Charles Corley: Culture, Wellness, Visualization, AI Colleague | Work 20XX Ep34

Cold Open
All right,
so then I will count us down
and we will go
in three, two, one.

Jeff Frick
Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home studio for another episode of ‘Work 20XX’ And we know workplace is undergoing this tremendous, you know, kind of transformation. It's hard to believe it's been five years since Covid really accelerated a bunch of processes that were already underway. And I'm really excited to have somebody join us today who's kind of at the cutting edge of what's happening in workplace design, what's happening and best practices. And he's coming to us actually from the future, which we can all have a glimpse into the future from Singapore. So joining us through the magic of the internet over the Pacific Ocean. He's Charles Corley the Director of Development for M Moser and Associates Charles great to see you.

Charles Corley
Well it's great to see you again. Yes.

Jeff Frick
So give me some good news on the future. How's it look over there.

Charles Corley
Oh, it's you got to wear shades. it, you know, it looks It looks good. Until AI is our overlord, I think we're going to see huge benefits. You know, I think that the conversation has shifted really from, what you described just now from from Covid and, you know I think the, return to office mandates have been thoroughly analyzed. The evidence is there. People have been able to push back. So we're on to something else now.

Jeff Frick
I hope so. I tried to make a make a creed me and all my other kind of future of workplace people in 2025 we’re not going to talk about RTO. [return to office] We're not going to talk about mandates. We're not going to talk about days in the week. We're just going to talk about work and try and redesign work. But let's get into it. And I've, you know, you guys really at the top level, I think as is it's really about design. And you guys have a really comprehensive kind of design process and strategy as you said all the way from from starting from zero into going and trying to do a remodel. And what's interesting, you've got a bunch of cool little videos you're posting on LinkedIn right now for people should to go out and check them out. And what's interesting is you're touching on all these kind of attributes of good design and objectives of good design that are not, so many butts per square feet. You know, they're not kind of what I would imagine was kind of classic utilization cost numbers. But really, I think the big interesting transformation, which has been across IT [information technology] and all these other departments that used to be considered, you know, SGA [Selling, General, and Administrative] nobody wants to be SGA anymore, right? We have to be contributing to the fundamental business and in the place of workplace. I think what's really kind of been inspiring for people who are on the cutting edge is, you know, we want to create the environment for people to do the best work of their lives. And that's a really different objective

Charles Corley
For sure

Jeff Frick
than just trying to squeeze a bunch of butts in seats and maximize that. And so you've got all these cool little videos they’re like a couple minutes long. And I just want to talk about some of the themes that are design themes that are all in congruent with business objectives, but they're not all business objectives. But let's just start with the business objectives. And you talk about, strategy goals and utilization and productivity, not just pure efficiency. So when you talk about the business goals, do you get pushback when you're starting one of these projects with a senior person that says, ‘Is this really going to help our business goals?’ Or am I just spending a bunch of money on design, where you know, I’d rather spend that money on something else?

Charles Corley
Oh no. No, that's a big part of their concern. The people we work with, quite often CRE leaders or leaders of workplace or whatever have a very complex job to do, and they, they have so many stakeholders, and any one of them can push back and criticize what they're doing. And especially in the larger corporations, it's a minefield. The strategy and business objectives are very much a part of it because everybody's going to critique what this person's trying to achieve for the company. So yes, we get involved in that very deeply. And that's really, strategy is not static either. Strategy keeps dynamically changing all the way through. And updating. So it's it’s a big part. They don't mind, discussing that in detail. And you're right, it's not so much about number of tables and seats and so forth. Because, well, the workplace itself is, has changed to be something that's more of a hub, more of a destination. And not everybody is assigned necessarily a table.

Jeff Frick
Well, let's back up a step because I think you're right. Maybe we should have started there. Like, do people understand that the objectives, the purpose of a workplace now is different because, right, the original offices were modeled like factories where paper were like widgets coming down the line. And you took your piece of paper and you did your process to it and you passed it to the next person. And that's really what offices are. And the file cabinets were there. And the reason to go to the office was to actually do work. Right. The phone was there, the mail was there, the files are there. That's not the case. So how are people really thinking about what is the purpose of the office that That's really, you know they're spending a lot of money. It's a big investment. What is the purpose of office?

Charles Corley
The purpose has become more cultural and more about who they are and I think that the, there's a draw to still come to the office for different reasons. Now, I don't like talking in too much generality because, businesses are so varied, so very different. Things like consultancies and knowledge work, and often teamwork, these teams can be close knit. They have to work together quite carefully a lot of detail. If that’s not your kind of business, maybe you can be very dispersed. But I see a lot of people still coming to the office. Not because they're forced to, but because they need that interactive teamwork. But also, I see, especially in Asia, that has a fairly young workforce, I see people coming there because they they want to be part of something. They want to see colleagues their age, they want to interact, they don't want to be just isolated at home or some other place.

Jeff Frick
It's interesting. Tracy Hawkins who's now at OpenAI, and she was at Twitter before, their global workplace person. She said, workplace is the physical manifestation of culture And you know, it was interesting when I was trying to pull that quote earlier today she mentioned culture in our interview like 50 times when I did a word count. And you've talked about why do people want to come together in this whole concept of, you know, kind of a honey versus vinegar? How do you make it attractive? What do you put there that makes people want to come to the office? So we're not talking about mandates, but we're talking about a place that offers an alternative kind of set of solutions and activities that you can't do at home. And maybe you can't do some other places.

Charles Corley
Well, the office isn't just space anymore. It's the embodiment of culture, ethos, purpose. I wouldn't overdo the cultural part and things need to get done. It needs to help people get their work done. But we're also seeing a lot of people who are entering the workforce who are tech savvy and our spaces before weren’t responding to their needs. There's a dimension that is, cultural and purpose driven, but there's also one of generational differences and the way we work and the flexibility in the way we work. So it's getting, it's getting interesting. Sorry, I'm not sure I answered your I’m not sure I answered your question, but.

Jeff Frick
So there’s a lot  Well you've got it again on your little list you’ve got fostering some of these softer things that support the bigger business things So for instance, creativity and innovation. So what are some of the design tips and tricks and things that you've seen that do encourage more, innovation and creativity?

Charles Corley
Yeah, it's a good question because I help our own company change and adapt to those things to. When people, are having meetings, they're often ad hoc now. There are meetings that do need privacy. That do need, seclusion. As people are working in different areas and not tied down to a desk, to get together briefly and have a, a huddle. And you need to have that technology in different spots all around, ready to go ready to be available not just for the people in the room, but their other colleagues that are going to be, coming in from other places. So you're meeting people and collaborating with people that are both there and also remote. Right? So the space needs to be technology enabled. And the fact that everybody is not sitting in neat rows allows you to do new things with the space that you weren't able to do when it was just rows of desks. Now the rows of desk are not gone, but they're greatly reduced.

Jeff Frick
Right, right. The other thing we hear a lot about is activity based, you know, activity based spaces that are really designed around. Yeah, I was going to say, or has it evolved to kind of beyond activity to more. I don't want to pull you down a general purpose vocabulary, but, you know, a little bit more specificity around that. And thinking about the uses of particular spaces for, for what people are going to use them for.

Charles Corley
Well that’s what I was getting at I didn't use the term, but that's exactly what I was getting at. I always find it's good to have, dedicated spaces for certain kinds of teams that need to do work. The word workspace can be a lot of things When we were, say, for example, designing Dyson’s new headquarters, which is in a beautiful old renovated, not factory, it's a power plant, actually. They had a laboratory as well. So obviously that's going to be a dedicated space, right? Because they're inventing things, so they’re and they're, testing things, but they also have highly collaborative, flexible spaces. So it depends on the type of work that people are doing. And there's a mix there. You have to really understand get very deep into, not just the cultural aspects, which are very important, but, the functionality, how people are actually doing their work. I'm in a unique position, right? My role gives me a a global sort of disciplinary lens to look at these things. And although I'm not telling war stories anymore my focus is, more on shaping methodologies. And what I see is people having to make a lot of decisions early on in their project about how they're going to tackle these issues. And then, it can be hard to decide how much to dedicate this space to this function and how much to do that, and how much should be flexible and what the mix is, and even how many people are working from home and It's a quite a dynamic thing. So it's a it can be a little scary for our clients to get that mix right and a to do it usually to a a fast timetable. That's the challenge they have and one we help them with.

Jeff Frick
Yeah. So I know one of the tricks of the trade that you use a lot is visualization and, you know, and using 3D tools to basically create fancy renderings or I don't know what the right, the right vocabulary word is of the space and the design. I wonder if you could share how the use of digital tools to enable you to have more of an iterative approach and more of a collaborative approach throughout the whole process, because, like you say, there's a lot of balls in the air between juggling your in-person people, your remote people, you know, all the different, you know, as you say, stakeholders that have, have their fingers in the pie Mixing up my metaphors

Charles Corley
You mentioned the beautiful renderings. And yes, it used to be that 3D was a deliverable. Give me some beautiful pictures rendered of what my place would look like. But now it's how we collaborate all the way through. Gone are the blueprints. Now we have, virtual reality is the way we handle project development from the start, when we're having the strategic meetings all the way to the end and every detail through there. So it's a complete virtual experience. It's what we used to call ‘What you See is what you Get.’ So you can actually immerse yourself in that. And you can do it from any distance. So the clients, the contractors, the people, the specialists, everybody who has a part to play, you know, on the same page and, not have any blind spots. They can see, how things are going, what their, how their work is affecting everybody, how their decisions are affecting the space in a very natural way, really. It's the way we were we were designed to look at things. Not text and drawings

Jeff Frick
And how has that changed? What has just the technology come down? Has there have been some some breakthrough applications? Is it ease of sharing? Is it, is it cloud based? What has kind of driven the change from the old architects, looking at that things that only architects can love to actually sharing with work groups, you know, 3D renderings of what we might potentially do and asking them for their feedback.

Charles Corley
Yeah. I think the, experts might have a varied opinion from my own, but I think it was compute power. It got to a turning point when we could more quickly bring something up in 3D than it took to even draft it by hand. So the speed of the compute has helped a tremendous amount. So I know that now we're talking about Nvidia and all these companies doing amazing teraflops of amazing things. And so that's really just only going to get more in that direction. You'll be able to do augmented reality much smoother, on demand in the future, in the near future I think It’s happening here and there now. But it's a So that kind of power is what changed everything. And then of course, the programs kept up with it. We tend to use, lightweight, nimble programs that can be modeled and then move around, that sort of thing. There's a few programs out there that all the architects use, and they can do 3D, but they end up with very big, very heavy representations and models that you can't use because they're so static. So we like to go for, a very effective way of keeping it light and nimble so we can use it anytime, anywhere. Another technology that has come about that has really helped everybody is the ability to take different programs with different inputs. Revit, SketchUp, you name it, and put them all in one platform where we can combine them and see the effect of everybody's work. So the engineer might be working using one type of technology and the designers’ using another type of technology. But we can now combine them and we can move around and look at them and use that as our meeting position So we have, highly collaborative things they have BIM 360 and Trimble Connect and things like this where you get in there, and. It used to be when you go into a meeting, you had everybody staring down at the drawings in front of them. But now we all look together at the virtual reality. What we've just finished. Or not even finished what we're in the process of creating. And we can annotate that and talk about that and work out, things there. Again, from together in the room or inviting people from halfway around the world. And that's oh, by the way, that's also affected what we talked about earlier with the culture, because, gradually over the last ten years I've seen more and more, people the teams are extremely diverse and our people are living and working in places that might surprise others, you know. We have a person in Cyprus, we have a person in Bali. We have people all over the world in places you wouldn't expect, who are very much a part of what we're doing and very connected.

Jeff Frick
Yeah, that's great. So in terms of, you know, kind of rollout and success and implementation success, right? Because you can design it and then you can it doesn't necessarily make it a success. What are some of the tricks in terms of supporting, as you said, a distributed team around a big project, whether that's a remodel or a new or a new space. And include everybody in that?

Charles Corley
Well 3D is a big part of that The three dimensional virtual reality is a huge chunk of that solution, because you can't do that with flat, disassociated technical drawings. It starts with the responsibility of the individuals to show up, be prepared use the right etiquette and just learn how to work with people online. I don't particularly like the way we do it now because it feels like a talking head. There is a a possibility of using a technology that doesn't keep you as just a little talking head standing there but you can actually move about I've seen some great systems recently at CoreNet from Cisco that do this too. The camera keeps moving, changing position, and depending on who's speaking and who's writing on the wall or whatever it is. Right. So the actual, use of the system is is dynamic which I I love. I think that's a great way to do things because, what we're missing in this a type of asymmetrical work is body language is it's the closeness It’s seeing the glimpse in somebody’s eye It's the way they move and you lose a lot of that when you're just a talking head on a screen.

Jeff Frick
Right, right. Well, what about kind of the not the technology things, but more the implementation steps in terms of some of the things I saw getting ready for this, you know really making sure that the senior management in the team trying to roll out the changes, you know, are trusted and, you know, over communicating and you know, talking about objectives and really kind of getting the buy in of the team to get excited both by participatory activities as well as, you know, over communicating so that the day they cut the ribbon everybody's excited and everybody's engaged and everybody's, you know, kind of part of the process versus, oh, God, they spent all this money on this thing. I would have rather had a bonus.

Charles Corley
Yeah, so you're preparing the place with all this activity. But you also need to prepare the people. So we have a lot of change management activities. We have an entire huge swath of our our firm is dedicated to strategy and all its forms. And the strategy experts that we have who are distributed everywhere often lead these discussions, workshops, all kinds of, tools they use. Not just data. Yes, they collect some data, but they also want to engage those leaders to engage the people to so that the end users themselves who are going to actually occupy the space feel they've been heard and have a role in shaping the space, too. So there's different degrees of that depending on your company culture as to how much they engage and to what level they engage people because some of these corporations are quite large, but they have representatives that’ll get together who will take them through the process of thinking this through sometimes considering all possibilities early on. And brainstorming what it could be without any criticism or judgment and then honing down on what it needs to be. And then taking the people. That doesn't stop there. You have to take them through a process with town hall talks with regular updates with site walks to see how it's developing all kinds of ways to keep people fully engaged all the way through so that by the time they actually get to where they're going and the new workspace is there and they step in they're already comfortable with it. They already know what to expect. They know how it's going to serve them.

Jeff Frick
Yeah Interesting. So, I talked to Julie Whelan from CBRE a couple of times, it used to be pretty easy to define a class A, a class B building. And what kind of the standard amenities are. But those have changed over time. And I'm curious if you could share any stories about some of the more cutting edge or innovative things that some of the clients have done looking beyond, you know, just does it have, you know, does it have food? Does it have parking? Does it have oil change? What are some of the cool amenities and workplace features that you're seeing people put in who are a little bit more progressive in this area?

Charles Corley
Well I’m not in the trenches anymore, so I'm not working in the nitty grittys of those kinds of decisions. But I've been impressed with some companies that have, really moved the needle on trying to make it a healthy workspace. The truth is that, the wellness programs are really now fully entrenched and very useful. I don't know if you can remember. Go back I’m sure you do Go way back to when there was a common term that we don't hear anymore called ‘Sick Building Syndrome.’ Remember that?

Jeff Frick
Thankfully, I was not in real estate during sick building syndrome. But I can already guess where where you're going with this one.

Charles Corley
Yeah. So. Well, what's happened is people used to have serious problems in their health. The corporate offices were I wouldn't say dangerous, but they were very unhealthy. There's a lot of off gassing. There was mold in the ducts. There was just generally a very unhealthy environment. And people would get chronic problems that they couldn't describe where it was coming from. And that conversation about sickness being at the focus has now changed in a positive direction to the term wellness. So we're not talking about problem, problem. We're talking about solution, solution. So I would say that that's probably the the great wonderful thing that's come up that wasn't there when I was younger and has grown steadily over the years is a focus on wellness.

Jeff Frick
Yeah, it’s interesting Ryan Anderson from MillerKnoll you know likes to talk about one of the great Covid outcomes was just a focus on air 1) because Covid was airborne. But then if people started focusing on their HVACs and you know, what's their CO2 levels in the afternoon it just, you know, opened up that awareness.

Charles Corley
Well you didn’t ask about the technologies. Yeah, your, you talk about the technologies and yes. During Covid, people were experimenting with how to remove pathogens from the air built in and all that's kind of in place now. It's kind of I don't know if you could call it common, but it's quite prevalent. But what I was saying was that a lot of these technologies are being championed by those companies that care about their employees. And they've gone through great measures to understand what's causing, people to feel unwell and to change that with the technologies. But there's so many, circadian lighting the way that they treat the air, the amount of carbon dioxide, there's sensors everywhere measuring sometimes 50 different things. I've actually done some videos about that my and articles on LinkedIn about that too. About how companies are helping them gather all this data. But of course, even though you have all this data, then you could get, decision fatigue. Well, what do you do with all this data? How to respond to it. And, I remember when we, our experts in New York and London were helping, HSBC to do their headquarters in New York. They went very much in this direction of creating healthy environment. And now they've got every certification I think out there from LEED and WELL and RESET and everything else. And they're heading towards a a zero carbon, which takes years to get to because you have to accumulate the data to prove that you're doing it. Also in Asia, since I'm in Asia, I should mention also. Yeah, as one person put it the people in China want to breathe fresh, clean air but they, they have that problem for a long time with pollutants. They’ve more or less conquered that now. But it was quite bad before. Yeah. India still has, India still has big trouble spots and they're growing immensely. We must have done in the last two years maybe 50 huge headquarters or campuses there. But there are certain parts of India that have terrible problems with their environment where people are burning crops where there's smoke or there's in fact that happened. I was checking an app on my phone which tells me what the weather is. And normally you expect to see cloudy, rainy, cold, whatever And when I went to New Delhi at a particularly bad time of the year and I checked the app, it didn't have all those words. It just said, smoke. So. And it was true. You walk out and you feel like you've smoked a pack of cigarettes. So the wellness in the environment when where you work is a big draw. People want to come to the office because it's a clean, wonderful, place where they have great water, great great air, great environment to work in.

Jeff Frick
Unfortunately, we got way too familiar with the smoke monitors and the smoke numbers and the air quality numbers over the last several years with all the fires in Northern California. [Jeff] So we’ve all rediscovered that part of the app.

Charles Corley
Oh, that’s so tragic

Jeff Frick
I had Evan Benway on, from sounds or Moodsonic and, you know talking about the soundscapes. So this whole investment. But I'm curious, you even take it up another notch on one of your posts, Beyond Wellness. You talk about happiness. Which is a whole nother step function of really thinking about how you put people in a great environment So how do you design for happiness?

Charles Corley
Well, obviously it has to be part of the culture in the sense that the leaders have to know how to work with their teams and their people. On that side of the equation. But for the environment I think that, it's it’s good to have spaces where something's always happening where they can have team spaces that open up to larger spaces and can reconfigure and can be dynamic. So you can change your environment. You can have more control over your environment that makes people happier to. And then I love that the, the some companies, quite a lot of them are creating dynamic spaces that don't really have a definition they’re sort of multi-purpose spaces. They're not just sitting there like a basketball court, but they’re used for other things and different times of the day or week. If they want to have a get together or a special event they can do it. And I personally, I'm not speaking for the company, but I'm a big, advocate of having someone who oversees that there's always something happening. There's not just a few yoga classes, but a lot of different activities that bring people together that make these people say ‘Wow, I want to come there and be a part of that.’ So, having lots of activities and events and learning events and you name it that bring people together it really turns it into sort of a lifestyle hub for people to know that there's always an event happening. There's always something that they can share because we’re a lot, a large portion of us, including me. I'm working from home with my Indonesian antiques all around me. A large part of us are not going into the office every day so we want that connection. So the happiness does come from that. And there has to be a reason aside from just going there and doing the usual slog. You want to have someone there in my opinion, who can always be thinking of and creating new events there of all different types. To engage. Engagement, I guess engagement is the key word.

Jeff Frick
Is the key, which then drives retention and, and, which is a really big deal because it's really expensive when you have turnover and to hire new people. So it's a big deal. Let's just shift back to technology for a minute. I just saw an interview with Kay Sergeant from HOK. And she's talking about sensors and the sophistication of the sensors that have actually been around for quite a long time not only occupancy sensors, not only is there enough oxygen in the room or too much CO2, but even with facial recognition. Who is in what room? How often are they used? And so really there's a lot of opportunity to increase the utilization with better data than potentially there was before. Have you seen the reception to or desire to use or, you know, maybe not quite so scared of using some of these more advanced technologies beyond just turning the lights on and off when people come in and out of the room to actually, you know, get more ROI out of their investment in these spaces.

Charles Corley
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot and it's a mixed bag. I’m very heavily into technology as you know but I'm also into the ethics of it and I I see that there's a fine line there that I don't know if it's going to be crossed but, the data keeps getting more and more rich. It's key that people track behaviors and general data about what the employees are utilizing and how effective spaces are and that sort of thing. But there is an opportunity now with more advanced data to track the preferences of the employees as well. And, they're starting to do the things that I'm not sure I'm on board with like measuring the keystroke speed of what somebody is doing and assess them psychologically as to whether they're having a bad day or and they're doing it in the name of wellness, but it feels a little invasive to me. There is a marvelous woman who has her finger on the pulse of it this and she works for CBRE. A psychologist. And she has she's very deep into all these different things and she understands the part that I have concern with and the parts that other people have concern with. And basically what it comes down to is that you can keep enriching the data by using the sensors as long as you're not. I'm not fully on board with tracking individuals and understanding their behaviors in the name of making their life better because that could be misused I suppose.

Jeff Frick
Right. But our, I mean, if you're running into the ethical issues is that because people are pretty comfortable with the technology and the younger people coming in and everyone's more comfortable using them

Charles Corley
I'm not running into them, I'm not running into them. That's just my overactive imagination

Jeff Frick
Not running into it but if that if that's an issue, then that would imply that people are comfortable using it. It if you're starting to run into things where you know you've got you know, potentially you hit a switch and maybe it's not anonymized aggregate anymore and you turn off the the aggregator switch. And now I've got individual data as to who was who was where.

Charles Corley
Or you've got or you just have your tag that you used to open the door and that’s got RFID and then that can be used to track your every movement. So, so yeah, there's, there's a lot of desire to make this a productivity gain, but it's on that cutting edge between you know, what's intrusive and what's not. But I didn't quite hear your question. Maybe I didn't answer it.

Jeff Frick
No, no, you did. You did answer.

Charles Corley
Okay, good.

Jeff Frick
My point being, you know, before, I think people were just completely freaking out or that it was too hard. There wasn’t open systems. You had all these interoperability issues. I think, you know, a lot of those walls are probably coming down in terms of what's really available. And then I would imagine just as people are younger and more comfortable privacy attitudes are a little bit different. That the desire to put it in or the reception to putting in some of these things maybe is changing over time. Versus before where it would have been ‘Ah, No, no, thank you.’

Charles Corley
I don't have any data on that, but it makes sense. They’re certainly less concerned. Like, I would never even just have one of those Siri or Alexa things in my home that's like a Like that old cartoon where somebody walks up, oh, oh a wife walks up to it and says Alexa, what's a good recipe for brownies or something? But basically you're conversing with a wiretap, you know? So I don't really want to have something that's live and always watching and always analyzing what I'm doing but that's me. I, as you said, the young people coming up, they're more, they're less concerned with that. They have other priorities. I just think that those of us who know how it that there is a line that shouldn't be crossed I don't know that it has been crossed. I'm just saying, as technology is advancing so quickly there's a possibility.

Jeff Frick
Right? Right. Different topic. Again, back to design, but you've got so many different things that you can design for. Sustainability. The United Nations Goals are [Sustainable Development Goals] sustainability goals were put out. A lot of companies have adopted them as kind of anchor tenants for which they can work towards. You mentioned one of the fancy new buildings you're working on is all LEED Certified, is one of the checkmarks on the most cutting edge coolest places. So I wonder if you can share how the sustainability goal has evolved over time? And how are you baking that in and helping people achieve their sustainability goals with things that they can do with design with the building.

Charles Corley
Well, it’s not a ‘like to have’ any more. It's a must have. And what we're seeing because space requirements have shrunk a bit and there's some empty floors in office buildings and there's some stronger competition and real concerns that buildings that have this already built in where sustainability is baked into the design of the building are having more rent more occupancy better everything. So they’re performing much better. And so it's a struggle for the older buildings to catch up. And so we have on many, many occasions we've had to help retrofit a building so they can stay competitive so that they can attract their clientele and get the rents they, they need to survive. So that is one part that where you have that sort of technology retrofitted into an older building in the process of upgrading the building happens all the time. We do very detailed technical due diligence. You mentioned we were a design firm we're actually an AEC firm. [Architecture, Engineering, Construction] so we have lots of architects and designers, but we have a hell of a lot of engineers as well. And then we have a lot of project management and construction types. So yeah, we're seeing this. Newer buildings are doing better than older buildings, and we're helping a lot of the older buildings to to catch up. But then we want to design with your with that in mind once the company a leaseholder comes into there and they need to take whatever it is ten floors or something they need to make sure that it all works together with the systems. And it's it used to be that the building management system was one technology And what’s the technology you're doing to track performance is another technology but it's gradually getting better that they're woven together. So the systems all speak to each other but it's been a struggle to do that over the years.

Jeff Frick
Yeah. It's interesting that local I think it's called Local Law 97 the one in Manhattan that’s going to put a lot of pressure on some of those mid tier buildings that [Jeff] that aren’t making the sustainability number. This might bring the wrecking balls to a few because they said the really old cool brick stuff. You know people love to redo that. And then, you know, the new modern stuff. It's some of that stuff in the middle. In the middle that that I think has been taking the brunt of the hit

Charles Corley
Well they’re already under a lot of pressure I'm not sure they need more pressure.

Jeff Frick
Shift gears to another topic I've been holding off because I know you're biting at the I know you're excited to talk about it and that's AI. So let's jump in. So first we'll talk about AI how are you using AI at work and then we'll talk about AI a little bit more generally. So for people that don't know obviously Charles’ face just lit up. He's a big fan. He's been using it for a long time. So let's talk about you know, how do you use these tools Gen AI tools at work? Because we're in this really kind of funky space. There's a lot of people not many people like you who are kind of ahead of the curve. There's a lot of people that just trying to get their toes in the water and trying to figure it about. And there's a lot of people still today have not touched it at all. So first let's talk about, what you're doing at work and then we'll talk a little bit more generally about advice for people. How do you use AI at work in 2025?

Charles Corley
Well, yeah. That's I've gone from being heads of different offices in different countries to leading that virtual design and construction we talked about, but now those teams are mature and two years ago, well I can tell you precisely, November of 2022 is when I I was enlightened that that ChatGPT existed and I was obsessed with it. So I've been using it seven days a week since then. And then I figured out

Jeff Frick
Seven days a week since the day it came out.

Charles Corley
Sure. If I'm in the grocery store and I see a can of something I’ll just take a picture of the backside, back of it at the, what do you call it? The ingredients. And I'll say, ‘Are there any bad things in here?’ And it will tell me. So I use it for everything. Almost like a proxy for search in a way in terms of kind of getting started and trying to figure out a way, you know, what you're asking it questions basically like you would Yeah like you would ask a search engine but more general? That's the first step. That's the first step of people how they use it. The first step to using ChatGPT for a lot of people is looking at that prompt space and saying okay, that, I know that space that's similar to Google. So I'll treat it like Google and I'll ask Googlely type questions. But we need to move on from that. And I'm proud to say we have been successful. I think that the the management position on this helps a lot. Now we're not doctors, lawyers, and we're not dealing with highly sensitive information. So we don't have a lot of controls over how we can use AI. You know, we're architects, engineers, contractors, other than a little bit of financial data and some personnel records. There's no reason why we can't use it for anything. So we had to find a way to put it in everybody's hands. And our management M Moser stands for Moira Moser Moira Moser is the woman we all work for. She is wise enough to give it to everybody. So we now have the Enterprise Edition which is the top tier edition of ChatGPT for all of the models throughout the whole firm available for everybody.

Jeff Frick
Wow

Charles Corley
And so was she made an executive decision to make that investment. Yeah. And it's I think it's an incredibly smart decision with a lot of foresight because look, AI is the biggest thing to come down the road since we can remember and it's going to change everything we do. We've barely seen the tip of the iceberg.

Jeff Frick
Right, the trick, I think, for a lot of people though is it's going to but what can it do today? And I think a lot of people still struggle with trying to find and I just think, don't think they work hard enough to find where the little use cases are in their workflow and in their work their work habits today where they can start injecting this thing to get this wonderful productivity gain that they hear about read about in the papers because, you know, it's not taking over everything yet. That said, you've been using it every day. There are places that you can inject it into different workflows or different processes and get a nice little boost.

Charles Corley
Well that's the next tier. Okay, the first thing is treat it like Google and then the next tier after that is focus on use cases and learn how to prompt. But Prompting has been a problem for people for a multitude of reasons. In Asia, sometimes English is a different a second language, but we have to explain to them that you can prompt in Tagalog you can prompt in Chinese you can prompt in any language you want. But then, how to structure those is kind of overthought. So people

Jeff Frick
Is overthought? Like the big giant chart with the 87 different prompt tips you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah that fills the whole screen.

Charles Corley
Forget about it. Na No, it's a it's a conversation. So we're using it as a, a thinking partner and a digital colleague. That's how we're approaching it. So in the team we have all our humans, but we also got the AI colleague. And so the way we're doing it is we’re talking to it as a human and we're bouncing ideas off and we're asking it to look deeper into data to perceive things that we may not see, or we're asking it to put together a risk matrix table that will help us analyze and think because this leads back to something we talked about earlier. So the people who we’re serving those CRE leaders [Commercial Real Estate] of those heads of corporations have a lot of decision fatigue. They have to figure out how to make the right decisions. And our leaders are helping them to structure and think through and make those decisions for those big workplaces. So our leaders use it to help Well they do some learning on it, yes but they're also using it to to help clients make wiser decisions and to run their teams. And so it's really not about input and an output. I'm happy. In fact, I see a lot of engineers frustrated by that because they say here's the data for the humidity and the temperature. Give me the thing I want. You know, what is the what is the comfort level point of ... When people use it as a computer they sometimes get disappointed. The people, and this might be what I’ve tried, and what a few other people have tried because we like collaboration and we're naturally collaborative people. We're always bouncing ideas off of other people. You are too. And so people who are collaborative get the most out of it quite quickly because we're asking it, it's opinion and we're saying What if that? How about that? What do you think of this? And we're digging deeper and trying stuff fearlessly. Whereas I think some people who are stuck in a technical point of view are just saying here's the input give me the output one transaction it's right or it's wrong. And that's not really the way to look at it.  It’s conversation

Jeff Frick
Right. I'm curious, do you invite it into meetings? You mentioned that when you're having a meeting or conversation you’ve got em as kind of assistants and thought partners. Do you use them in, in active meetings?

Charles Corley
The listening and the voice part is not fully mature yet. So that's hard to do.

Jeff Frick
Not so much as a as like a monitor that comes back. But say you're in a meeting and, you know you got a question and let's ask right now in the moment

Charles Corley
Oh yes! Absolutely, yes

Jeff Frick
Absolutely.

Charles Corley
And the conversation will change. So if you have to structure a perfect prompt to get a perfect output you're not gonna you're gonna have a hard time. There are tools where you can create agents or you can create structured things if you're repeating them all the time. But what you want to have in as a consultant or a knowledge worker is something that is like a second brain that helps you think things through. So we might go through I might upload some photographs. Let's say of a construction site and I'll say, What's your assessment of this and that? Rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 and it’ll say well it's an 8.5 because I see this stuff where this needs to be fixed and it can read the photograph perfectly and give you its opinion of what's right and what's wrong with it. So you do that with a lot of photographs and then say Okay, based on that, how much manpower do you think I will need to finish this in in one week? And it will compute that. And it will tell you how many different electricians, how many contractors, how many of this and that. And then I can say, well, some of those people will come off their work and can be reassigned to other jobs. Maybe we could dynamically do it so that when these people are finished and they're not experts in just one trade, they can move on over and help these guys and then we can do it faster. And it said yeah, good idea. So let's try that and it comes out with a better one now you don’t need 15 workers you need 12 workers. And will take less time. I'm like okay. So then my leader needs a way to manage these people. Let's assign names to each of these 12 people and let's talk about which days they do which activities. And it puts out that. And then I say, okay, then I need checklists for my project manager to, make sure they're focused on the right things and know what the priorities are. So we go through the priorities and it creates all those check lists and all that came about from uploading a few photographs. So you start with the photographs and by the end of it you have a complete schedule a work description everything. And you can do that. You can then go to the next step and say, what about cost? And talk about cost. The conversation can change and talk about any direction you want to take it.

Jeff Frick
So what about hallucinations? What about hallucinations? Because, you know, you just went through a great use case of the of a kind of conversational way to unwind a bunch of detail around a project starting with pictures. But let's just say it did the calculation wrong. You should have had you know, 18 people, not 12. And its information on the price of lumber is is dated. So your budget is off. I mean, how do you kind of keep an eye out for hallucinations make judgments about hallucinations work around hallucinations or or do you find they're not a problem? What you know, kind of where are you what's your what's your kind of take for people who are just scared of getting the wrong answer in an area that they don't have enough knowledge about that maybe they make a bad decision.

Charles Corley
It's a concern. It's a concern and our unspoken, it's not written, but our policy is that the person who's overseeing the thing has to check it as though they were checking a colleagues work So, the AI is your junior colleague. Even though it's brilliant it gives you the work and you as the senior person have to go through it and check it. You can't assume that it's ready to go out the door. So, it makes, in my opinion others may disagree, but I think it makes as many mistakes or less actually than a human makes. So I haven't found that it's made more mistakes than a human. So the mistakes that it will make and you pointed out a great example of that was a cost. I wouldn't trust the cost data coming out of it. I would have to check it with local supplies and things like that. But within that 30 minutes I've broken down so much information that it would have taken me four days to do. Now I can spend that time just checking a few thoughts or whatever, and to double checking a few things, right? So if you're if you had to buy a generator for your new building and put it on the roof you can ask you know of these suppliers, which one supplies to this country of those, which one uses biofuel? And this one you know and then we’re narrow it down to a few choices for you. And then you have to do the final check on those choices. You don't have to just believe anything. So, yeah, it's a anything that comes out of Generative AI, LLMs, is a draft. It's not a final thing. But it's usually better well thought out, smarter and certainly faster than your junior colleague that you might and it won’t argue with you. It never get’s frustrated

Jeff Frick
It’s just so funny

Charles Corley
It never get’s frustrated never gets frustrated.

Jeff Frick
Never gets frustrated or gets angry. You never got an angry AI That's funny. I just think it's so funny how our opinions on trust are so varied. And, you know, we just tend to trust technology that it's going to work because we're just so comfortable because this stuff works so often. My favorite example’s you know, people driving in the back sitting in the back of a Tesla going down the highway. And it's not a level five autonomous vehicle not even close. And yet people just they just trust. And it's funny you talk about it makes the same amount of mistakes or less than a junior assistant. You know, driverless automobiles here. You know, we've got Waymo's now running around San Francisco. I think they're in Phoenix and a couple other countries they don't crash. They get crashed into. And if there's any crash at all you know, people are up in arms where they're way better than 99% of the drivers out there. But we don't have the same, you know, kind of threshold or bar of, of what we expect. So it's funny that you couch it in the form of a junior colleague. Then maybe then people can get more comfortable with the fact they need to check the work versus this, this all knowing you know, super, super machine that that you know, is going to absolutely always give me the right answer.

Charles Corley
Yeah, I wouldn't mind AI as my copilot I just don't want it to be necessarily be the pilot. So, I think that's fine. You know, it's it probably would make a lot of smart decisions and say, here's a better route. Oh, watch out. There’s construction ahead. I don't know what. You know, that's a much more complex system and one I know, not that much about. I studied a bit about it when I was doing my certifications in AI. because I had to understand all the different ways that AI came up across many industries. But, yeah, there's life safety at risk there. I don't think what we're doing is quite the same thing. I certainly if you're doing a building and your you're calculating the structures I wouldn't trust its calculations. That would be a life safety issue. But there it can do very powerful. There are some models in there that do extremely good calculations and do them very well. And most of the problems occur when you're when you're question asking prompting if you like. It's not that well thought out. It's not really, clear. I'm not saying you have to structure a perfect prompt but you have to give it some context and explain the parameters of what you're trying to do just like you would a colleague. So usually mistakes come out from that. Now if it does, as you say, hallucinations and gives you a wrong calculation. ChatGPT o1 for example will show you how it came up with the calculations and it will calculate everything for the structure of your new building very fast. And then you can spend more time just going through and making sure that you and the structural engineer agree when it’s done it already super fast and it's showing you all the calculations. It's not a black box. It shows you what it's doing. So I'm fine with that as long as the humans do the checking.

Jeff Frick
Yeah that's a good that's a good strategy. All right Charles, we're getting towards the end of our time. You've got a great kind of global view of all these progressive companies building the newest, coolest things. In workplace. What are you excited about over the next couple of years we've got, you know, thankfully Covid is well behind us and hopefully RTO and all that junk is behind us and people are looking forward. So as you look forward to the future of workplace what are you excited about? What do you think's going to happen over the next couple of years?

Charles Corley
Well, Crystal-balling it has never worked for big issues, but in terms of the industry I'm in workplaces and architecture and engineering. It's, we've already discussed that it's not about office mandates anymore. It's about readiness and adaptability. I think adaptability is a key word. Maybe even modularity in many cases. And the next real conversation has to be about AI that adaptability and designing workplaces that reflect who we are and what we're becoming. So, that's an evolving thing. Nobody can really crystal ball it.

Jeff Frick
But I think all some of your my notes say you want to keep it keep it evolving. Right. It's never supposed to be a static situation anyway. Right. You have to you have to but AI has to be it's going to pervade everything we do in the tech sense. But adaptability for companies is key. So I don't know if I've done a video on that. If I haven't, I will. I don't have that on my list of, cool things. I have purpose, scale, sustainability, happiness, efficiency, digital twins, mental health, creativity, innovation, inspiration, connection.

Charles Corley
Wow. I talked about all that?

Jeff Frick
You got a lot. I don’t know how many more videos you have to do? Oh yeah I well I have

Charles Corley
I like sharing knowledge I love it.

Jeff Frick
I love it.

Charles Corley
And I think adaptability is what we need because we can't crystal ball it. Nobody could have told you that Covid was coming. Well, some people claim they can. Nobody could have told you the effect that work from home mandates work from home would have on office leases. Nobody predicted it really. Nobody predicted AI’s fast rise. We don't really know what's coming up. So adaptability is in all its forms it’s going to be how we help clients to prepare that you can't really future proof. But we can put it under the umbrella of future proofing.

Jeff Frick
Right. All right, Charles. So I think we'll leave it there. I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate all the sharing of, of the insights. And really good to, to catch up today.

Charles Corley
Okay, well it was wonderful seeing you again. I hope we can get together again soon.

Jeff Frick
Absolutely. All right. Thanks again. All right. He's Charles I'm Jeff You're watching Work 20XX. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. Catch you next time. Take care.

Cold Close
All right.
We are clear.
All right
All right.
Very good.