revit model to show what that connection's required.

Shanoc Halliday

If that can just be something that's just marked up, put into a connects or something like that and initiate to a client, just have one engineer doing that markup and seeing it out. It's much cleaner, it's much more efficient.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, and you mentioned one of the good things about Bluebeam is that it's very simple. And as a Bluebeam user for a long time, I can tell you that I agree, it's very simple, but it can also achieve A lot. Like there is a lot you can do with Bluebeam.

Andrea Ciaffi

So usually, like people that are using a product, a digital product, sometimes they think, how can I best leverage for BIM to deliver projects more effectively? Like what type of advice would you give to engineers, architects, and BIM technicians that want to leverage BIM more effectively?

Shanoc Halliday

The key is, as much as I just said, we're not a CAD software. It's about setting it up like a CAD software. So, working with clients that have built out an extensive. structural library or mechanical library or P&ID. That has worked really, really well.

Shanoc Halliday

Another thing is to lean into the fact that the PDF is a container of information, or the digital information. So I think it's a double-edged sword in the sense that Bluebeam is so easy to use. And I remember Don Jacobs, who won the...

Shanoc Halliday

pioneers of Blue Beam back in the day to kick this off. He said, it's simple by design. We want it to be easy to use. I guess the irony is then we get IT that just deployed to everyone and says, oh, this is a simple software, you'd be right, it's just a PDF software.

Shanoc Halliday

The reality is it's more complex than that, but it's not as hard as BIM. So when I talk to these beam companies, like it's not the same effort, just apply some of that, 1/4 of that into Bluebeam and you'll get a lot of, you know, great resolve or great productivity out of it.

Andrea Ciaffi

And you touched previously that you mentioned that Blue Beam is using RFIs, which kind of like suggests that you should be using Blue Beam at the end of the projects, but sometimes I know that people use it for early day sketches. So at what stage of a project you think Rubim should be introduced to maximise his value.

Shanoc Halliday

That's been interesting to watch. So back when I was drafting and modelling up, it was all about, hey, you know, show how clever we are and do a model and model everything, even for concept designs. Where I'm seeing companies now that have this BIM approach and strong BIM skill set, they're now approaching me and saying, well, how can we do a constructability or concept designs?

Shanoc Halliday

How can we do this within Bluebeam? Because the reality of the fact that the engineer can do the markup or whoever's working on the project. It might be for a tender, might be some sort of cross-reference guide, but they can just do that themselves and deliver that project.

Shanoc Halliday

And if they win that project, they've got this fantastic markup that can then go to the modelling staff. So what I'm seeing is Bluebeam on that. starting package as well for all the preliminary designs. I see it through the design as far as the checking and the QA throughout before they issue for construction.

Shanoc Halliday

I also see Bluebeam, it was a great example of an as-built, so working in a joint venture for the level crossing removals in Melbourne. And they had to verify all the as-builts were correct, and then they would go to the builder to quantify or check, and then be approval of payments.

Shanoc Halliday

So, we went through a process of doing the as-builts. So, in that sense, I see an end-to-end solution. I don't personally see... as much going into operations, but I know we've got some clients are using that side of it as well.

Andrea Ciaffi

And is there ever a point where, from your point of view, it makes sense to move from Blue Beam to then use another platform? You mentioned like Revit and AutoGuard, by which point you say, okay, now enough with Blue Beam, let's jump onto another platform, maybe we reserve Blue Beam for something else later.

Shanoc Halliday

Yeah, I thought about this question. I'm worried this might sound like a business easy way out, but choose the right tool for the job. And I don't have a problem having a conversation with the client that will talk about, oh, we're doing this and it's Revisto.

Shanoc Halliday

I used to use Revisto. I think it's a really powerful tool. There is definitely an overlap, so people that... more technically understand how with Visto and Bluebeam, we'll see yes, there's an element of overlap between those two softwares, but it's also different strengths.

Shanoc Halliday

So. I think more often what really happens is, I mean, even say with ACC or Forma now, there's an element of a markups within Forma. So there's an overlap there. So where would you transition? I don't think there is so much. Just choose the right tool for the right job at the right time.

Shanoc Halliday

right, and I've had clients say, can we just get the one tool that does this? Well, I mean, Procore is an amazing tool, but Procore still has integrations into Bluebeam and to possibly other software as well. The reality is no one tool is going to give you the job you want.

Shanoc Halliday

Have a look at the skill set you've got and what you can leverage and what the outcome you're trying to achieve. We're lucky that we can get used across a whole range of things, but sure, if you're going to lean heavily into the BIM side and model coordination, it might be in Navisworks and Rubisto.

Shanoc Halliday

Fine, that's not going to be us.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, definitely. You're right. The right tool for a job makes sense. And also, I think it depends on the skill of the specific person that is interacting with that product, because maybe you are not that familiar with Revit and you can do a lot with

Shanoc Halliday

Mm.

Andrea Ciaffi

Bluebeam or vice versa. So sometimes you're not familiar with Bluebeam and you can do a lot with Rabbit up the degree. And yeah, and when we think about digital

Shanoc Halliday

Yeah, Greg.

Andrea Ciaffi

transformation, one of the key aspects is driving adoption. And when we think about adoption, human factor is a big point, right? So how do we make sure that we support the companies and drive digital adoption?

Andrea Ciaffi

From your point of view, like when you think about company, sometimes I think about the company culture, because in some companies, maybe people are supported when they try to implement and adopt digital solutions. What do you think? What do you think is the role of the company culture in trying to?

Andrea Ciaffi

boost the adoption of digital tools.

Shanoc Halliday

And. Digital, see digital tools is interesting because I guess we're talking then about new software as well. That is a tricky one because I'm also well aware that procurement trying to reduce their software stacks. And you know, there's, when they're doing renewals and purchasing new software and where it gets allocated to and staying compliant, it's a lot of work.

Shanoc Halliday

So... That's A tricky one to answer and might be unique to the individual company. I will say from a digital transformation and where things are going, I mean, AI is kind of putting a big neon sign above everything. It's interesting watching the landscape.

Shanoc Halliday

Think about digitising even further with AI. But let me go back a moment. When I lean into my CAD manager role, office consistency or standardisation is the key here. I think once, and I used to say this a lot when I was training up people in Revit, I had a meeting once.

Shanoc Halliday

between some different drafting managers in the Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne office. And we were debating over what roof perlins should look like in plan. And all of us had different ideas of how they should look and were quite passionate about it as well.

Shanoc Halliday

And some were inside out thinking, well, you know, if we don't, you know, present it this way, then surely the builders can't build it. The reality is, builders see lots of different types of drawings and they still managed to build it. My main thing came up with about how does our resource centre, they need a consistent way of we present it.

Shanoc Halliday

This is our way or this company does it. So I said in the meeting, I don't care if we do it the way I consistent. I like the least, as long as we consistently do it the way I like the least, because that creates the opportunity for improvement, and that's why I've always has a philosophy.

Shanoc Halliday

So, even if I've done a web template and family content or in Bluebeam now profiles and tool sets, my hope is that that gets deployed amongst. the staff and then in six to eight months time or even a year's time, it's evolved into something else.

Shanoc Halliday

So I think that consistency and then the opportunity to improve. So an example as well, if it helps, I'm working with a client that's really keen to push that office standardization, but I don't want to limit that where no one can change anything.

Shanoc Halliday

So in Bluebeam, there'll be tool sets. So when I get the opportunity to start and create your own tool sets, like that's brilliant. You built a brand new steel connection. We could use that. Next week that gets deployed and everyone gets to use it.

Shanoc Halliday

So you see an evolution. I think that's from a base level within software, something that needs to be supported. And that's probably a really good culture. That's where I would support.

Andrea Ciaffi

And again, you speak with many digital leaders and you probably have developed your opinion of what a good digital leader is, but what does good, this is probably a broad question, but what does good digital leadership look like from your perspective?

Shanoc Halliday

Did you? I think one that's really just listening to, well, I don't know, I don't have a really good answer for this. It's really challenging, I think, as I said, with AI, that's been forced through, like, you know, the terminology of a digital engineer or digital innovation team.

Shanoc Halliday

I've seen that word come up a lot more with our clients. It's a lot more listening of what they can do with the software. The challenges that we were facing back in 2010 with trying to do BIM adoption and trying to do like a grassroots up to management to say, you should be using this software.

Shanoc Halliday

They aren't there anymore. We've got management pushing back down saying, what can we do with this? How can we be more lean with, you know, staff or how we, how long we spend on a project? Yeah. Not exactly sure if I have a good answer for that one at this point.

Andrea Ciaffi

It's difficult because there are different aspects, right? So, yes, so let's focus on something a little bit more complex,

Shanoc Halliday

Mm.

Andrea Ciaffi

which is about predicting the future. It's even harder, right? Of course,

Shanoc Halliday

Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

Andrea Ciaffi

of course, nobody can really predict the future, but you probably see trends. that are shaping the future of digital collaboration. And is there anything that is exciting for you, anything that you surprise you in terms of new trends that are coming to the digital space of construction?

Shanoc Halliday

It's really, you can't go anywhere without saying AI. I've already mentioned it here. So I'll put that back into focus within Bluebeam itself. I think that's going to be exciting for us at Bluebeam because look, there's AI from a computer image recognition. That's pretty simple, but getting beyond that.

Shanoc Halliday

AI wants to look at data, and I've been, you know, on my bandwagon about, yeah, about... talking to people about the information within the PDF, how you can store data and how you can extract that data and utilise it elsewhere. And some really good success stories with that with clients as well.

Shanoc Halliday

So I was on a call with a client the other day, they were kind of curious, what can this AI do? It's like, well, let's just focus on how you're using Bluebeam in best practises to have. Clean data within the software or your PDFs, and then we can leverage that outside it.

Shanoc Halliday

So, for us, we've got MCP; it's been brought into it, so we're using Claude at the moment. Hopefully, in the future, we'll see Copilot come into this as well. So, what that means for me is... And where this gets genuinely exciting, and I see it with other software too, beyond Bluebeam.

Shanoc Halliday

We see a... a jump in the ability to use the technology. So in the past, going back to BIM spaces, with Dynamo came in, I was training people how to use Dynamo. It was not easy. Then other people going, well, I'm going to learn how to code and I still can't code and not many people can code.

Shanoc Halliday

But now all of a sudden, we've got this natural language we can start to use. And we can actually become pseudo-coders as such without having using visual coding or even actual coding itself. I think that is going to be very interesting to have a small go back to those SMBs.

Shanoc Halliday

Ten people in the company, skill set in software is okay, nothing great, but you know what? I don't mind using this AI ChatGPT type scenario. All of a sudden, they're going to build master prompts to do amazing things for the quantity takeoff. I think that's going to be really, really interesting to watch and see what these people produce.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, I'm very excited also to see what happened in the space of AI and PDFs, right? Because one of the problems related to PDFs is that they appear less intelligent than the 3D model, right, for the average user. But now with AI,

Shanoc Halliday

Yes.

Andrea Ciaffi

you can probably read them in a different way, and you can read this data a bit differently. So it would be interesting to see what happens to companies like Bluebeam as well. Speaking of Blue Beam, so we're talking about the future in general.

Andrea Ciaffi

We have these very interesting, a great opportunity to have you here and learn more about what's happening actually in Blue Beam. So what can we expect? I know it's hard to predict like something like five years, but What can you share with us about what's happening in Brubim in the near future?

Shanoc Halliday

In the near future, I'll stick to that. I'll stick to within my swim lane on that

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah.

Shanoc Halliday

one. So we just released Max. So Max is where we've got the AI functionality. And for us, AI, as I mentioned, it's MCP. So we, within that version, there is an element of another tool called Firmus, I'll get into in a moment.

Shanoc Halliday

So essentially, you get to bring your own AI of choice, because that's going to be a big issue for these big consulting companies around the world. Like, as soon as you say AI, they go, well, hold on, you for a second need to look at this.

Shanoc Halliday

I think the opportunity for SMB or the little businesses. you know, they're not going to worry about, you know, where the AI is going to as long as it can do the job easier.

Shanoc Halliday

So we get to bring your own AI into the system and ask the questions and teach it and educate the system around how you want to use the PDFs or how the information you're extracting out of it and putting back into it more so.

Shanoc Halliday

And the functions within Bluebeam, so that's gonna be quite powerful. So, we're not here to put a PDF into the cloud, and it creates a prompt that says, "You should go away and do this. " Where I see it going is you put a natural language prompt into MCP, and it'll actually do those things for you within Bluebeam.

Shanoc Halliday

How much is going to evolve over time? At the moment, we, you know, we're doing this much, but it's gonna grow and grow. The other part I'm quite excited about is, you know, talking about Thermos, which is the software that we acquired late last year, so that is an inbuilt element we can look into at the moment, I guess, where...

Shanoc Halliday

It's IOI and it's. reviewing the drawings or possible issues. So where I think that could be exciting in the future is I remember myself issuing drawings, but that had to be coordinated with what we did with our specifications, what they had to be done with maybe even digital execution plans to some extent will come into that and definitely Australian standards or whatever standards you're abiding by.

Shanoc Halliday

So what if you could have an AI that understands all this, collates it all together, and when you're issuing these drawings, all the specifications, anything else, you say, right, these are all working together and there's no inconsistencies within the information. I mean, risk is what we want to reduce.

Shanoc Halliday

There's a lot of issues out there with just things being built wrong. So how can we reduce this? I think that's going to be quite powerful and hopefully just, you know, saving a lot of stress out there for our community. So that's looking forward to that.

Shanoc Halliday

And then just the general pieces that we do within Bluebeam, it's been. It's been quite exciting, I would say, the last couple of years at Bluebeam. There was a period where I've actually said this transparently to clients that it was getting a bit stagnant.

Shanoc Halliday

And me who enjoys technology, not much was really happening. The development just didn't really feel there. And then with the new CEO, things just start happening. So every business quarter, there's a new version coming out, whether it be the most amazing new tools, depends on the client, but there's always something new happening, always something interesting.

Shanoc Halliday

And for me who enjoys technology, I want to stay on here because I want to see where we're going. I want to see what we're doing next. And sure, I do talk to product and see what's coming out and what they're working on and testing little versions and side projects.

Shanoc Halliday

And it's great. It's exciting. So yeah, looking forward to see what Bluebeam keeps pushing out to the clients.

Andrea Ciaffi

Yeah, exciting. That's very exciting. And we are at the end of the episode and we mentioned that you will launch a newsletter then, but if people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?

Shanoc Halliday

Well, probably LinkedIn would be the easiest one. I am not going to go beyond LinkedIn at this point. But yeah, reach out there. This month, you'll see a newsletter come out. I'm trying to demystify what a CSM does. I'm always welcome to challenges or compliments, sure.

Shanoc Halliday

But I just really want to Yeah, if you've got a CSM, how can you leverage them? I mean, the reality is you're paying for software. You're paying for a subscription service. There's the opportunity to politely exploit your CSM to get more productivity out of it.

Andrea Ciaffi

Definitely, and Shana, thank you for joining us today.

Shanoc Halliday

Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on here. I really appreciate it.