Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:00

Hello listeners. This is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning. In. Albert just got back from the AAC conference in Anaheim, California. We're going to talk about some of the conversations that he had with people on the floor about trends and other challenges that are top of mind among professionals and capital projects. Hey, Albert, hey Nate, welcome

Unknown: 0:25

back, I guess. Yeah, it's been a while, but it has. I've been traveling a lot, but I've been home for a week and a half at this point. That's

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:33

right. And then you were in Anaheim, not for Disneyland, no, but for a conference, yes,

Unknown: 0:40

yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was good. AAC, by the way, you mentioned Disneyland. The A, C E, also mentioned Disneyland, the listing image for this year's conference, you know, the 2025 Expo, or whatever they call it, when, if you go on their website to go sign up, it's just a picture of the roller coaster at the California Adventure. You know, of course, with the Mickey Mouse ears in front of it. This is like, come to the AC conference, or maybe Disneyland, or

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:06

Disneyland, yeah, but a solo trip to Disneyland kind of weird? Yeah, definitely. I wouldn't do it. You don't do it alone. No, do it with a group to wait in line.

Unknown: 1:16

Now that group needs to have a particular composition, or else, it still is weird, and this is something that you know, your friend and mine, armor saber, talked about. We were talking about this at a rooftop party hosted by our friends at smartpm, which happened to be right across from from Disneyland. We could actually see the California Adventure from the roof. So we posted up to a spot which was going to have a good view of the evening show. And we started talking about like, Well, why not go to Disneyland? And the main reason why is if two dudes in their mid 40s show up without any obvious connection to children or families or, you know, wearing matching T shirts or something. It comes across a little weird.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:54

Yeah, it could be a lot of different things. But the the memory I have, the memory I have of Disneyland is that my mom took me on Space Mountain when I was, like, four or five. That's too young. Scared the crap out of me, yeah? I thought I was gonna die, yeah, and I never, I wouldn't go on a roller coaster, like, for my entire teens.

Unknown: 2:16

Like, yeah, you definitely got hit too young by Space Mountain. Seriously, like, I mean, Space Mountain is for is for teens. So you really missed out, buddy, I'm sorry that you didn't get to have that experience. The first time I went on Space Mountain, I was probably six or seven, and that was too young. That's it scared the crap out of me too, because it does feel and like I've, I've since had a thought about roller coasters in general, and Space Mountain in particular, that they follow kind of a laugher curve of, of, like, optimal enjoyment, yeah, where, if you're too young, they're going to scare the absolute crap out of you, because, you know, kids are scared by stuff. If you're in that butter zone of slightly, let's call it 15 to 30, you're going to really, really like, you know, a roller coaster, get a lot out of the excitement of it. But as soon as the, you know, impending, as soon as your impending mortality starts to take over, your conscious thought, you're just, you're not going to like it anymore, because there's like, yeah, which is hazards and risks, you know,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 3:12

yeah, that is everything is, I feel like when you're little, like everything is going to kill you,

Unknown: 3:18

yeah? Well, when you're little, the risks are real. When you're old, the risks are merely perceived.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 3:24

That's hilarious. Yeah, it's yeah, it's fun. I enjoy the roller coasters, but I also feel like a Disneyland experience is not the same if you don't have, you know, a child that complains at least a little bit, but

Unknown: 3:38

I've been in the presence of whiny children at Disneyland. And there is very little that confuses me more than a child who is unhappy to be at Disneyland like I don't get it.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 3:48

I and it is like 45 degrees for all the Canadians out there, or, you know, 110 if you're American, with that pavement. So

Unknown: 3:58

it gets to keep it, to keep it region agnostic. It is an unpleasant number of degrees.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 4:06

Yeah, let's move on and start talking about the AAC conference, yeah. How was it? What was it like? It was

Albert Brier: 4:12

great. I really enjoyed it this. This year's was a particularly good one, I think probably because when I've gone to conferences recently, it's largely been for sales reasons. I mean, that's why we go right, like it's a marketing opportunity for us get our name out there. But I spent a lot more time this year than I normally would, in the technical presentations and talking to the people giving the you know, who wrote the papers and about their research, and just kind of trying to steep myself in the in the technical stuff a little bit more this year, and that made for a really great conference for me. And there were some really interesting conversations to be had, especially about risk and schedule, because those are my two core competencies as a project, controls professional. And there was a lot of interesting stuff going on in

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 4:54

those two fields. Yeah, like, what were they talking I mean, AI is probably going to come up. Oh for sure. Came up all over the place, but what kind of, what kind of topics were kind of front and

Unknown: 5:05

center? Well, one of the key themes was the, this is gonna sound very dramatic, but the slaying of ancient gods, okay, like so just that, like the the legacy tools that everybody's been using for time immemorial, about, you know, scheduling, for example. A good, good example, there is p6 Right? Like, Oracle, who owns primavera, doesn't even show up to these conferences. Like, they don't have booths at the AC conference. Typically, they do show up to some of them, like they'll be, you know, I don't know where was last time I saw an Oracle booth. I'm actually having a hard time remembering, but the last time I saw an Oracle booth, it looked like somebody's science fair project, like it was really, really small, manned by one person who didn't really seem like they wanted to be there. You know, no offense to my Oracle friends, but you guys definitely have a king of the castle vibe going on, right? Like they don't really have to work for their license sales. You know, if anybody wants to do a serious job of doing enterprise level scheduling, they're gonna get p6 Right, right? Yeah. Well, five years from now, that may not be true, because there are a profusion of schedule maintenance and management tools and estimation tools even that not only didn't exist five years ago, but wouldn't have been possible five years ago because of, you know, all the cloud compute that's available now, because of all the the different ways that people are, like, learning how to schedule and plan their projects. Like, you know, I'm getting a bit into the weeds here, but the point is that there, there are lots of software companies who are coming after p6 who are actually saying, like, our goal is to take over some of those licenses and start doing the same kind of work that p6 would have done, you know, 510, years

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 6:42

ago, yeah. Who did you talk to when you were on the floor? So

Unknown: 6:45

I got interviews from a pretty wide variety of people, but over half of them I would call, like technical project controls professionals, right? Actually, you could argue that all of them were so a bunch of them work for software companies that provide project controls tools. Many of them are consultants like us, working for, you know, different consulting agencies and a couple represented owner operators, like people who are running operating assets. So just, just to quickly run down my my list and and, by the way, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everybody I'm about to name. I spoke with Claudette Smith from Hess Corporation, David Emanuel from risk connect, David Hewlett, so Dr Hewlett is one of the great researchers in risk management these days, so it was a real pleasure to talk to him. I also shared the stage with him briefly at the Safran summit that immediately followed the AAC conference, I spoke there, and so did Dr Hewlett Franco yasuyama from pattern energy, Frank bangalon from FTI, Ian Nicholson, who's someone we've spoken with before. He owns and operates emerald solutions. They do risk training, and they're a big, heavy Safran user. Jordan Brooks from innate. Innate is one of the companies that's they're building one of those new scheduling tools that might be coming after p6 pretty soon. So, you know, stay tuned for that. Luis Terry from Atkins realis. So Atkins realis, formerly SNC Lavalin, my former employer, Michael apage from plan Academy. Like, if you don't know him by name, you probably know his face, because he's all over YouTube. He has some of the very best scheduling tutorial videos out

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 8:24

there. So, yeah, if you're looking to go down a planning sort of scheduling, uh, rabbit hole there, that's your guy.

Unknown: 8:32

Absolutely no. He's, he's the best. And he was, he was really fun to talk to. He was super game for the interview. Um, Muhammad Al Rashi from faithful and Gould, another former employer of mine, Rachel Fleming from MVP. She gave one of the technical presentations about risk, and she and I are going to be having some follow up conversations soon. We have some convergent ideas about how program level risk should be managed. Love it. Rohit sinda from smartpm. Smartpm makes one of my favorite new scheduling tools. I make an analysis tool, and this is a whole class of tools that would barely have been possible prior to the last three to five years. It's this, like smartpm, builds on the DCMA 14 point analysis program, like invented by the US Department of Defense, like, I don't know, two decades ago or more. It's kind of become the standard for measuring schedule quality, especially for new baseline schedules, but also for ongoing schedules to measure like throughput and slippage and things like that. So smartpm takes those initial 14 analysis points and builds a whole suite of analytical tools on top of it. That is very, very cool. So I'm hoping we can get Rohit on the podcast for an interview at some great interview. Speaking of people who would make a great interview for this podcast, I also spoke to Santosh Bhatt from Turbo chart. Turbo chart does linear schedules, which is a very cool speaking of interesting technology enabled schedule analytics, that's definitely. Right at the top of the list for the kinds of I should be learning more about about this. So I'd love to talk to Santosh about it on the podcast. But anyway, yeah, thanks to everybody that I just mentioned. I mean, you guys were super helpful, and I appreciate you all being willing to do some interviews. But anyway, let's get into

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 10:15

it. Yeah, let's do it. So one of the first questions that you talked to them, just to kind of pull us back. Was about the future of capital projects, because, you know, we covered tariffs, for instance, on a previous episode. We've talked about AI on another episode, and this was kind of your opportunity to sort of get a, you know, read the what am I trying to say? Like, feel the pulse. No, get the pulse of, sort of what people thought the future of capital projects

Unknown: 10:46

would be. For some context, I asked people to answer a few short interview questions with me. Went through really, really quickly, just four questions. You know, the first one, I guess it was five, because the first one was, who are you? But the second one was actually a request for consent, but the third one was, what is the future of capital projects? So we went through that and three other questions. And the future of capital projects, according to my friends on the AAC floor, sounds a little bit like this, right? Digitally integrated, integration AI enabled, management, dim, uncertain, good, scheduling, long term value, complex data, uncertain, centered around technology. Dr Hewlett gave a more nuanced answer. Let's give that a listen. Well, you would hope that the future of Capra project is for steady success in in meeting our quantity and price and cost, I mean, price and schedule objectives. There's not an awful lot of evidence that we're getting better over the years in doing so. So

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:55

that was interesting, huh? Yeah, super interesting. So clearly, digital data kind of front and center?

Unknown: 12:03

Front and center, yeah, yeah. I mean, we had 13 people agree to do our interview. Probably would have been more if I had gotten my acts together a little faster, you know, and started recording on the first day.

Albert Brier: 12:15

But we got 13 people respond, and of those 13, six of them said something to the effect of data or digital is the future of capital projects. So that's a pretty big percentage, like that's almost half of our respondents. Second place answer was uncertainty. So you mentioned tariffs and the business environment earlier. Lots of people concerned about slash thinking about an uncertain capital projects environment, because most of the people I spoke to were planners in one way or another. So uncertainty affects them directly, like they don't. They don't know what they can and can't plan for,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 12:48

right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not surprised that digital thing, the thing, the digital thing, the

Unknown: 12:56

digital thing to get out this year. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:02

digital because that's kind of one of the things that you know, dokaneish and company does, which is digital transformation. And even yesterday, last week, you like, we're constantly having conversations and helping clients sort of execute and kind of go through the proper process to enable a digital transformation. So I'm not surprised. Yeah, I liked the data and digital because everybody's taught, how do you use AI to get more value from your data? The uncertainty piece also not surprising. No, you know, I mean, like, it's a constant, you know, changing environment, the goal posts are moving constantly. Time new tariffs terrorists are I mean, even in Canada, we talked about, the prime minister talked about not reaching a trade agreement that has some kind of relief and that there will be terror. I mean, it's just, it's wild. And so your planner friends that you were on the floor with, like, how do they price anything?

Unknown: 14:00

Well, I mean, it's a great question. The best we can really do is just use the data that we would have used last year to do the same kind of planning that we would have done last year, but put a big old fat error bar on it. I mean, you know, we talked more about that in our episode on uncertainty. So I do think that people should check that out, because it does go into some of the root causes of why the business environment is more uncertain now than it was, you know, say, 10 years ago. Although even 10 years is kind of a weird because we for similar reasons, we were experiencing similar uncertainty 10 years ago. You know, interestingly, the third place response. It was a distant third mind you, but it was the third place response was positivity people, despite the issues and, you know, despite the challenges of uncertainty and a changing digital landscape, are positive about the future. So that was interesting to hear, too. It's not so it's nice to hear a little bit of positivity, positivity, yeah, well,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 14:57

I mean, you have to, right, like, you can't give up. I. Yeah, but the Yeah, just I think about infrastructure. I think about construction, any physical asset that's got to import materials, like we talked about in the other episode, you know, steel, you know, being like any any material, there's a wild amount of uncertainty. And even I finished reading this book called Apple in China. And so it talks about, you know, Apple supply chain and its contract manufacturers like Foxconn. And even now, Apple now is trying to move into India to, you know, diversify their supply chain, the manufacturing. It's just, it's wild, like it's wild it is. So it's,

Unknown: 15:38

you know, and that uncertainty piece, I mean the the purpose of changing your supply chain, as dramatically as Apple is looking to doing. To do so is to try to avoid risk, right? But avoiding risk on boards risk, right? You're moving as you put your moving the goal post. You move in the tracks on your train. Where do those tracks lead? You don't know. Like it's the future. You don't really know. So, you know, Tim Cook is genius at this whole supply chain thing. I'm sure he shows what he's doing. Yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:10

exactly. So the next question you asked was, like, speaking of positivity, sure, the next question is interesting. You know, the California High Speed Rail, you asked the question, will the High Speed Rail ever get built? Yeah, I did

Unknown: 16:24

you want to know why?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:25

Yes. Pause for dramatic Yeah. Dramatic

Unknown: 16:28

effect, yeah. Okay. Dramatic effect achieved. I asked that question in part because, yeah, it was in California. People are going to have thoughts about it. Some of the folks who were there are from California, but not everybody. In fact, not most people, but everybody there is a major made lap is a mega projects person in one way or another. So I figured I'd at least take the temperature of the room and see what they think about it. And here's what they said, Absolutely not how is it was originally envisioned. I think it's being built right now, but it's only between Fresno and as San Jose. I have no idea. I don't live in California. Yes, it will. I don't know if it'll get built in California. I only hope it ever get it gets built in Alberta, and I have very low expectations that it will. We've been talking about it for 20 years, and we're no further along than we were certain segments. Yes, that's probably the most political answer I could ever give, right? Yes, eventually, absolutely, yes. I think so. I hope so well eventually. But I don't know if we'll be around for it, to to experience it, I'd have to say no lot of positivity in

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 17:33

there. I mean, they have to be, you know, the the idea of high speed rail, like we just, we have none in the US, right? And we have, but we have Amtrak and we have, we have rail rails amazing. Like to take a train anywhere is amazing. So arguably,

Unknown: 17:52

long distance, high speed rail connections are an American innovation, arguably, arguably all my, my, my, all my British listeners. Okay, I get it all

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:01

right, but I think China would have something to say about that. But it's something that's needed right. Even here in Toronto, like Metrolinx and TTC, they're building like we need transit and so the high speed rail, I have to believe that people are optimistic, because that's something that they want, it they need.

Albert Brier: 18:19

Well, there's, there's two ways to read the optimism that you hear in these answers we just listened to. One is precisely what you said, like people are excited about the prospect of having high speed rail connectivity between major American cities. It's been an unfulfilled promise for a very long time. I mean, you we could talk for hours about the historical issues that caused Americans to go to cars instead of trains, but that's basically what happened. And so we're playing catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to our high speed rail. And you mentioned Amtrak, like Amtrak is great, but it's built on technology that is genuinely ancient. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they can't really be classified as high speed rail lines when you could outrun them easily in your car driving alongside the Amtrak on the freeway, right, right. So you know, if you really want to do better, you're talking about the kind of stuff they're building in Europe and especially recently anyway, in China, where the rail is truly at a very high speed. And as you pointed out, we don't have any of that in North America, like, literally none. And that means that, you know, this is where we get to the flip side of that set of positive answers we heard. Because about of the people who responded in the positive about half of them, Well, exactly half actually responded with a qualified yes. Like, yeah, but it's going to cost a ton, or Yeah, but the scope's not going to be the same, or Yeah, but it's going to take forever. It's already taken forever, by the way, yeah, but what that gets at is, you know, we definitely need it. We definitely want it. There's a lot of excitement about it. People are positive that it's going to happen. And I'm sure we would see similar results if we asked a broader population. But. Optimism doesn't help you build mega projects. In fact, it hurts, yeah? Because if you believe so strongly that you can do something that may sound like great, you know, power of positive thinking, the wish type stuff, or it's the wish, right? The secret was secret, okay, The Giving Tree, you know that one?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 20:19

Oh, yeah, that's we'll put that. That'll be part of our, our book club to give Yeah,

Albert Brier: 20:26

right, right, right, next to Murrow's industrial mega projects and Ben flagbergs How big things get built would be the Yeah, 300% Yeah, the given life. Why not? But yeah, why not? But believing, believing strongly in yourself and your team is a good thing. Believing that you can produce results that have never been seen before on this continent is is bad. That's not a good thing. It's bad. It's a bad thing because you're you're not going to take accurate accounting of your own weaknesses, you're not going to take the appropriate measures to control risk. You know, you might spend less time planning than you would otherwise, because you believe that whatever you produce is going to result in success for you, and that's not accurate. Okay, the numbers just don't bear that out. Like any high speed rail project is going to be a mega project, right? They're going to cost billions of dollars. And mega projects are the worst performers amongst all project sizes and classes in terms of their cost performance, their schedule performance, and whether they get finished

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 21:25

at all. So to build these massive projects requires you know software right. And you asked the question about the most used software on the floor, and no surprise there, but you had some obvious uh answers, favorites, yeah, favorites,

Unknown: 21:45

yeah. Let's have a listen. Yeah. Let's go Apple Music. Active Risk Manager, well, except for Outlook and and excel, I use saffron risk almost every day. Well, Excel, Outlook in some form or fashion. The application type I use most is teams type applications, so whether it be zoom or WebEx or teams, I'm on those virtually all day. Innate schedule, obviously, that's easy, easy one to answer. If it's not innate schedule, it's probably what most people say, which is Excel, between Outlook, maybe primavera, Primavera p6 Primavera p6 besides teams on our risk, we use saffron risk. Well, smart. PM, it's gonna be Excel. Surprise. Surprise. Excel is right up there.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 22:29

Excel is everything like, you know what? Albert I just last week, my daughter's talking about going back to school, and so I taught her how to just put a budget together and use some the some function to to budget or close. And

Unknown: 22:46

I taught her magic the first time you do it. Yeah, she

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 22:48

was blown away. She's 11 year old. She's an 11 year old for our listeners. But, yeah, it's a blow. I feel like it's life skills, right? It's just life skills, because Excel is like it runs the world. Man, runs the world really does. So what else did they say? Well, our

Unknown: 23:05

actual number one answer was collaboration and communication tools like Outlook, teams and zoom. So that was the stuff that came up the most. And I mean, makes sense, right? Like you and I are talking on a teams call right now, yep. So it's, it's no surprise that people are kind of glued to their screens. I mean, there's a lot of remote work. Now, since the pandemic, things were trending in that direction even before the pandemic, yep, but now we all got kind of it. So it was a little bit like a war suddenly produces huge advances in certain kinds of wartime technologies. The pandemic produced huge advances and and huge, uh, adoption of digital technologies for collaboration and communication. So that was our that was most people's number one. Well, it wasn't exactly most, but it was a strong plurality. But number two was definitely Excel for reasons previously discussed

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 23:57

100% and it's getting better. Did when you had those conversations, did anybody talk about AI tools? Yes,

Albert Brier: 24:05

but you've got to remember that AI is still a bolt on to these tools right now, yeah, even you know we're talking about outlook teams zoom, you know, you can kind of by extension, include the Microsoft Office Suite. When you're talking about Excel, you're also talking about things like Word and OneNote. All of them have aI features right now that you can use, but they all are just tacked on like they don't feel there's no real software that feels like it's intrinsically AI enabled, except for just the chat bots themselves. You know that's gonna change real soon, but it's nobody's most used software today. Yeah, you know, yeah, our third place answer. Interestingly, if you kind of group all of these together, they were actually our first place answer, which is a lot of technical software, right? So we heard a few people say p6 a couple people say Safran, risk and. And we had some, some of our friends in the software industry explain that they use their own company tools primarily at work, which makes sense, right? So all of these are highly technical pieces of software. And I mentioned this is very much a technical focused conference, yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:15

I think. But it's not surprising to excel. I mean, we do, like you said, everything in Excel, and Excel is like a workhorse for total workhorse, you know, and that actually gets in the way of some of the the change management initiatives that we work on. And, you know, people just create their own shadow process with Excel, because whatever tools that they have don't work, and so they need something to get their job done, right.

Unknown: 25:39

So, not surprised. Yeah, it's hard to move away from something that works and is easy for you. I mean, it really is. Yeah, you know that's that's why it's hard to start a new diet Nate.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:51

Same reason diet is just die with a T. Exactly the last though, we always end our episodes with your piece of advice, and you turned that around and asked for a piece of advice for a new practitioner coming into capital projects, you know, planning, cost estimation, etc. Yes, I did. What did? What was that advice like? Well, let's say, let's

Unknown: 26:17

find out. Find a mentor, learn to tell a story from the numbers from the data. So data is important, so we'll understand the risks and understand how you can actually extract that and see the more holistic view and the more holistic story behind the data. Keep it real, keep it honest. Fight against management that doesn't want want to rock the boat. Start getting things done. Don't, don't, don't worry too much in the beginning of your career in trying to learn from theory. Don't let your young age or your lack of experience stop you from feeling empowered to make right recommendations, because everyone has something to offer. Focus on the basics, you know, understand what's going on, as opposed to chasing every new technology and every new bell and whistle that's out there, project management hasn't changed that much. I would tell them to look outside the box, whether that is what you've used in the past in just your role, or what you use in your organization. As far as finding a new technology, go out there and see what else is to offer. Figure out how to use

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 27:26

AI. Don't just focus only on technical skills. Focus on soft skills. Become an excellent communicator and be impeccable in everything you

Unknown: 27:35

do. I think I'm looking for more like aI softwares that help you to develop dashboard and analyzing the schedule. Know how to communicate clearly and well with your team, so that everyone is on the same page, and that will lead you to success. Think about how you're going to bring all the data together, right? I mean, historically, everything's kind of been very, very siloed, where you've got your cost guys using their tools. You've got your schedule guys and p6 primavera, you've got your side teams and your Procore ACC, but really work together and work as a team to solve the problem, right? Don't try to keep your data to yourself. My advice is always be curious. Ask questions.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 28:18

It was interesting, and it was good to hear from, from these

Albert Brier: 28:21

folks, yes, for sure. And it's interesting too, that their answers lined up with some of their previous answers pretty tightly. The number one and number two. Well, I guess tied for first, really, we had data and software, you know, learning how to use, manipulate data and use the new software packages that are available. That was tied for first with soft skills and communications. So that's right, an even mix of technical and non technical advice right up at the top there, which I thought was interesting, and that that holds true in our second place. Responses to where, you know, a lot of people mentioned, or several people mentioned experience and learning. Like, go out there, do the work, right? Like, be a continuous learner, you know, continue to educate yourself about what's out there and learn how to use AI. Like, to your point earlier, when you're asking about software, like, nobody's out there, like, heavily using AI as part of their technicals. I mean, I guess I shouldn't say that. There were actually a lot of presentations at the conference about how to integrate AI into your technical practice. But by the same token, there aren't a whole lot of software packages that are, you know, built from the ground up to utilize AI and do the kind of work that we do in Project controls. But everybody I talk to, they know that it's coming. Right? Yeah, they absolutely do. So they're one piece of advice for a new person, be on the cutting edge of that. And that's good advice.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 29:43

Yeah. I mean, I see, like, the data and software, soft skills, comms, you know, continual learning, that's all enabled by AI. It can be, yeah, but things like soft skill, like, really, I think it's undervalued, you know, as we're starting to return to the off. Office, you know, it's been many years, several years, since the pandemic and the emphasis on soft skills. I read about, you know, how to, how to operate in an office, like, there's some, you know, articles, and it's just, it's kind of a new thing. It's not, I mean, remote work is still a thing.

Albert Brier: 30:19

People definitely are pivoting back towards an in office modality, and that's a good thing in a lot of ways. I mean, some, of course, predictably, the tech giants are being super ham fisted about it, and, you know, really putative instead of encouraging. But the real point is, getting people back in the office is a clear benefit. Yeah, right, yep. But that's not going to replace the ability to work from home, work remotely, be a digital nomad. That stuff is still important and and I agree with you that AI can be an enabler for that. In fact, I'm, you know, you work with AI a lot. In your capacity as our our marketing lead, a lot. Yeah, in my capacity as our training lead, I also work with AI quite a lot, so I've been working with it's Claude. Actually, I've been working with Claude to build up some training content for our new project controls people, and I'm going to spend some time with it later today, when I'm not editing this podcast. Mind you, I'm going to be spending some time with it to see how good it is at training new staff and picking, like, quizzing people on new skills and things like that. So there's definitely some some space in in the training and upskilling and soft skills world for AI,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 31:29

yeah, definitely. Well, let's wrap it up. I mean, thank you, Albert, for sharing that and doing those interviews on the floor. It sounded like you had a really good time. I mean, I Oh, I totally. We went to Chicago. Last was a couple years ago. I think we were in Chicago for the same conference. And, yeah, just a really positive experience. But

Unknown: 31:48

yeah, it always is like the AAC does a good job of bringing good people together. So you know, thanks to them for that, and thanks to everybody that I spoke with. And thanks to you. Nate, it was a fun conversation.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 31:59

Thank you, Albert. Talk to you later.

Unknown: 32:03

Hey everybody. It's Albert here. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. We hope today's conversation was informative and, above all else, inspires you to excellence in what you do. Thank you once again to everybody who agreed to be interviewed for today's podcast. I had a great time talking to all of you, and I wish you all the best. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to rate, subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners just like you. I'd also like to thank Thompson Igbo Igbo, for letting us use his excellent music on our show. If you like what you hear, check him out@igbomuzik.com that's E, G, B, O, musik.com talk at you later. You hang on. I'm gonna use this opportunity to pour some milk into my tea.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 32:54

Look at me. Go that's that's going good. Pour. Thank you.

Unknown: 32:57

Thank you. Perfect, perfect. Oh, perfect. And listen, listen to this luxurious sip. I

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:05

need to go get a coffee.

Unknown: 33:06

Irish breakfast, baby

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:08

Irish breakfast. Did you actually put whiskey in that? That's an Irish Coffee. No, hold on, just a second.

Unknown: 33:14

It's just the type of tea is called Irish breakfast. You Lush?