Navigating 2025: Insights into Asset Management, Data-Driven Strategies, and Sustainability

Hello. I think we have started on our, navigating twenty twenty five webinar. Welcome everyone that has joined us. We're going to get started here shortly. I know we're a few minutes after noon. Just to get started as a few housekeeping items, you will be muted throughout this presentation. Please submit your, questions through the question and answer box that you should see in your left hand corner. We will hopefully leave time at the end to answer any of your questions. You will also receive a recording of today's session by email after it's done. And if you can provide us any feedback, we'd really appreciate that. Just to get right into it, I'm gonna introduce Brian Bell as our main speaker today. He's had twenty years in asset management industry experience with Britely software. He's our SVP and head of strategy over here, and meets corporate strategy in MA. So I turn it over to you, Brian. Thank you. Appreciate the time. Glad to be with everybody today. My fun fact, that they asked me to add, I I struggled trying to think of something, but then I realized, you know, I actually know somebody that knows Tom Cruise. I don't know Tom Cruise myself, but that's kind of a fun fact. Going back to somebody that I I knew during college periods and ended up being in the navy and flew the jets that they actually filmed for Top Gun Maverick, which also happens to be my favorite movie. So, it's a fun, fun addition. And if anybody was at Illuminate a few years ago, there was a bit of a joke on that, with with, my love of Top Gun at the time. So, hopefully, that's a a fun throwback for those that were there. So I wanted to start out with a a quick rewind February of twenty twenty one. Texas experienced a winter storm like no other. Temperatures plunged to minus two degrees Fahrenheit, almost twenty twenty below, Celsius. The state power grid, was just not designed for that level of extreme heat or cold, and it collapsed. There were four and a half million homes lost electricity. Everything you can imagine, you know, was was affected by this. Pipes burst in hospitals. Water treatment plants failed. Estimated economic toll of the the crisis was nearly two hundred billion dollars in damages. Really one of the most costly disasters in Texas history. But here's what was kind of less discussed. At the core of it, there's a strong viewpoint that this was, failure in asset management. It it's a combination of things like aging infrastructure where eighty five percent of these outages came from natural gas plants and pipelines and wind turbines that froze due to inadequate winterization methodologies, risks that had been known about for nearly ten years going back to a prior major cold snap that raised red flags. There was siloed data. Grid operators did not have the real time visibility into these interdependent systems tracing through from supplies to power plants to hospitals, for example, and knowing what the potential impacts would be. There was more of a reactive mindset. There were there weren't enough predictive models that would simulate the cascading failures in these extreme conditions. And if you move forward, and how do you contrast to, infrastructure environments that have taken different approaches to this? You go somewhere that experiences this level of cold on a regular basis like in Norway, where they typically have temperatures that reach, you know, even twenty degrees below Fahrenheit. Their grid managed by, Staltnet, which is part of the Norwegian, oversight and governance of their of their national utility grid, took a different approach. They they hardened their assets. They heated pipelines. They insulated turbines. They deployed AI driven load forecasting, for example. The lesson here, asset management isn't about avoiding crises. It's really about anticipating them and taking proactive approaches through the application of technology, processes, different methodologies, and an organizational approach that, that can help provide more resilience. And in today's climate volatility with supply chain shocks, AI disruption, it means that we are all in some sort of our own Texas in some degree. The question is, will we repeat these mistakes, or will we build systems that turn this fragility into some foresight? So, you know, Texas, wasn't a fluke. It's a symptom of some of the macro trends that are starting to reshape our industry. Over the next rest of the hour, we're gonna unpack on some ideas of how to turn these systemic risks into strategic advantages. And there's a quote that I like here that come from the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is the author of, of Black Swan. You know, that's the the theory of, major catastrophic, you know, changes that happen and how, people and organizations, respond to that. Resilience is not about being unshakable, but it's about learning how to dance with disruption. And as I said, you know, thematically, we're increasingly dealing with all sorts of different dynamics in the market, whether that's technology or environmental impacts, financial, political impacts. And so over the the next few minutes, we're gonna talk through what some of the landscape looks like today, some of the, changes and things that are going on, how how those particularly impact the industry of asset management, and then we'll start to talk a little bit about some of the things you wanna focus on as we think about planning for the rest of twenty twenty five and then going into twenty twenty six. So, it's it's really a a privilege to be here today. You know, this is the audience here is a group of professionals that are keeping the world running. And whether you're managing MRI machines, treatment plants, educational campuses, roads, production equipment, logistics fleets. It can go on and on. The the truth is that your work is is the backbone of our economies and our communities, but the ground is definitely shifting beneath our feet faster than ever. We're operating in a area of compounding complexity. All the trends that we just talked about, and we'll go into a little bit more detail, are colliding with, some technology revolutions like AI, digital twins, and all the challenges that come along with that complexity. And at the same time, all these assets are no longer in isolated systems. You know, a bridge is not just concrete and steel. It's part of a network that feeds traffic data, emergency response plans, and, carbon carbon budgets and other things. A hospital is not just a building. It's a node in a health care system, and it's, increasingly strained by aging populations, cybersecurity threats. And this complexity is just magnified by all the expectations that are rising around us. Citizens demand infrastructure that's resilient. Investors are scrutinizing, ESG metrics, down to the asset level. Employees expect tools that, do more than just automation, but they augment their existing expertise and help them do their work more efficiently. Regulators are rewriting rule books. Sustainability disclosures and governance frameworks are rolling out, seemingly every week, and yet the gaps still remain. World Bank estimates that global infrastructure, investment gaps will reach fifteen trillion dollars over the next fifteen years. And then we have an opportunity aligned with that, though. McKinsey's reporting that AI and data driven predictive maintenance strategies can help reduce asset downtime by in excess of twenty to even fifty percent. So the stakes are existential. Organizations that are clinging to, you know, traditional practices of manual inspections, reactive maintenance, siloed data, they really aren't just risking inefficiency. You know, in my view, they're they're risking a level of irrelevance. But luckily, I think there's some things we can do. There's levers that we can address for resilience and growth, and we're gonna dive in here. So without further ado, we'll take a a first step and, check-in. So I'd love to to know a little bit more, about how you feel going into this, about your preparation and level of readiness for this digital transformation. I mean, it it shows up in different ways in every industry, and, I think we're all gonna see different opportunities for this. But, we've got a poll here that I think we'll we'll, check-in on and take a pulse check. I'll give you a minute or so to give us your thoughts. It's always interesting to see how different industries respond to this. And, you know, if we unpack this down kind of at the at the respondent and industry level, I'm sure we'd see a lot of, different interesting takes on on how this goes. Alright. A few more seconds here. Alright. Appreciate everybody's responses. We got some great feedback. Alright. I don't know if I let's see. Okay. Somewhat prepared. It looks like our our bulk of responses somewhat somewhat neutral. Great to see that a a handful of us feel very prepared. I'd love to dig into that if we had more time today, but, you know, I think, you know, it's everybody's seen the disruption over the last, you know, ten, fifteen years of of digital, integrating into our environments. So I'm sure that we've all taken some steps towards being prepared, and there's there's clearly more that we can all do, to take advantage of the latest technologies. And the landscape is clearly shifting, so it's it's a constant battle to stay up to date and see where we can find, ways to integrate technology into the digital landscape. I'm gonna take a few minutes here to walk through kind of the current, setting of the environment. You know, as a a strategist within our business, we utilize a lot of different frameworks from how we think about, the external environment. And one of the most common ones that we that we use, and you you may have used it in your own environment. So if you've been, through, any sort of training around strategy or or or business management, this is a typical one. We call it PESTLE analysis. It covers different facets of change or or the strategic landscape around political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors that are having an impact on, our organizations. There's other ways that you can look at the world. You know, you can look at, five forces analysis or other other sorts of, frameworks. But, you know, this one, I think, is a great level setting tool that gives you a a way to think about these these various, components of the environment. And so we're gonna step through each of these. I've I got a few things under each category that, I think are gonna speak to the landscape that we're currently operating in, and so we'll we'll jump right in here. So on a political, front, you know, one of the big things over the last several years has been the funding that came through the, infrastructure investment act in the US. You know, as the last administration left office, there was, a lot of movement on trying to get some of these additional funds deployed. You know, while it was over a billion dollars of original funding in the act, now just over half of that has been, deployed and and at least put in motion to to get into the pipelines. That doesn't necessarily mean that all those dollars have been fully executed. Clearly, these are long, long term projects in many cases in capital investments. So everything that has to go into the planning processes, the permitting, the lining up of resources, the the sourcing of materials and supply chain alignment, you know, all that is is still a reality. So but as far as the funds being made available, a a little over half of that is now been deployed, given the, the transition. You know, t TBD, exactly what impacts will happen as the new administration in the US takes place. There has been a prioritization just both in the structure and deployment and allocation of funding around clean energy projects, going through the end of last year. And so, you know, that's where we see a lot of the allocation of the funding. There have been some, I'll say, bureaucratic hurdles, with with some of the infrastructure components, the physical infrastructure, when you look at water systems or public transfer, transit, efforts. You know, a lot of that just comes with the territory of dealing with the, permitting, environmental studies, and other things that are required to get some of these these projects going. But we have seen evidence of of other projects that have been fast tracked. Texas is a good example of, charging networks along one of the major corridors. I believe it's the I thirty five corridor, where they established charging stations at certain increments, and a lot of that is now up and and going, and adopted, you know, some of the the more modern technologies around, adapters and other things to make it very accessible to a variety of of EVs. And we're also seeing some really exciting innovation. Bechtel Engineering is is leading the charge, in building a new generation of nuclear power plant. I believe it's in Wyoming or or Montana. And this is a a new, innovation in cooling technologies. It uses a sodium based cooling technology that will provide base load to, you know, three or four hundred thousand homes, using a new smaller form factor, but, next generation nuclear energy, infrastructure. So great to see that going on, a very clean approach, to transforming our energy grid. As we look across the the pond here from the US and North America, we do see the impacts of the EU green deal. You know, there is very aggressive and and proactive, legislation that that was passed in the EU. There are mandates around reporting that is required, starting this year, and and it really starting to cover all three scopes of emissions. So scope one is direct emissions from in industry primarily and and businesses that, have emissions to to track. Scope two is around purchased energy. So, what are the sources of your energy supply and and what are the carbon impacts of that energy? And then in scope three, it really extends far reaching into your supply chain as an organization. And, in the EU, all three scopes are now under, under the compliance mandates, and that really requires a lot of data tracking. So, as you think about particularly supply chains, the transfer of information back and forth between vendors and and consumers of goods within the industrial, value chain, a lot of information requires a lot of, tracking systems, reporting. And so, you know, this is a little bit specific to organizations that either deal with, the EU, or or maybe supply things to the EU, but certainly something to be aware of. And then, finally, on the political front, geopolitically, clearly, we've had a transition in administration, so there's a lot of questions and, answers to be to be found out about what that will actually do for some of the, things like trade agreements. I mean, obviously, in the last week or two, we've seen a lot of back and forth between, you know, North American allies even, and and, you know, we're watching very closely as to what impact this will have on the trends that we saw in twenty three and twenty four of nearshore, you know, as some people call it, friend shoring where we're bringing things back into, you know, from a US standpoint into Canada, into Mexico, you know, bringing it back from, prior markets, maybe in in Asia. And so, you know, TBD, again, as to exactly how some of these trade agreements will get worked out. But, you know, there's continues to be instability clearly in certain regions of the world geopolitically, which will continue to affect, trade patterns, whether that's in, you know, Asia, certain areas in the Middle East, etcetera. Moving on to some economic factors. Interest rates, you know, we we always watch very closely. We did see a bit of cooling in inflation towards the end of twenty twenty four. Outlook is probably more so on the fifty basis point, cut from the Fed in twenty twenty five, but as inflation in q four of twenty twenty four was still, didn't come down quite as much as as initially hoped, but, that's certainly something that's impacting us all from the ability to to, acquire funds at a reasonable, cost of funds, and clearly that makes an impact on our capital investment plans and strategies and potentially OpEx, as well if we have to divert OpEx funding towards CapEx projects. Commercial real estate continues to be under pressure. There have been, you know, a combination of things here, declining property values, vacancy rates, still unclear totally exactly how we're gonna end up in a return to office environment, you know, and and and a lot of investors in this category are starting to deal with the remaining high interest rates as as we think about refinancing, investments within, the portfolios that they they have. Interesting shifts. Yeah. We're seeing some areas where this empty office space is getting repurposed. One of the areas of particular interest is in biotech and labs. We have some, pockets of this, particularly in in Boston. I think it's it's some great examples where, given the suitability of these commercial environments, you know, depending on access to power, you know, size of the floor plate of the of the building, ability to retrofit for the proper ventilation, which would require certain ceiling heights, for example, access to the right workforce and other elements of the supply chain. You know, some of these these buildings are being, converted or or retrofitted into labs and maybe even data centers. So, you know, there is a a notion that, a a meaningful percentage of the existing stock of commercial real estate can be converted into other uses. That does obviously take investment and paired with, you know, the thoughts around the, the remaining high cost of capital. You know, every every portfolio has to make different decisions about that, but, there is some hope for revitalization of these empty office buildings in certain areas. We also see multifamily in certain cases. But, you know, it's it's a little bit regionally specific as far as the US. And then additionally, on the commercial, real estate vantage point here, you know, office vacancy is is still significant. You know, we're almost twenty percent in some of our large metro areas according to CBRE. But, you know, as I mentioned, lab demand is surging. There's just a a lot of innovation going on in the pharma, biotech, life sciences space. And so depending on, you know, the regional components there, the the growth of that is driving this, this need for reuse. I mentioned Boston in the in the last set of comments. But, you know, there's there's certainly some opportunity there, and, it's it'd be great to see some of this existing building stock go to use and not sit idle. Socially, top of mind, you know, the the continuing shift in the demographic trends, this is a a global phenomenon. It's it's not specific to the US. There's an interesting study from McKinsey that talks about different waves of aging demographics across the globe. There's about three waves that are described. Interesting article that, you know, you quickly, look up and and Google, but, they have a very in-depth report around, when these demographic shifts are are gonna hit the the different economic zones and regions within, the globe. You know, there's certain sectors that are particularly impacted. You know, for example, Deloitte did a study that thirty percent of utility workers are gonna be retiring by twenty thirty, and, you know, Gen z makes up about twenty eight percent of our workforce that just does not have clearly the the institutional knowledge, maybe the training, or maybe even just the the general desire, to, pursue some of these careers as they did in the past. But we are seeing some ways that technology is helping to come alongside the the need to train and equip a younger workforce. We see examples where, when when workforce is able to find resources, new technicians that come in maybe from an adjacency adjacent space that you have to get retrained and reequipped for the task, at hand. And things like AI driven, learning management systems are coming about where it can really tailor the experience of those, the coursework and and the training for those employees. And so, in a survey of of learning and development professionals, nearly eighty percent of of those professionals said that they were starting to deploy AI technologies to help accelerate the training path for those personnel, and so interesting areas that that may be of of use and interest to you. Twenty percent increase in course completion rates, though, as well. So, you know, not just is it, accelerating the the adoption of of the the learning modules, but also achieving faster completion rates and getting those workers into the workplace and on the job faster. Next trend around this, is the need for cross generational collaboration. And the way that we frame this is really thinking about, I think, primarily the knowledge transfer that has to happen between this upcoming workforce, the the Gen z, workforce. Not only do they demand more digital forward or digital first workflows, you know, they wanna see things like AI dashboards as opposed to reviewing PDFs and spending a lot of time in email and and communication in manual ways. But they also are finding ways and and asking for ways to use technology to facilitate that training process, not just in kinda initial training courses, but maybe even in on the job training where we can pair more experienced, technicians with, younger or less experienced technicians that are going to the site. You know, it's a combination of things. One is, how do we get all the knowledge and experience as best we can out of the people, out of the processes, out of the prior completed work that's been done in a facility into some sort of, data lake or data warehouse, that is accessible. So it's kind of securing that and archiving that knowledge to the best of our ability. And we see examples of that. Siemens, has an example within the accelerator platform where it helps ingest that information, just as an example. But then, you know, how do you then take that information, use things like virtual reality training or augmented reality or, AI models that can specifically extract the elements of that data warehouse, into things that can communicate, to the the new employees or the the newly trained, staff and and help facilitate that knowledge transfer. So there's a huge opportunity here around making sure that we don't just lose all that, wonderful institutional knowledge as it as it walks out the door, but also then efficiently get it into, you know, the brains. You know, we we don't have Neuralink in everybody's brains yet, but, you know, using other innovative ways to address with with technology, we're starting to see evidence of that. Again, globally, birth rates are plummeting. This is really an uncharted water for, for for society, frankly. Sixty percent of humanity on Earth lives in a country where the fertility rate is below replacement rate. I mean, think about that. Two thirds of the global population resides in a country where the replacement rate is lower I mean, where the fertility rate is lower than the replacement rate. So based on UN projections, within the next sixty, seventy years, some major economies are predicted to fall by twenty to even fifty percent, and that's primarily driven by the demographic challenges, of, of the replacement rate. So as I mentioned, there's there's three waves here. McKinsey has some great information on this if you go out, take a look at that. But it it starts with some of the current kind of advanced economies in North America and China, and then it makes its way across, across the globe. But, you know, different impacts in different regions as it progresses. Something to certainly keep an eye on. Moving into, the technological areas, this is some of my favorites, just being a kind of a strategist in the technology, space. AIs and, you know, we could spend a day on this topic, honestly. There's so many different aspects here to to consider. You know, just a year ago, I think, you know, in my presentation to, Illuminate as we talked about industry trends, and AI was obviously one that had had been a top of mind thing. I think Chatt GPT had just come out. The rate of innovation and transformation in the AI space, you know, it absolutely makes your head spin. I mean, every single day, you know, if you were to spend a few minutes, you know, surfing some news sites or x or, you know, wherever your your area is, there's something completely revolutionary happening in some corner of the world. You know, just in the last week, we see that, the DeepSeek, business out of China has released their r one model, which, you know, supposedly has decreased their training cost by maybe eighty percent. You know, there's some speculation about where the the truth lies and how it's been been, classified and categorized. But, you know, what's clear is there is a incredible amount of innovation going on in this space. And, you know, when we see evidence of something that nobody even knew existed basically a a month or two ago, you know, now competing for top spot, top three spot against the, you know, quote, unquote, eight hundred pound gorillas of OpenAI with with their support from Microsoft or, Google and their their deep research tools in Gemini, and you got Grok coming out of XAI and just, you know, massive amount of disruption. But, you know, all really amazing. And what's hard to do is is to really kind of figure out, you know, number one, what is everybody even talking about? What are these terms? What is an LLM? What is a, you know, a reference, reinforcement model for learning? You know? What is, what does a token mean, and why is that important? What's a GPU? But beyond that, I think what you're starting to see is an evolution of the entire AI space where there's a lot of foundation being laid with these large language models and and kind of this base layer of of tooling. And it's really setting the stage for some incredible innovation that you're starting to see, bits and pieces of. You know, I think because it's so technologically oriented, you know, we've heard stories about how AI is helping people code faster, you know, sixty, seventy, eighty percent faster than traditional, you know, hands on keyboard. But I think you're gonna see examples of that and evidence of that across the board. And so, you know, we're just at the very, very early innings of this. This feels very much like the early days of SaaS, software as we started to see the change in going from on prem to cloud based, environments. But the the keyword I would leave you with in this section is agents. What we're gonna start to see are very specifically tailored AI agents that are, it's not just an LLM, you know, language chatbot kinda thing, but there's gonna be things that can work independently. You know? We we give them a set of instructions. They go off. They live in the background, and they go tackle very specific tasks within your vertical, and they could do things like maybe, you know, run all of your dispatching for work orders. They could be sitting there at the intersection of all this information that comes in between sensors and IoT and historical information and third party systems from your ERP or, you know, active, work order management, and then figure out, you know, out a lot of or any human intervention, you know, what is the best decision to make around how do we resource this particular task, who do we send, what do we need to do, and what order do we need to do it? So agents are gonna be one of the biggest things, coming out of AI. So sorry. I went probably too long on that one just because I'm passionate about it. But, extending here on the technology front, digital twins. You know, this is kind of a a loaded word. I think everybody's probably got a different perception of what a digital twin means. And I I I hope that at the end of this, you can demystify it a little bit. In my view, and I think it is is broadly shared, digital twins obviously can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It doesn't necessarily have to mean a fully, built out end to end model of the most complex environment, you know, you can imagine. You know? There's obviously examples in high dollar, high value, mission critical asset intensive environments, whether that's oil and gas production or, you know, really extensive manufacturing plants, highly automated, etcetera. There's obviously a place for that, and and there's a ton of investment that has been into that space. But I think it's really important to recognize that digital twins can also be very small. They can be simplistic. They can address something as as simple as a as a single asset that is independent, and you can look at that in, with the same philosophy, around, you know, using information, using a digital model. You know, you think of it as just a a record of, you know, what are all the components, the attributes, the characteristics of this one particular asset? You know, what is my, what are the the different systems or or data that I can link to that one asset? And focus on just the things that are most important to you and your organization and then build over time. You know? I I think of it as a maturity curve across asset life cycle management where, we can go from very simplistic implementations of a digital twin to a combination or a a a string of digital twins. Sometimes the digital twins will even overlap each other and inter interrelate with each other. You could have a digital twin for your physical assets that then interacts with a digital twin of your energy and sustainability models and and scenario planning. So, the the important thing here is that there are emerging standards, which are very are gonna be very helpful. ISO nineteen six fifty is one that is starting to address what it means to connect these digital twins together. It starts out with in the building space with, building building information modeling, you know, BIM. Some of you may be familiar with those interconnection points. How do we standardize this so we can get the most value out of our investments in these digital twins? And then finally, in the technology space, it would be remiss if we didn't talk about cybersecurity. Clearly a massive threat from cyberattacks. Every week, somebody announces some sort of intrusion, data breach, theft of personally identifiable information. The increasing complexity of the technology landscape around IoT certainly makes that more and more of a threat. But, you know, making sure that your organizations are organized in the right way, have the right staffing, have the right frameworks that are established, you know, coming from, you know, I IT, and and cybersecurity experts, you know, doing regular audits, using encryption appropriately, establishing policies, securing network architectures. You know, they're all critical components of making sure that cybersecurity is a key part of asset management because the the physical assets that we have as they converge with the digital environment become, you know, a larger and larger attack vector for, intrusion into our critical infrastructure. I bundled the last two, areas here around legal and environmental, just because in in many cases, we're seeing as it relates to the asset management industry that they're intertwined. And we put touch a little bit earlier on the compliance mandates that are coming out of the EU, but there are, there's there's something that's very interesting there called digital product passports. This is another compliance regime within the EU around ensuring that the information related to sustainability within the supply chain of products is consistent and unchangeable or immutable over time. And so that there are, you know, from a compliance reporting standpoint, they wanna have traceability back into the supply chain of, you know, what went into something like a battery for an EV vehicle. BMW, for example, is using blockchain, to track their supply chain, their vendors. And so, you know, again, when you use blockchain and the cryptography that goes along with that, you know, it's something that doesn't you can't change it. It's immutable. So once it gets written into the blockchain, it's something that, you can be traced back, and and nobody can just go back and change a record and say, oh, no. No. This this had this carbon impact or this this carbon impact. So it it becomes a a system of record in and of itself. There's some speculation that in the US, some of the more progressive, regulatory, states such as California and New York will adopt similar rules within the next, year or two. So we'll keep an eye on that. But, you know, it starts with probably technology sectors, as we've seen in the EU. You know, battery manufacturing is certainly one that that has been evident. But, you know, the vision that was established by the EU and could potentially be adopted, you know, at areas of the of the US extends to other other asset classes and asset categories. So it could extend to construction materials. It could extend the things like raw materials, steel steel production, you know, could could extend to furniture, for example, in in building environments. So, something to keep an eye on. We do see in a lot of different categories some of the more progressive approaches towards, climate change and and carbon mitigation, net zero targeting, for example, starts in EU, and then it it finds its way over, you know, into the UK, into Canada, and and, eventually into the US in in in pockets. And then, sometimes at the federal level, sometimes at state level. And so it it there's a lot of nuance here. Every industry is gonna have a different approach to this. Different sizes of organizations are gonna have different approaches. Sometimes we see US based industries that have business dealings or supply chain interactions with the EU that that need to pay a little bit more attention to this than maybe somebody who's, you know, more isolated in a maybe an area of public sector, in states that don't have as much attention on this. Another thing I wanna point out as it relates to legal and environmental, and this is US specific, but, there's been a lot of talk the last several years around the SEC on some proposed rules around, climate risk disclosures. Again, this this was a trend and a focus area for the previous administration in the US, aligns more so with some of the European approaches, from the investment community, that would have required publicly traded businesses to provide standardized reporting around, climate, related impacts to their business, carbon sequestration, other things. This, you know, was was a rule that was proposed by the SEC, was was in motion to go into effect. It was halted by a judicial, process and is under technically under judicial review today. You know, I think all, expectation is that this would likely not go forward under the new administration just, with a a different approach to this area and a different set of, priorities. But there isn't a likelihood that elements of this may be adopted at the state level. So, again, going back to kind of the regional differences or state level differences in the US, it could be that we see, again, California, New York, and some other markets, maybe Illinois, adopt different, disclosure rules as it relates to financial filings within businesses. So this is more so for our our private sector, clients and and, interested parties here on this audience, but that it could be an impact that needs to be dealt with, sometime over the next couple of years. We do expect that there will be a whole range of of of solutions to address this, whether that's just basic tracking systems and software augmented by AI, partnering with other sorts of, experts in the in the industry, various managed services and consultants that'll come alongside here. But this is something to keep an eye on even if the federal level initiatives in the US have been paused. The other thing is, as it relates to compliance around, governance around around the the climate, reporting and whatnot, greenwashing is a term that that has, come to light, and this is where companies may have made claims on their level of investment or how they classify certain initiatives within the business to get credit for, addressing, you know, climate change or or being in compliance with with, national or regional, governance around around climate. But there there is, there are lawsuits, coming to play around organizations that were not fully, maybe say, accurate or, didn't quite align with what the actual, legal standards were around that. So, dozens of these lawsuits have been filed, and so we'll we'll see how that evolves over time as well, but interesting to see the the legal intersecting with the environmental segments here. So we're gonna pause here, after doing a run through of the landscape. Got a few more slides to talk through and get you a little bit more focused on actionable things that we can do. But I wanna take another pulse check, in understanding with a little bit more specificity how your organizations are integrating things like IoT and the physical environment with, concepts of the digital twins. So, you know, may maybe don't overthink the IoT and digital twin ideas, but I think everybody's probably found ways to connect, some sort of sensor or some sort of electronic device into a workflow. And so I'd love to to hear, how how that's progressing for everybody. So are you in the early stages? Have you maybe dabbled with it, done a little bit of, integration, but not not fully integrated yet? Have you you feel like you're you're done with the job? You've you've invested the time, the resources, the training, the, installations of of all that, or maybe it doesn't apply. Maybe you're in a area of the asset management space where, you know, we're not gonna put a sensor on how high the grass is growing on the athletic field. So, maybe that's not applicable. Give it a few more seconds here. Appreciate everybody's submissions. I got almost half of half of the team on. Alright. Alright. We'll go on here. Early stages. Well, that's, honestly, a little bit higher, than I expected, but it's great to see it everybody seems to have at at least gotten a start. Almost twenty percent says doesn't apply. I I'm curious as to what some of those asset classes are. If you if you got some some, feedback there, I'd love to hear that. Clearly, a minority of folks in the fully integrated department, it's hard to keep up. I mean, the the goal line keeps shifting, I think, as we kind of sped through some of the changes in the technological landscape. You know, you may get to a certain point and say, man, it's good to have this information, this integration, but next week, something else comes out. Right? So, great feedback. I see a a comment from Heidi, you know, oversight. We we should have had one that says we haven't even started yet. That'd be great to get a a breakdown on that one as well. So if you haven't started yet, love to get that feedback as well. But, you know, look looks like a majority of folks have at least been thinking about it, maybe made some initial investments, maybe even have a plan for what, fully integrated looks like, but somewhere along the maturity curve, of that journey. So moving now into, some focus areas. You know, we painted a broad landscape view of all the different things that are going on across those different areas of political and social and technology and legal, etcetera. But, you know, where are we starting to see some momentum? Where do we think that the most kind of bang for your buck is, and what are some examples of how some of these, investments, of time and resources can really have an impact? First of all, probably not surprising, data is really a foundational step. So, there has to be timely, accurate, comprehensive information available to you in almost any area of decision making. So, with the complexity of all these different environments, you know, each different domain, whether you're talking about, operating technologies and and, you know, whether that's building technologies or production equipment or, you know, vehicles or elevator lifts and escalators and other things, forklifts. There's there's information available in almost any sort of asset domain. And then when we start thinking about how do we combine that information with, the needs around our energy consumption, cost, sustainability strategies, every every bit of this drives more and more, information volume. But, you know, we have to get our arms around that. So it's crucial for organizations to have a strategy in place to prioritize, and we can't boil the ocean. We can't just go say we're gonna put a sensor on every single thing. But looking at the entire landscape of your asset portfolio, understanding, you know, what has the most risk? What typically has the highest cost of operational profile? What's gonna be most relevant to my long term capital plans? What are some things I can do to get better quality information? Maybe that's a sensor. Maybe it is a human being being on-site, having an optimized approach to data collection, whether it's asset tagging or using things like OCR or image recognition technologies and getting more of that information in into a common, centralized place so then we can start using that to to, validate and then make better decisions. Things like, energy information. You know, we can make a direct correlation between consumption of energy and no knowledge of its sources into things like carbon as we think about extending into scope two or scope one, scope two, scope three emissions, reporting that's that's increasingly being required. Just starting with basic collection of, you know, electrical consumption and cost can be a stepping stone when we think about data. So important there. Example of this using data, love to mention, one of our, partners in the industry here, Children's Health of Dallas, used data, to secure twenty million dollars in funding from their finance department. They use all that, in a collective way to develop a comprehensive ten year plan, provide a financial forecast for all of their building in their their campus environments, really help them to optimize some of their infrastructure investments, and really identified millions of dollars of, potential, repair costs that they could avoid or or optimize the the prioritization and the approaches to capital investments, ultimately, really enhancing their decision making, using data and technology. Next focus area, this digital transformation trend continues to show up in many industries. You know, it started out mostly in the heavy asset industrial production environments. We, you know, we see this evidence in the building environments as well as we start to see connection between digitized building automation systems and other things. But, really, there's increasing, reduction of cost in the the implementation of digitization. So what do I mean by that? The the cost of sensors, the ease of use of applying something like a simplistic, you know, air quality sensor or vibration sensor, we're seeing step changes in cost reduction, not only to acquire the the product, but the ease of installation. You know, no longer does it require a massive effort and and lift to bring together not that you don't wanna have a lot of people on board and aware of what you're doing, but, we don't necessarily have to piggyback an existing IT infrastructure. You know, some of these new technologies can provide things like mesh networks that ride totally stand alone, keep, you know, cybersecurity standpoint, keep it separated from the operational IT environment. There's ways to do this faster and cheaper and get high quality data that's coming through. So this convergence of physical and digital environments is real, and it it is continuing to accelerate. So more information there ties back to the last, topic around, data aggregation and and using that for decision making. But we do see that, you know, using these IoT sensors in in asset systems and portfolios of assets is unlocking things like the real time monitoring of information, helping to guide resources more appropriately. And I think we've got an example of that next slide, But just overall improvement of operational efficiency in the near term, but also leading to better information that helps with decision making and modeling of more accurate, asset scenarios in the future. We do have an example. One of our clients, Aberdeenshire, used, smart gully monitors. So it didn't mean that they had to put a a sensor on all seventy thousand of of their gullies, but they they took an approach to say, if we go back and look at, you know, something as simple as our work order history, where do we know we always have to go when heavy rain comes? You know, wouldn't it be great to know ahead of time if there was a a likely blockage or if water was rising faster than we expect, you know, in this particular hot spot because there's a downstream or or, you know, issue with with pipes, that we could quickly get resources on-site, address it, resolve it, and mitigate that, maintain higher service levels for our community, but do it with, you know, just just the areas that, are the most likely to be impacted by something like heavy rain. So, again, simplistic approach, a stepping stone, a great example of integrating that physical environment with a, an IoT device, maybe, you know, low ran or a wide ranging, wide area network, maybe converging with the five g technologies that can give you access to distributed sensor networks, and then pulling that into a workflow. Simple example, something's triggered, says water is rising at a a certain, you know, rate. Let's get somebody out, prioritize their routes, and get them to the right place at the right time. Third concept here is around the sustainability and environmental compliance. As we talked about, regulations are mounting. A lot of them flowing kind of from from east to west, from from Europe over the pond in North America. Different, states and jurisdictions are taking different approaches here. But the long term trend clearly is that there is more pressure for decarbonization and information and tracking around this. And so as economies, you know, continue to, be interrelated, converge, have lots of back and forth, trade, and other things, the supply chains become, very integrated. There's concepts, like the WEF has around circular economies, and and other aspects of that that are driving, approaches globally for better information around sustainability and environmental compliance. So, again, there's stepping stones here available. You can start by simple things like just tracking cost of utility waste streams, sources of those of those streams. You know, there's clear, correlation in comparison to, the the carbon planning, and then helping to drive and and leverage that information for, strategies to mitigate carbon long term. Interesting. There was a study, from JLL I wanna share with you that took a you know, there's, I think, six hundred and fifty some different potential regulations for the built environment, depending on where you are, the type of industry you're in, the, the jurisdiction that has authority over your area, and just some of the, I don't know, half a dozen or so most, stringent building standards, performance standards in North America. JLL did a study, and it was interesting. They have a tool on their their website you can actually look at and and by, types of facilities. They had a couple different dimensions you could look at. If you applied the standards of a particular, compliance regime, I would say, on on these building standards, across these different classes of of assets, you could see who was in compliance and who wasn't. And, you know, there's a estimate that up to sixty five percent of US building stocks, so kind of existing facilities, do not meet the the thresholds of the proposed standards. So that's a big thing to overcome. So there's there's gonna have to be ways to address that. There's certainly a a massive brownfield environment, of things that exist that we can't just go tear down buildings and rebuild everything. It's easier to say that we can make adjustments going forward on how we architect design infrastructure going forward to address, the standards and to adopt the best practices and, different approaches to energy efficiency and sustainability. But, you know, major major considerations here about, you know, what the impacts are, you know, given your state location, given your industry, the different different bodies that have, something to say about that. But, notably, you know, if we are not in compliance or or achieving compliance or on a path to compliance, there's potentially heavy penalties. So, as these debates happen, as, you know, standards get, debated both, you know, in in the kind of public square, but also in in legal frameworks, whether that's in the judicial system or otherwise. Really important that we keep an eye on this and understand when hard and faster goals are gonna come into play and what the implications are. Finally, I'd say that, you know, in the public sector, or I should say in the in the private sector, when we have public investments in in the markets, for example, there is increasing interest. The SEC rulings were, you know, one aspect of that, whether or not that fully goes forward in its anticipated form or not is is to be seen. But there is more interest globally from, you know, for businesses to at least make information available about their sustainability efforts, and and how that plays out within their supply chains, within the the products that they produce, and there's many elements to that. And I'm not talking about kind of ESG generally. It's it's really around the specific elements of sustainability as it relates to carbon energy utilization and other things, and it's it's very complex. So, it re requires that there is an integrated approach, using information systems, processes, organizational structures, and other things that will provide the information not only to those organizations to help manage better, but then can in a format that can be shared more broadly and externally to their various stakeholders in the community. So, lots of opportunity there in the near term, long term, but, in many cases, it's going to require partnering with organizations that have, you know, particular expertise, particular technology, you know, other consultants and and, people that can come alongside you and and kinda guide you through that journey, and address that. One of our clients dealt with this. This is in the public sector. Davis School District, achieved significant reductions in their energy consumption, seventeen percent reduction in consumption while also growing about forty percent in their facilities. So really nice to see the divergence of energy consumption while the facilities are growing. In fact, they were honored as a recipient of the Utah Energy Champion Award in twenty twenty four, by the Utah Association of Energy Engineers. So, again, this is an integrated approach. It requires better data, tooling, software technology, behavioral change, you know, having all this information at your fingertips in order to drive, the changes and updates, into your organization. And finally, I'll be quick. Digital twins, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but, you know, quick, explanation. It can be a virtual replica of just about anything, object, person, process that simulates behaviors and helps us understand how it works in real life. We are seeing, you know, further investments in digital twins. Again, it doesn't have to be the most heavy, asset intensive areas that can be represented in in more simplistic asset classes, and there's ways to use a digital twin. Just get your arms around organized information, understand how an asset is performing, what is the expectation of how it performs, and how, it'll last over its intended life cycle? And there's ways that we can address this across a variety of of areas in the maturity life cycle, but, interesting ways to use that. We we'd partner with Sydney Olympic Park in Australia on ways to model a digital twin that integrates asset information, environmental obligations, financial components, you know, bringing kind of the three legs of the stool together to really have a comprehensive strategic approach to asset management using technology and creating this kind of comprehensive digital twin. So there are ways to do that. We'd love to share that with you. Last poll question for those of you who can stick around for, another minute or two. You know, what, who do you think is gonna win the big game? And for those of you who might be out of the country, our big game, you know, the Super Bowl, I think NFL is one of the most watched things around the globe, but, you know, put a a quick pull up here. Maybe you don't care at all. Maybe you're a, a Patriots fan or a Dolphins fan, Cowboys fan, but, we do have the the Eagles and the Chiefs. Maybe you don't even know there's a big game. Would love to see everybody react to that. Let's see. We got anybody responding. Eagles. We got some Eagles fans. I don't know if that's because they love the Eagles or if that's because they don't like the Chiefs. I'm I'm here for the snacks. I'm also here for the ads. The ads are always great. I love that we can, you know, see the ads. Now they release ads before the game even, and then you can go to YouTube afterwards and watch watch them afterwards. So, look, I wanna remind you. I appreciate your attendance today. Thank you for the opportunity to share all this with you. Sorry. We had a few minutes over. It's my fault. I'm gonna yelled at, but, you know, we do encourage you to download our state of US asset and facilities management report. Got some detail on five key trends. You'll you'll hear some things that sound familiar when you do that, but encourage you to do that. We'd love to engage with you, share information. If you have questions, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you. Love to get feedback. If you have specific areas we'd love to cover in our next webinar, love to hear about that as well. Appreciate the opportunity. We appreciate the opportunity to work with all of those who are clients with this. And, for those of you who are not, hope that we gave you some value today in this webinar and, look forward to engaging you in the marketplace. Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian, and thank you for everyone for attending.