During the last 50 years there has been more improvement in the tools and processes to produce architecture than during the 500 years dating back to the Renaissance. During the last 5 years there has been more improvement than in the previous 50 years. If this is a trend, we could be witnessing the beginning of exponential growth in these improvements. Very shortly architectural practice may begin to be totally unrecognizable compared to what we have today.
Between the time of the Renaissance and the Twentieth Century architectural practice went from ruling pens, T-squares, triangles, and tracing paper to digital work. Digital work is now transforming from local offices to international wide area networks, and is also transforming from human unput to machines, and the velocity of that transformation is accelerating quickly at the beginning of what looks like an exponential curve.
Because of digitization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, the amount of work enterprises can produce is increasing. This is also increasing levels of competition. Consequently, the number of enterprises that can competitively do work is decreasing. I suspect these moves are in exponential proportions, which is not that noticeable presently because we are in the beginnings of the curve. The curve, now starting slowly, will change more and more rapidly with time. There will be massive contraction in enterprise sizes, and huge decreases in the numbers of enterprises, accompanied by massive enterprise liquidations. The number of enterprises left standing will become a very small but very productive and very profitable club. This will be a huge transfer of the wealth from one group of architectural enterprises to another, and it will be on a level not seen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The nature of business already being conducted by architectural enterprises is shifting rapidly and fundamentally. Business is increasingly making a transition from being conducted by armies of large enterprises to armies of one, operating not from Class A office environments but from isolated laptops hooked up to any convenient WIFIs anywhere in the world and connected to an unlimited number of other laptops also hooked up to any convenient WIFIs located anywhere in the world.
These are temporary strategic partnerships, each one mobilized on a project-by-project basis and liquidated immediately when each project is completed. Strategic partnerships like this are already operating and in fact this is precisely the way our company, Archline.com, operates. Stock in trade by architects responsible for the profits and losses of their otherwise traditional and conventional enterprises, will become more and more narrowly defined as the value-added services of other enterprises emerge to be offered at world class quality, price, and velocity. Genius, aka architectural services, has become a commodity, and genius is bought and sold globally daily.
If you are an architect and you are responsible for the profits and losses of your enterprise, you should think again about where you are and what you are doing. Is your enterprise working for you or are you working for your enterprise? The answer, chances are, you are probably working for the enterprise. Are you generating personal compensation at a level you feel is commensurate with your contribution to your enterprise? The answer, chances are, is probably not. Are you finding yourself in a lopsided balance, enduring the tipping of a lot more responsibility and liability on your head than it’s worth? That answer, chances are, is probably so. Many CEOs, some of them with large enterprises, have already resigned their posts in favor of becoming “lone wolves” operating on their personal laptops, located at home, airports, construction sites, destination resorts, whatever. One former CEO confided in me he has clients who don’t want to go anywhere near a conventionally operated architectural firm for fear of getting hacked for their business by other members of the firm. Owner-architect relationships are becoming very low key almost clandestine spy like operations, where meetings and communications are hush hush, isolated, and introverted.
These CEOs are discovering that their core businesses are not any longer necessarily inclusive of what has up until recently been traditional and conventional functions of professionals of record. Functions such as design, writing specifications, construction administration, and even the signing and sealing of contract documents, are all increasingly being offered by other fully licensed architects and engineers where more and more of them are located in countries outside the United States, and where compensation levels are sometimes more than a whole order of magnitude lower.
The only reliable remaining stock in trade for such CEOs are the simple relationships they have with their clients. Everything else has become commoditized by the lowest bidders, the highest velocity and the highest quality.
This is staggering disruption but there is more. Strategic partnerships with outside or offshore professional resources will eventually be eclipsed by contract documents completely produced by AI robots, and those robots, at least initially, will be controlled and managed by companies typically now found in Silicon Valley in California. Architects and engineers who intend to stay in the game are forming strategic partnerships with those companies now. Jurisdictions which have historically issued building permits requiring great care and time in the review, comments, and approvals of professionally signed and sealed construction documents, will gradually discontinue dealing with such documents in favor of robot generated documents because those documents will be essentially free of errors and omissions. The companies managing those robots will be preapproved for the issuance of building permits for documents prepared by those robots.
How far are these circumstances in the future? Not long, and the future is essentially now. Do you want to know more about how you can ride the tsunami of changes about to sweep through the AE industry instead of being ground to the bottom? My company, Archline.com, is starting to ride that tsunami now. We already have an international wide area network of architects and engineers in several countries, and we are working with architectural and engineering enterprises in many locations around the US, and we have already begun elementary experimenting with the applications of artificial intelligence in our work. Contact me and let’s look at our potentially mutual interests. You’ll be glad you did.