Jerry Miller: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another podcast presented by ms consultants. My name is Jerry Miller, and today I will be talking to Jason Christoff, Senior Vice President at ms consultants. Jason is a professional engineer and a 25-year veteran of the multi-unit retail space. He has worked with brands such as Walmart, Fifth Third Bank, Value City, Bob Evans, Pilot Flying J, Aldi, and PetSmart. Jason, thank you so much for meeting with us today.
Jason Christoff: Great to be here, thanks.
Jerry Miller: Jason, as you know, the construction and design landscape is changing quickly. Brands are looking to expand faster, roll out projects consistently across different markets, and do so with a stronger emphasis on customer experience. At the same time, it’s hard to read a journal or turn on a business station and not hear about artificial intelligence and how rapidly that’s progressing in our world today. Jason, maybe this is a good time to talk about technology and perhaps some innovation that you see in this particular market.
What are some tools you’re using to help your clients with efficiency and to be effective and innovative in the way they’re rolling out some of their programs?
Jason Christoff: Yeah, you’re sure right. I think people want to talk about AI all the time. It is the majority of every presentation at every conference that I’ve been to over the past, at least five years. I think what it all boils down to is that AI has some risks, but it also has some opportunities. The way we’ve been talking about AI more recently (at ms consultants) is – what are we worried about?
The thing we’re worried about in AI is that confidential data doesn’t get released to the internet and create privacy concerns. What we’re not worried about is that it’s going to take all of our jobs. The reality is, the AI agents out there aren’t that helpful when it comes to design work, but they’re enormously helpful when it comes to the capabilities of some large language models, like Copilot or Chat GPT, to help us research, to help us gather data, to help us compose messages in more professional and efficient ways, etc. That’s really where the beauty of AI lives at ms consultants today.
Design Limitations & Efficiency Gains
Jerry Miller: So when you think about using the tool from a design perspective, it sounds like it’s not quite there yet. From an efficiency standpoint, there are ways to use AI software to get through a scope of work, or to ensure that there’s consistency, or that there are things that have not been omitted from a set. But from a design standpoint, it’s just not quite at that point yet.
Jason Christoff: I think you’re right. I think from a generative AI perspective, it’s not going to help make our designs more effective and efficient, but it absolutely has a lot of opportunities.
One example would be our client submits a new procedure or a new set of prototype documents; We can feed that information into our local, private co-pilot server, and it can help us compare what the differences are in that set versus the one that was maybe submitted last quarter or the quarter before that. It helps to inform our teams of what to look out for. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but every time you can save an hour, that’s one less hour that our clients have to pay for. Over the course of years, or even weeks, those shared savings through those efficiencies are valuable to our clients and to ms consultants alike.
Innovation & Security
Jerry Miller: Jason, are you seeing any of your clients pushing AI or challenging you all to be more efficient with it, or is it the reverse? Is it the architect of record holding the responsibility of going to the client and suggesting new technologies, whether they be AI or another type of resource that can help with efficiencies? Who do you see driving that conversation? Or does it come from both sides?
Jason Christoff: I think it’s a mixed bag. We have a couple of clients who are really exploring opportunities and avenues to increase their own internal efficiency, and we also have some clients who haven’t mentioned it at all. And that’s not a good or bad thing. Perhaps they’re doing a lot within their organizations that they haven’t shared with their architect partners like us.
As far as our approach at ms, it’s a tool that’s here to stay. We’re trying our best to use it in a responsible way, to get those efficiencies out of our everyday life, and create better products for our customers.
Jerry Miller: Jason, maybe one other question on the topic of AI that we see popping up quite a bit, and that’s the whole issue of security. You mentioned Copilot, and there are tools out there now that companies can license, and there are firewalls that are put in place within a company. What’s your perspective on security issues, and how are your clients expressing concerns around security when it comes to AI?
Jason Christoff: At least in the architectural space, the biggest issue that I hear about the most is intellectual property.
While not everything we do is proprietary, there are certain aspects of what we do that we wouldn’t want our competition to know about. That’s certainly true in the retail space, where some of our clients have some things they don’t want exposed. We have non-disclosure agreements with most, if not all, of our repeat clients. It’s really important to use AI responsibly in ways that are not in the public domain to keep that information as secure as possible.
Jerry Miller: That’s interesting. We see that across the board, the security issue. There are concerns over things as simple as using Microsoft Teams and recording meetings being an issue for some clients as well, so that’s definitely a topic [of concern].
Well, Jason, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for sharing your insights. As we look ahead, it’s exciting to think about how these practices will continue to evolve, especially as new technologies and priorities emerge. Thank you again for your candor and for bringing such a forward-thinking mindset to the conversation.
Jason Christoff: Thank you. We’ll talk again soon.
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