Introduction

So yeah, we have like struck built with confidence, but I actually had a meeting today with the city of Amsterdam and I changed the title to never waste a good crisis, right? Because sometimes the best ideas and problems and solutions come out of good crisis.

Identifying the Crisis

So what is the crisis currently?

The Construction Crisis

that we are currently in a construction crisis. So basically everywhere we have to build more.

In the Netherlands, about a million homes until 2030. That is about 200,000 homes a year. And we're reaching about 80,000. That's roughly, let's say, the numbers.

And nobody's actually getting to the point like, yeah, but we think There is not even a plan that in 2027 it will be 300,000 or 350,000.

Government Concerns and Regulation Delays

I actually heard today that the government would like to see a pipeline on where they are with the amount of houses that are being built. And one of the things, of course, there's many delays in this, right? I mean, I'm not going to say that we're the only ones, but one of the delays in this whole story is compliance when it comes to rules and regulations, when it comes to building and construction.

So there are tons of regulations. Literally, I think there is more than this. It takes about 5% to 25% of a project budget to work on compliance projects with all the consultants involved that do the reports on everything.

And it takes one to eight years to actually start construction, depending on the project. And then it's generally about two years of construction. So, yes, good planning. Also make sure that that time is very short.

But if you look at it in the grand scheme of things, you can better make sure that you shorten the eight years to five years instead of the two years to nine months, for example. You have bigger savings.

Tackling Compliance with Technology

So, when we dove a little bit deeper into this whole space is that the compliance is obviously having an impact here. 1And more specifically, the market is having issues with the fact that all the big decisions are made at the beginning parts of a project, but all the checks, the regulatory checks are actually being done in later stages of the project.

the market always fix this with just brute force by adding more people and adding more money and of course big development projects like 2,000 euros here more or less doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things but they worry about the time and they worry about the de-risking of the projects because if they make mistakes business case wise even on this side of the plan you can fix them here but you cannot fix the business case anymore Then it's just a matter of dealing.

They want this industry to really go like the car industry, for example. Like you design a car, et cetera, and then it rolls and you know what your risk is actually going to be. Whereas with construction, they're doing changes the moment the building is already there.

Applying AI to Regulatory Checks

So what we've been saying is, okay, what if we are going to apply AI to do all these checks in the beginning of the projects? Where you don't have all those consultants involved, there's no budget for that, but you can let an AI run on that space. And then it will save time, cut costs, and de-risk projects.

Evolution of the AI-Assisted Approach

We came to this vision because we were at a governmental workshop back in November. And we already had at that point a very practical application of AI because we said we're not going to do mid journey or stable diffusion pictures of create a building that in the end is just a picture and not a building. And we said we want to have something practical.

So we took the Dutch building code, we put it into an AI assistant, and you could start asking questions. And all of you think, well, that's not the most revolutionary thing. No, probably not. But you learn what the market observes from this.

And suddenly, you have architects that are like, oh, wait. I actually get a source here. But normally, I'm on Google, and I have a screen with the buildingcode.org. And I'm doing Control-F, and I'm going to look where the answer is.

And now I actually get the question, get the source. And another architect says, look, there's tons of international architects here in Amsterdam and they don't speak a word of Dutch. So there always needs to be a senior person coming in to a Dutch person to look at the regulation. But now you can ask a question in English, look it up in the Dutch building code, get the answer back in English. So very, very simple. use cases, and then they said, if you can do this with a building code, can you also do this with a parking norm?

Expanding the AI Library

Would you have a bicycle norm, an aesthetics document, a NEN for the people that are Dutch document, a BREEAM LEED, those kinds of, so now we have a library with over 170 documents, national and let's say municipal level. But of course, they wanted more. So they said, can you also do this for zoning plans? And in the Netherlands, zoning plans can be accessed online.

In other countries, that's not the case. So it took us a little bit of time to build this, but we actually got that done too. So you don't have to look up anything in the zoning plans anymore. You just ask the question.

I was at a real estate, an asset manager last week, and it took her three hours to figure out whether she could put a healthcare facility building up in a particular space and we just asked question and said no and there and there is the rule so to save her three hours then we got one more question okay so we spent usually about 45 minutes to create a mass volume study what is the plot that I can build on and what's the maximum height that I can build on can you not do anything with that yes we can we actually extract the maximum building height with AI from the zoning plans. We slap it onto the cadastral plot, and that's there.

This was version one in March. And of course, you get questions like, yeah, can you not show some surroundings? And this today, now we show it like this. And this is in two months.

AI-Driven Design Checks

So now we're in six months. And this is what we've been able to do. But again, this whole library thing is just one piece of the story because we said we're going to do checks on design.

Automating Surface Norm Calculations

And I will show you now a video on how that works. with in the Netherlands, what's called the NEN 2580, otherwise called surface norms. So you have to know for every space, how many square meters you have gross and net. And that's not only when you start building, but that's also when you start renting it. So basically for everything, you need to have this calculation.

1And we now started to automate this. So this is an actual building in Amsterdam where you do some annotations initially already when you do the design. So this is not spectacular work.

So now the AI is actually determining the first surface area to look at, the one in green. And you see, hey, some things are actually not correct. They shouldn't be in there. So you remove them.

And now he starts calculating, so generate the results. So this is a 7,000 square meter space, and we were off by 20 square meters when we did this. And this is just a POC still.

And now what we're going to do is we're training it. Are these voids? Are these staircases? Are these technical shafts? You answer yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. And then the answer rolls out as well.

Now you're going to actually change a wall, make the wall bigger, and immediately, let's say, decreases the number of square meters. So again, where we want to sit is more in those phases in the middle, right? Like if you're really at the end, yes, you can do some clash detections. I won't go into the details on building codes, but you're too far in the process. You want to have it done right here.

Marketing the Library as a Product

And we thought the library itself we can market as a separate product because there's a company in the U.S. that basically has 800,000 monthly users just by offering a library with rules and regs throughout 52 states. So that's pretty huge, of course.

Future Developments and Launch Plans

So first our library we're launching now, actually today, Then the core design checks, so think about like fire checks, evacuation, what I said, surface, parking is a very big one. And then we can even go into, okay, I have this building, what should I do in order to make it BREEAM or LEED compliant? Like certain, or what kind of punterstelsels, all these things we can do later on.

So there's now about 2,500 questions asked to the model in the past couple of months. With that, we've been able to train it to make sure we give the proper answers, and with the help, of course, of language with the guardrails. Over 150 architects, et cetera, right now are using it.

Model Training and User Adoption

The library has over 170 documents, and then we have the 20,000 spatial plans from the bestemmingsplanne. few architects and developer firms where we're currently working with, but also on the government side because there's a big need to change that.

Extending the Technical Library Internationally

So how does that work all in practice? This is what we call the technical library.

We haven't only done it, let's say, for the Netherlands is most elaborate, but also the UK building code we've added. As you may know, ever since the Glenfell fire in London, everything regarding UK building codes has become very, very difficult. So we've added that and we're actually, so that's only one document, consists of 18 documents, but that's already a very valuable tool for people in the UK.

So if you would ask, what is the fire resistance of a building higher than 10 meters? Now it starts looking into the documentation. Hopefully it works. I've done many demos where it didn't work, of course, but I don't mind. It does work.

Improving Answer Precision

So this is what we learned as well. Initially we gave an answer, but we didn't really differentiate between new construction and existing buildings. So then the market said, look, that doesn't really work because you have to know what the rule is because those are different. So we made that differentiation right now.

Integrating Zoning Plans and Technical Documents

And then, and I can explain that to you, you see here the two libraries are very separate, right? Like technical documents and then the zoning plans. But that's of course not how an architect or developer works. The reason why we had to present it as two is because one is directly plugging in from all the zoning plans online and the other one is an internal rack that we build, technical. But those are two different things.

Introducing the Project View Feature

Project-Specific Queries and Parameters

But, of course, in the workflow of an architect or a developer, that doesn't work. So actually today we added, let's say, the so-called project view that you can create a project. You immediately, let's say, it's actually nice to show. I haven't done this much. Let's say it's a start dock. It's a renovation. The role is an office and the location is here, single 126 in Amsterdam. Okay. So now all the questions that I'm asking, the AI is only going to give the answer with those parameters taken into account. Yeah. So it immediately, let's say, picks up this single 126, and then you can ask like, what can I build here, et cetera. Actually, so far so good. So thank you very much.