Bluebeam Max Explained: AI Markups, Takeoffs, and Connected Workflows with Luke Prescott

0:00On this week's show, geeking out with Luke Prescott, VP of Product and Bluebeam.

0:16Hey, Luke, how we doing, man? Great, man. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I know it's been a long time coming. I've been waiting to bring you on to have some fun. It truly is going to be a geek out, man. I'm excited. We can go as deep as you want. Well, that's what we're going to do. And for everybody listening, we're just going to blow that fourth wall. We're going to do truth and transparency moment. I work for Bluebeam. Luke works for Bluebeam. But we've known each other for a really long time. And we're going to talk about product. We're going to go deep. We are really going to get down and dirty.

0:49And we don't even know how long this thing's going to go. So we're just going to do it. And y 'all are going to come along for the ride. and truthfully this is the culmination of you know what i've seen here at blue beam but also we were talking about it ahead 2017 was the first time anybody from blue beam was on the contact trio and then 2024 we had usman on and so 2026 we've got luke and there's been a an arc in that so um buckle up right of course it's good to be here now everybody remember check us out on those socials youtube.com forward slash at the contact crew follow us like subscribe make sure you subscribe on that podcast thing too it helps us over here and lastly if you don't already know you ought to be better be signing up for unbound.bluebeam.com and join luke and i at unbound where a lot of what you're gonna hear is gonna come to fruition and blow your minds yeah it's gonna be great i can't wait you know that moment when you're buried in submittals the electrical contractor swears they're working on the latest set, the mechanical disagrees, and nobody can find the same detail, Bluebeam solves that problem and more with Max.

2:00Stitching pulls together every discipline's drawings into a single continuous view. So architects, engineers, and contractors are finally looking at the same thing at the same time. Wild concept, right? Flag issues before they cost time and money. Find what you need fast and stop herding cats across 100 sheets. Same Bluebeam you trust just way smarter free trial at bluebeam.com forward slash try max all right we're we are back luke prescott before we dive all the way in vp of product but you've been around the block been here at bluebeam for a really long time give everybody like a background and an insight into you sure yeah i got hired onto a construction crew uh just days after graduating college and uh I fell in love with building.

2:45I swung a hammer for about 10 years, hired on at my buddy's interior finishes contracting firm in Southern California. And he sat me down in front of a PC and said, this is Bluebeam. Of course, he didn't say this was review. He said, this is Bluebeam. And from there on out, that was about 18 years ago, believe it or not. And yeah, just had great experience. Just fell in love with the challenge of building. What I was seeing on job sites, you know, you can imagine when you first get into construction, you observe it, you wonder, this started out as a hole in the ground. There were people and machines, and now there's a structure.

3:24And the math doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand. How did you just start putting more people in this location and then this really, you know, expensive and valuable material with really well-crafted machines? We could call them robots, but, you know, it's anything from lifts to drill motors to, you know, to whatever it might be. That was always incredible to me that the secret sauce is the people, the communication, the workflows, the ways of interacting with each other and sort of tapping into various strengths and be able to build that. So it was fun to be part of that and to watch that.

3:59you'd go out early on the job, like maybe it was during some of the early phases and you would just see it evolve rapidly to the point where as you're getting at closeout, you just walk through this, whatever it might be, and you're just in awe. Even still to this day, it's like that for me. Even just driving past a job site in my neighborhood, you see the cranes out or whatever, and you just think like, how did we figure out how to do all this? Like, what is it that we've done? So all that to say, ended up at Bluebeam in 2012. I was here for about six years, six and a half years. And I worked at a couple of the different places still within construction technology.

4:36Then I came back to Bluebeam about two and a half years ago. So now I lead the product and design team here, a huge advocate of our technology. I love seeing the work that our teams are actively pursuing. And my goodness, the evolution of where it's come from 2008 till now is unreal. And I just feel incredibly lucky to be a part of it and to observe it. Yeah. So it's awesome because you've got that history, right? Swinging the hammer and getting the respect for actually doing it. And then having to sit behind a computer and figure out what do you want me to do here? And that transition kind of sunk in.

5:09And then if you fast forward and you look at, you know, you were here, you did all that work. Then you did go and look at the other half and other places. And that's just a good, valuable, you know, mix of learning. right? That's how we get better and then come back. So unbelievable to me, but it's still true. There are still a lot of folks out there who don't understand Bluebeam. So, and you kind of said it, right? Like we all call it Bluebeam. I am guilty of this year and a half in and I haven't gotten good enough at calling it the right thing. So explain to folks who may not know, or at least who maybe we'll take a clip and share it so that, how do you explain Bluebeam?

5:44Bluebeam is the tool for everyone in the industry to solve problems. You can think of it as one of the most probably highest abstraction ways of referring to it is would be a tool to empower intent. You know, if I'm a electrical contractor and there's something that needs to change, I have intent to get that changed and coordinated. Well, that might have three or four other people that need to be involved in solving that problem. I'm not even going to necessarily call that an RFI. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I just simply need to be able to communicate the intent of that problem, either graphically or through annotations or within context of the specs or the submittals, the shop drawings, the drawings, whatever it might be.

6:22Bluebeam empowers all that. Technically, it's a series of applications that run on desktop window machines, on iOS, on Android, on a web app. It's got some live collaboration pieces that let people do this in real time together. It's got tools that connect into large document management systems called the Enterprise DMS to use the acronym. But at the end of the day, it's a tool and the way our users use it. It's, you know, they open up Outlook, they open up Bluebeam Review, they're in Bluebeam tools all day long, solving different problems for different use cases. We see it all the way through the early planning phases with owners and architects, all the way through the closeout and the management of the space, even to the extent moving into other broader organizations that are trying to manage space and land.

7:06A lot of our world is represented in the context of PDFs and drawings of record. Bluebeam's the tool to manage that is really what it comes down to. It's the best way to visualize the world around us in a very simple and accessible way. Yeah. And I think that simplicity is key because this is a complicated process. So you hit on this from the beginning and it's something that I took for granted until I got into the industry was that the world around us is built by people and people who are doing hard work, right? This is not easy stuff. It's getting more automated in ways like you said. And I like the way you say that, like we love to call things robots.

7:44And I'm like, They're really just tools in most cases. So I think we're, it's not, it's hard work. And so the management of that work needs to be simple and straightforward. These people, they don't work at the same company. No, that's true too. Some of them do, right? It's easy if you and I are at the same company, we can solve problems, but try doing it when there's 10 people from five different companies that all have to try to solve the same problem. I mean, it's not easy. I'll say we've got to just not to get into the details, but we're here to get into the details. So let's do it. We've got this functionality in our technology called Studio that allows for people to mark up documents together.

8:20Watching a user in Studio is kind of fun to watch. I've stood over the shoulder of a user. They'll get a notification in their email. They'll click a link. Immediately, they're in the session. They mark it up. They close it. They can get another notification. It's like a 15-second, 30-second flow. And they're interacting with people that aren't at their organization. They've never, maybe never even really interacted with, but they've got the knowledge or the intent that they can communicate by just clicking a link notification, launching the app, marking it up, closing. It's really a thing of beauty, I would say, watching that happen in ways in which I think today there's more technology barriers to communicating externally outside of an organization just due to various requirements.

9:01It's fun to see that the Bluebeam has had such an influence on the industry to promote that level of connection. I'll call it collaboration, but just connection, intent, communication. It's fun to be part of that. Yeah, and I agree. That's one of the things that drew me in early, early on is like a lot of the software was there to capture certain things, but they weren't really there to get a decision made and get done and get moving. And that's really what a lot of what we need is, I've said this from the beginning, if it's not helping a person in the field, then why are we doing it? And this is what a tool like this allows us to do.

9:35And you're right, a session. By the way, that is a really underutilized piece, I think, that people don't. And I think we can even talk about that, that like this tool works for architects, it works for engineers, it works for GCs and CMs, it works for trade contractors, it works for material suppliers, like everybody's in it, using it in different ways. And so there's all these, there's gaps, you know, there's basics where people, you know, oh, I use it to open up my PDFs. I use it to do these things, but there are so are tools like that, right? Where you can hit a session, open it up. I don't think a lot of people know that if you are that person and you're that electrical contractor and you have that, you know, intent, that question, right?

10:14You can open up a session, draw them right to it, go right to, maybe it's the electrical engineer that needs to answer a question. Maybe it's just GC that needs to answer a question. Let's get her answered and let's go. It might not be material in that it has to be an RFI. It's just a quick question, but it's in context. A lot of email lacks context. So this is, it's a contextual idea to dive in there. We do this exercise with new folks that come onto the product team where we'll say, take a, determine the industry, take a condition, right? But take a condition in your home or take a place in your home, whatever it might be, your kitchen or your living room, your front door.

10:49Describe it to me in an email and tell me something about it that you need to change. whatever it might be. And then do it again with in Bluebeam on a PDF with a photo using our capture tool and a call out. Let's see how close I get to what your intent actually is. And it's just kind of funny. Could you imagine doing construction through a comments field or through a status field or through like a free text box? And it's like, what? Of course not. You have to go much further beyond that and provide the visual context in the relationship that we're understanding. What's the baseline that we're talking about?

11:21What's the problem that we need to solve on top of that? And then what's our agreed upon solution? I mean, and that it's funny because there's still a lot of people out there doing that. And then a lot of other parts of my life, I would like a blue beam type solution to because, again, communication lacks context unless you have those kinds of things around it. And again, we're trying to build something that's highly coordinated and requires collaboration and communication more. And it's funny because you'll hear the word coordination used. And a lot of my BIM and VDC folks listening will think coordination in the form of like clash detection.

11:54And I'm like, no, it's literally like coordination of where are you? What are you doing? Like there's physical coordination to what has to happen for crews to work together. I don't, especially now, if you think back, you know, now more than ever, the coordination of different trades on to job sites by the GCs and knowing the order of events in which things have to happen is way more complicated when we started this thing. It's probably even just worth calling out Bluebeam loves 3D. Like we're not like there are we on the product team here at Bluebeam. We don't view it as like a 2D versus 3D reality of like which one's going to win.

12:34They both solve different problems at different times. We actually had a great guest speaker at our Unbound event in Cologne, Germany. He was, interestingly enough, working on a BIM project in North Africa. And he said, and this quote will probably stick with me forever, he said, 3D is where the design happens, 2D is where the decisions are made. And it was just such a sort of a clear moment where it was around the 2D table that they were solving these complex problems together of how the geometry within the structure relates to each other. With that said, we just released with Bluebeam Max, we just released what we call connected sessions to Revit.

13:09So up until that point, every markup that you ever placed within Bluebeam had to be viewed within one of our four client apps, which is Bluebeam Review, which most people know on a PC, our web app, our iOS or Android app. What we did is we built a sort of a middleware or conversion tool that will take a markup out of the 2D space and convert it to 3D geometry within Revit. So what you can do is you can now connect a studio session to your model. You'll produce those sheets. You can then mark them up in 2D, just like you would regularly would with clouds and callouts and all the stuff you do. And those markups now convert right back into the model in Revit.

13:46They show up on the 2D sheets and 3D sheets. It's a really cool technology. All that to say, that's new in the last three or four months with the launch of Bluebeam Max. So we're certainly very much supportive of the future of 3D and the connection between accessibility, the broader workforce, 2D, and also the rich information within the 3D model. I mean, again, coming from the outside in, there was this feeling like BIM had to win or, you know, or 2D had to win and there was having to be a winner. And when I got here, you know, and by the way, during my time in the 10 years I've been doing this in construction tech, I've moved from, oh yeah, we're going to go full 3D, life's going to be 3D to realizing that's just not feasible.

14:29It's not feasible because of the technology and the other things. It's because of what you said. It's the right person, the right format, the right time, and to get things built. And so this is what we're doing. But it is, can we connect all of that? And can we make this a better world for construction? And I think if you go to the core of what Bluebeam is, you know, we were here to help solve problems for the industry that the industry was facing. That's why, you know, it started in 2017 on the show with connecting workflows. We have been a part of that process and that sort of fabric that connects architecture, engineering, construction, and even owners to hand over at the end along the way and solving problems in there as well, which is gives us something that most don't have that width.

15:17Right. We're really wide and have multiple areas that we help. So it's really a cool growth then to say like, hey, we don't want to take away what's right for you. We want to connect to you. I know we're just kind of jumping around. This just makes me think about where we're going from even an AI perspective. Come to find out, shocker, AI is really good at reading data and writing the data. And so one of the core functions within 2D workflows is the rich commenting and markup data, connecting that into the 3D data. I would argue six months ago, that was really hard to do. You now can import data in using AI agents into Bluebeam and pull those out in and out of 3D models and vice versa.

16:01It's this whole new world. And some of it's very early. It's the direction we're going in which there can be agents to monitor activity that move data between 2D and 3D in different applications. Very early days of that, but we're starting to see the early implications of that. Even some proof of concepts that I've seen from early customers have been really fascinating in ways that just honestly were not even technologically possible a year ago. And now that is available through self-service technology right off of our web store. Right. I mean, that's where we're like into some like really interesting territory here.

16:36Yeah, we've really come into some. I've been doing this, too. And it's, you know, we had that PDF, right, portable document format. And I don't think people realized, and I know they didn't, that there is all that rich data. We call it markups, right? But they are physical things that might represent almost anything. It can be a measurement. It can be a question. It can be all sorts of different things. But we're generating data. And so I'm now going to call it the perfect data format. The PDF is now the perfect data format because it's now unlocked in a way that I could not have imagined 18 months ago in any way, shape or form.

17:13And then sitting here and, you know, being a part of this and realizing what that's going to unlock. And who knew, I mean, maybe some of you guys did back there knew that someday that what we call the markups would become seriously important data over time and drives valuable insights into the execution of building the decision making in the process. But you have a hard problem, right? Because people love Bluebeam. Let's just be honest. We have some of the coolest fans out there, but this is their baby. So how is that sitting in your seat where you're trying to move ahead, right? And stay up, but you're messing with people's baby.

17:59So how's that been? No, it's good. We want to do right by our users. And our users have a very visceral approach to our technology. It solves big problems for them. It gets them out of some binds in various ways. It gives them voice in a way to maybe what their trade is or their, again, back to their intent. They love the fact that the colors are so vastly customizable that you can change the hex codes of the fill to a certain opacity of your callouts and text boxes to align with your standards in some way. Great. That's Blooby. That's what it's intended to do. It just goes that deep. I've seen drawing sets that are looked to be works of art in terms of the graphical and visual and colorization that's being done.

18:45We don't take any of that lightly at all. Like we view our role as product managers and designers and engineers with the utmost respect. And we also understand that we're stewards of this technology in the industry that has a lot of people banking on it on a daily basis. I'll tell you one of the big conflicts I'll say that we sort of live in. It's this reality of someone's going to open that app today and expect it to do the exact same thing it did yesterday because that's how they're running their business and that's what they need to do. Secondly, there's also a side of them that want to open that app and it to do a new thing.

19:23And whatever that new thing is, the next evolution of the, it's a paradox in a way, but at the same time, it's just the reality that we live in. One thing where I'm happy to share it here, we're shipping bullet points and numbering. And like, that's been something that people have laughs for a long time. And you know, like, you know, the sound off the alarms and the fireworks. And there's a lot of technical reasons that we had to go into that to be able to build that out. I've seen it. I've seen it in my own eyes. It's great. Works just like you would want it to work. But it's that type of stuff that users are like, great, bullet points of numbering.

19:51I wanted that forever. Blooming's finally got it. Great. Cool. Users are going to love it. And then there's questions of like, okay, what about AI intelligence? And how can it understand everything about my drawing and create these relationships across all my files? And you're just like, okay, these are the realities of what product development at Bluebeam is. And those two things aren't necessarily in conflict with each other, but they're very different approaches to where the product needs to go and how we're going to get there. So I would argue that innovation for us is both in the practical realm and also in the more conceptual forward-leaning.

20:23So lots of great stuff on the horizon, but I'll say a crew that I work with, they have the utmost respect for our users, for the industry, they don't take their job lightly in the slightest. And I'll say, I just, I am constantly amazed at the level of respect they have for what they're doing, that this just isn't like another PM job or another design gig. This is literally dealing with the tools and the structure that power a global industry on Bluebeam. And that's not lost on anybody here within the Bluebeam ranks. Well, and that's what's great about being here and being out on the front edge where I get to be in the industry itself.

21:01And it's funny, you talk about that paradox. That paradox exists in this industry to the nth degree, right? I will sit in a room and I will be talking to an advanced group that is really looking for, how are you gonna automate things? How are you gonna help me collect data? How are you gonna help me close loops and really advance my business and really move my entire business forward? And I want you at a foundational layer of that along with my other tools that I'm bringing in. And then honestly, 10 minutes later, I could be sitting down with a small contractor that's got 10 people, two trucks, and wants to deliver and wants to be better.

21:41Not that they don't care, they're not there, right? And, but yet the same tool they're going to open up and in some respects, the same tool, right? It might be review, somebody might open max, you know, whatever. They're going to see this logo and they're going to go Bluebeam. And so we, again, that's a huge piece. And I want to roll us back because I want to get to talking about Max. But something that I felt before I came on board was like, what is Bluebeam up to? What are they doing? And exactly that, like release over release, like what are we doing? You had to address the past and really refactor.

22:21I know you don't want to give away the secret sauce, but talk a little bit about that extended process because I don't think, first of all, as somebody who's done this before in another world, refactoring and keeping something working that people love without breaking it, that's really hard to do. To my IT folks listening, if you do your job really, really well, nobody notices. That's the beauty. You don't want them to notice. So if they're noticing, something's wrong. So talk a little bit about that refactor path and maybe open people's eyes to what it took and why we did it. To take in all of that, you have to put yourself back in 2002.

23:01July of next year will be our 25th anniversary. Technology was a very different time back then. You know, occasionally, you know, we'll see something on YouTube or whatever from 2002. It was like kind of grainy footage of the kind of funny looking clothes. I'm like, I remember that. I was like out of college at that point. But it feels like such a long time ago. That's when Bluebeam started. it. So we're about to go into, we're in our 25th year here. And what we've had to do is do exactly what you described by taking technology that is used every day and is a value, and it has a level of expectation and evolve that to solve problems in a new way.

23:36What we didn't want to do is, as I say, throw the baby out in bathwater or completely rewrite things beyond what some users or maybe even what some industry experts might've expected us to do 10 years ago. So for example, 10 years ago, obviously a huge push to go web and mobile makes a lot of sense. We too have also gone web and mobile. I'll describe that in a moment. But there's also a separate superpower that comes along with local processing. So by being able to put the power of a local proprietary library that we've developed onto a local machine, you start to unlock new possibilities. In fact, I've seen some early, we're not releasing this, but we've seen some really interesting examples of local AI models running on fairly high-powered yet accessible devices.

24:22And you think, there's an interesting future here where what if there is a component of AI that runs local? The compute gets to a certain point, the cost gets to a certain point, the parameters of the model get to a certain point, and then all of a sudden you're doing some really interesting things locally. So the whole idea of technology moving exclusively web and mobile, I would actually say is an anti-pattern. It's not necessarily what is required to be. Now, I will say that there are very important pieces of local technology that need to be connected into web-based sources. So, for example, we talked about Studio.

24:55We're working on a couple of really interesting things that are going to launch next year. We're going to announce them at Unbound. See you in Vegas. really cool stuff that does not use local compute, but uses the power of the interwebs, so to speak. Some really cool stuff that's on the horizon. So all that to say, we've had to do that evolution. So again, it's a yes and. It's not, you know, this is the end of local desktop. It's what does it also mean if I'm looking at a file on my local desktop, how can I, in a matter of two clicks, view that on my mobile device, send that to you and have you access that on web?

25:29I've got even a couple of things beyond that. I don't want to go into too much detail on, but where could you then see it here or there or do this or that with these people in this context? That to us is this broader thing we've been calling Bluebeam Anywhere. And it's the whole idea that I can get to the people, the information, the documents I need, regardless of the device I'm on, the security requirements I'm on, if I'm offline or online. That is, that's the story of Bluebeam Anywhere. We've got a lot more work to do. By no means is that done, But we've made some incredible progress and a lot of hats off to the team for that.

26:01We just recently launched a whole series of updates to our web and mobile applications, specifically iOS and Android, for tool sets and measurements. More of that's coming here in the near future. Studio Sessions and Studio Projects is now fully supported across our web, iOS, and Android applications. So you can start a studio session, send out a URL. And even if the person isn't even a paying subscriber, they can log in with a no-cost Bluebeam ID and access the files on their Android device, mark it up. And if that's a connected session, you've got a no-cost user on an Android device marking up 2D drawing that pipes immediately back into a 3D model.

26:38That's what Bluebeam Anywhere is. And that's available today, actually. So that's what Bluebeam Anywhere means for us. So we're going to continue to expand along all those lines. Yeah, you're going to go down that line. And to everybody who's listening, you've heard me say this for years. And now I think you'll start to see the connection and why this was such a cool thing for me to get to do is that it's right person, right place, right time, right information. And that was never to be owned by any one application. And that's exactly what you're talking about. A detailer sitting there in Revit and needs this.

27:12And a person in the field is looking at something that's been installed and needs that answer. And they're on a scaffolding or they're on a lift. And how can we make all this quick and for the right person in the right place? And, you know, these technologies are doing it. And I love that you went to the idea of, hey, desktop, there's certain things you can do. I want everybody to take a step back and just think, like, I have been saying this for a very long time. and so is this show, there's a sign curve to the way this goes, right? We're always going out to the web, onto the desktop, because the reality is there's power in different places at different times for the right thing.

27:54If you think about it, to my IT geeks, we went all SaaS and everybody said, it's all cloud. And I even had a guy tell me, stop doing your job as an IT person because it's going to be gone, right? Because everything's going to be in the cloud. You don't need to do anything. We all know that's not true. So, but a lot of that power was then brought in local models for computer vision to the edge to do things right there. Right. And so the computer can do those things now, especially with, you know, processing the way it is and that future of being both. It's not yes, this only it's yes. And that I think it ties to your PD, you know, to your 2D and 3D.

28:31That's right. It ties to the edge into the cloud. It ties to like, stop thinking in absolutes, think in possibilities and don't cut yourself off from a possibility. And I think that's important too, that, you know, as a leader in the industry, and we've been around for a very long time. And I do believe that, you know, it's funny because we had connected workflows and then we had, I had Usman come on and really talk about respecting the intelligence, respecting the industry, respecting what it knows in order to keep delivering. And I think we hold that responsibility. You talked about it. Our product folks hold that responsibility.

29:10Our customer success, our customer delight, our account managers, everybody holds that at heart. There's this driving force that we play a significant role and have a duty to keep that up for the industry. It's so cool to see it permeating. I love it. So I, this might be a little bit of a regional story, but growing up in the Los Angeles area, a few years back, some folks got together and decided to build the tallest building west of the Mississippi. It's the Wilshire Grand, right? And it's now the Korean Air Towers. I think it's 72 stories is in downtown Los Angeles. Some really powerful tools, a lot of brain power and intelligence and experience.

29:52And they built a prototype that will probably never get built again at that one spot in time. I think they did it in 36 months and they could do it again, Jeff, if you had a few billion dollars or whatever to hire them, they'll put one in your backyard, right? It's like, these are incredibly talented, educated, skillful experience, crafts people, architects, designers, engineers, all the way up and down that can do this and they can do it all day long. And yet we hear these stories about construction slow to adopt technology. That's a construction technology problem. That's not a workforce problem.

30:28That's not the user's problem. It's because if you look a lot of technology that's out there, it's not solving a real problem that customers need. And so the truth is, I think our customers have demands that they will continue to build our world into the future as they have for the last couple hundred years. We have customers that have been around for 150 years. They've been doing this since the 1800s. And they will continue to do that for the next 150 years. We just have to be able to provide them tools that are better than the status quo. They're better than what they're able to do. And look, that's the type of thing that keeps us up at night, that we're making sure that we're actually building that level of expectation.

31:05I actually do fully reject the notion of this industry as being maybe behind or slow to adopt technology. That actually may be true on the surface, but I think the reality is they have very high expectations for what technology can actually do for them. It's incumbent on us as technology providers to actually meet that level of expectation. Yeah, I mean, I've been saying this for years. Look around at the world around you. It is not less complicated. It is not less technologically advanced. It is far more. And there was people who built that. And so it's our it's a definitional issue and how we define what, you know, innovation and technology adoption are.

31:40Right. We see it as an app on our phone. We see it as an app on our computer. It is not that it is integrating fabrication. It's integrating manufacturing mindsets. It's changing to new tools. Right. The tools, if you look at them, are so advanced. I've toured some of the tool facilities and just see the new advancements in them and what they can do. And it's really funny that you mentioned the Wilshire Grand because MEP Innovation was there a couple of years ago. And while it's an incredible building and I've been to the top, I was also stuck in their elevator for 30 minutes. Because they have a one of a kind that I know of.

32:13There's probably a few of them out there. They are dual level. So they actually have two cars per elevator shaft. And you touch a button and then you get in. What you don't know is if somebody gets out and you're not paying attention and you get into the one they got out, that might not be the one. And then you just ride up and down for 30 minutes. And yours truly was in there and went flying out as soon. And let me tell you, so sometimes design intent is great, but sometimes user experience is very different to anybody else who's had that experience there. but also an absolute marvel when it comes to what they actually built.

32:52I want to talk Max. I'm going to put you on the hot seat later for a rapid fire on some other stuff. But first and foremost, what's Max? What is it? What are we doing? What is it doing? That's a great place to start. I could give you the big story, but let me give you a small story. Every markup that's ever been placed in the Bluebeam world for the last, let's call it 25 years. I'm rounding up six months, but let's call it that. Every markup that's ever been placed, been placed by a user sitting in front of a machine with a mouse, clicking vertices, you know, points, creating this object. Cool, fine, fair enough, good enough.

33:25Max is the first time that you actually now have AI create your markups for you. What does that mean? What AI? Where are the markups? What are they targeting? What do they say? What's the data coming in? What's the data coming out? All that gets to be defined by the user in the work process. Simply put, that's Max. It's a new evolution on top of what we have done for the last two decades and a way to unlock new ways of working. I'll give you another very specific example. Those features we've talked about, the connected sessions and other things, we can kind of go through that. But for many years, we were kicking around the idea.

33:58We're going to go super deep here on a few layers of product management and review workflows. We always wanted to do an Excel import into markup data. Now, there were some Excel imports that you could do into various tool set types, like our punch key symbols and things like that. But being able to bring data out of an external source, let's just call it an Excel spreadsheet, into your markup data was actually a really hard problem to solve. It's a data mapping issue where you have to sort of map all of the cells and rows and columns. You have to analyze your spreadsheet and then you then have to go to your markups and analyze your markups list.

34:32You have to add more columns or whatever it might be. It was just something that was very challenging to solve and something that a number of us had been kicking around for, frankly, years, just trying to think how to do it. Come to find out, AI is really good at mapping data. So back to the whole idea of we introduced a couple basic commands in Macs that essentially let you update markup properties and create custom columns. And it's very sublime on the surface. And you think, well, update custom columns. What does that mean? Well, you can now pick any external data source and have that map and create new columns within your markups list to assign data against.

35:11Well, update markup property, what does that mean? Well, you can change your markup from red to blue, okay? But you can also now assign any amount of additional data to those markups from an outside source. I'll give you an example. I was doing this, playing around some stuff. I view it as my job to spend at least 30 minutes a day in some form of our technology, be it an integration or our technology. It's one of my commitments to our customers that in my role, I feel it's very important that I'm actually clicking on our tech, using our stuff. So that's something that also sort of brings me joy, kind of fills up my meter, so to speak, where I can go and feel like I'm staying very close to the technology still.

35:56So one thing that you can do is you can go into a document, there's a takeoff, and just a single length, and that length might be like, we'll call it 100 meters. You can then go into an AI tool and say, look at that length of 100 meters, and I want you to build out all the assemblies of a concrete masonry unit, a CMU wall, according to typical standards, and create columns for the bags of cement that I need, the total linear feet of grout, the weight of grout, the labor hours according to standard known labor factors for that type of wall. and then you just simply add in a height and it will go through and map all that information, go pull that off the internet and begin creating your columns and then start calculating based on 100 meters of a given material.

36:50We can pull in that assembly and start calculating that. That was the type of thing that was completely unheard of six months ago and is now just a few prompts away. That's what Max is. It's the ability to take that external information and have that influence the reality of what either commenting is, an estimation, the design. And then from there, there's that other step of, now that I have this data, where do I need it to go? So what we've seen is a lot of great activity in the market from our adjacent partners, apps, the various companies that we work with that either build within our ecosystem or also providing MCPs where that information can now be in context and Aegis can take that and move that into other applications.

37:34We have some early things that we're working on with HCSS and HeavyBid. Yeah, that's right. You got your HCSS hat there. We have a lot of customers that are doing takeoffs in Bluebeam, but they're doing their estimates in HeavyBid. How do we make that a little bit easier? And how can AI kind of help map that data? So more to come on that. You should come join us at either the HCSS user group meeting in February or at Unbound, but that's all I'll say for now about that. I really like that because something I'm going to call out because I've been out there talking about it quite a bit and I carry two hats, right?

38:12Like I do work, my day job is Bluebeam, but I do, you know, this, the content crew podcast, I do this, I'm out there in the industry, you know, thinking about it for them. And a lot of what we're asking, a lot of what this AI has done and a lot of what construction technology has done over years is like add new things. It's like, oh, I want to do that, but I'm going to do it over here. You got to go do it over here. You got to go learn this. And it's one of the powerful things about Bluebeam is like, we did it on paper. We really, truly held to digitizing that, right? We held to the way you did it on paper is the way you do it in the plans.

38:47Now I watch people do takeoffs, measurements, markups, the whole thing that they were doing to learn the job and to quantify the job was very much digitized. And it was very, it was frictionless. It removed a lot of that friction and exactly what we're doing. And I'm going to have you explain MCP in a second for folks as well. But what we're doing with Max is everything you just said, somebody can do and they can do it by hand. All of it. It's just really tedious and takes a long time, but they can do it. And it's a no thanks because again, it's not the value add. The value add is the outcome and quantifying it and understanding the scope on the job and what it's going to take to deliver it and do it and do those things.

39:35So we're not asking you to do something that you never did before and learn something completely freaking different. We're aligning it with the way you do it. And we're trying to do it very frictionless. And that's a powerful component. And then, like you said, we're waking up to things that we didn't know were possible in our own tool. Now, kudos to you and the team for doing a lot of the prep work on it, that again, we're not going to dive into all the refactoring, et cetera, that made it possible, but that's an investment on our end. And I want to be transparent. That investment is because we care, right?

40:11Because we're invested in this connected future with everyone in this built world delivering projects. We know that data centers, hyperscalers advanced manufacturing are on the forefront right now but labs and hospitals and treatment centers and housing and commercial real estate they're all there and they're all going to have their boom again what we're designing and building is for all of them and i think that's really important for me as a to align with the goal that i've always had of just helping this industry reach its true potential because it's limitless and it's awesome I get on a plane.

40:49I drive to the plane. I get on a runway. I cross a bridge. I look at, you know, my kids get so mad. Look at all the cranes. You look at the construction. Stop for a second. And they're like, oh, God, it's at the core of our company, right? It's this guiding light. To me, that's just important for the listeners to kind of understand. And well, as you can probably tell, we had a lot to geek out about with Luke Prescott, and there was no way we were fitting it into one episode. So we're going to hit pause right here and pick things back up in part two, where we dive even deeper into what's next for Bluebeam, the industry, and the technology shaping how we build.

41:22Thank you for tuning in today to geek out for our interview with Luke Prescott. To read all our news stories, learn more about our guests, and listen to the show, visit thecontentcrew.com. This is the Content Crew signing out. Until next time. Enjoy the ride and geek out.