Kelly Paletta: Hey, good afternoon everyone. I’m Kelly Paletta. I’m Director of Sales and Marketing here at EXP Technical. Welcome to our webinar. Our topic today is Blueprints, BIM, and Chaos.

We’ll be talking about taking control of project data in architectural engineering and construction firms. Now if you’re not in one of those industries don’t worry you’re not in the wrong room.

I think you’ll find that a lot of the concepts a lot of the examples that we post today even though they are somewhat AEC specific they still have pretty broad widespread application.

So even if you work for a nonprofit org or a creative agency or an accounting firm or a law office you still may get some value. In fact I’m pretty confident that you will get some value out of attending this session today. Let’s see I wanted to share just want to give you an overview of what to expect as we go through our conversation today. And let me pull up. There we go.

So I have a little bit of information to give you an overview and let you know what to expect today. Our agenda appears here. And for those of you that have attended these events in the past you know that sometimes these events are kind of like a podcast where they’re very conversational. Other times we have guests that have very scripted and prepared material and a lot of PowerPoint slides.

Today we’re somewhere in between. We have some examples and some practical examples that we’re ready to share with you. But aside from my portion here there’s not a whole lot of PowerPoint.

Instead it’s going to be a conversation that focuses on real world examples that we want to share with our audience today. But you’ll also notice that there is time for questions and answers at the end of the session.

So I would encourage you to speak up to submit questions. There’s a couple of ways that you can send questions to myself and our panelists who I’ll introduce in just a minute here. One way is you can post comments in the chat. And you’re certainly welcome to do so. I would advise you though that comments in the chat are visible to everyone in attendance. So you want to be sure that you’re very diplomatic and respectful in anything that you post in the chat and aware of the privacy concerns that might go along with that.

The other option is that you can post questions via the Q&A feature in Zoom. And when you do that your questions will just go to me as the moderator and to our panelists here. And I will introduce them in a second. But one question that comes up every time we host one of these events is “is this event being recorded?” And in fact today’s event is recorded. It usually takes me about a week. So be patient but be on the lookout for email that will come from me about a week from now after I post done a little bit of post processing on the video. And at that point you’ll be able to go back rewind some of the important things that you learned or share it with others it will be freely available to everyone everyone that you’re connected to.

Now before I introduce our panelists I just wanted to give a little bit of a preface because again I think we have a lot of people in attendance that have been in attendance at previous sessions. And you know that it’s pretty rare that we invite vendors or folks that are representing a product or a suite of services.

But what we found happening again and again is… At EXP Technical we support hundreds of small and medium sized businesses. And we support over 100 architectural firms among those hundreds of businesses that we support. And we kept seeing a lot of the same problems coming up again and again with collaboration with remote access. People were sometimes frustrated with the SharePoint experience or with synchronization problems with SharePoint or had issues with VPN connections to a server or a lot of other problems that we’ll discuss as we go here.

But what we found was that there was a suite of microservices that are available that tended to solve a lot of those problems for a lot of our clients. And so that’s one reason why we wanted to invite a couple of guests here to help us to kind of share with you what we’ve learned or what we’ve seen work well for many of our clients not just in the AEC industries but also in many other small and medium sized businesses around Western Washington.

Kelly Paletta: So joining me today is Kyle Wallstedt who is a manager of partner solutions engineering at Egnyte. Kyle thank you so much for joining us.

Kyle Wallstedt: Yeah thanks for having me Kelly. Really excited to be here.

Kelly Paletta: Great. I’m excited. I’ve seen what you have to share. So I’m really looking forward to getting out of the way and letting you go. Also joining us from Egnyte is Dan Burke. Dan is the partner sales manager at Egnyte. Hey Dan. Hey Kelly thanks for having us on the call today.

Kelly Paletta: All right. And it looks like you’re on a patio somewhere enjoying.

Dan Burke: Yeah this is for those Wisconsin grads in the crowd here. We recognize this is the Cherish Memorial Terrace Memorial Union.

Kelly Paletta: It’s lost on me unfortunately. I apologize for that.

Dan Burke: Sunday. Washington goes to Wisconsin.

Kelly Paletta: And then so that I am not outnumbered by the Egnyte guys we also have Jeff Shaflik joining us. And Jeff is a consultant and a team lead here at EXP Technical. He’ll kind of be representing the EXP Technical perspective and also the voice of our client I think in these conversations. Hey Jeff.

Jeff Shaflik: Hey Kelly. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Kelly Paletta: We’re just about ready to get to the good stuff. But there are a couple of uncredited cameos from guest speakers. I’m going to introduce one of them now. Here she is. She wanted to talk about her perspective on remote access. This is a woman named Gaia, and I’ll let her speak for herself.

Gaia (AI cameo): Last night I was deep into designing the Fairview lobby. Everything was finally coming into place. And when I went to save my progress my internet connection dropped. The file closed unexpectedly. And I lost two hours of work.

Kyle, I thought that might be a good segue. I know that’s just one of many problems, but Gaia’s issue seemed like a good one to start with. Of course, she’s AI, for anyone who couldn’t tell.

I thought her issue would be a good segue to show our guests the Egnyte environment and give them an overview of some of the things to come in the presentation.

Kyle Wallstedt: Sure. Let me share my screen and get started. I’m glad you clarified that was AI.

Kelly Paletta: You really needed me to tell you that, right?

Kyle Wallstedt: We’ll start with the basics of Egnyte. There are going to be a few demos today, each probably five to seven minutes long, with some discussion in between. This first portion is really Egnyte 101. First of all, you’re looking at it. This is Egnyte.

In this case, I’ve got a web browser view of Egnyte, and I also have Egnyte on my desktop app. You’ll notice my S drive is mapped and connected to the exact same data you see here in the browser. From the beginning, Egnyte was built as a file server replacement tool.

In the early days, we didn’t target any specific industry. We didn’t build products for particular verticals. We set out to build what we called instant infrastructure, and the tagline was “Your on-demand file server.” From the beginning, it was a cloud file server, before the word cloud became a buzzword.

One of the things customers often like about Egnyte is that you shouldn’t need to learn anything new to use it.

Egnyte is built as a mapped drive. I’ve got my S drive, and I can access it anytime I have an internet connection, so I no longer need a VPN when I’m remote. You can also access the same data through a web browser or, as I’ll show you in an upcoming demo, from your mobile device. There’s an Egnyte app where you can access your data, so from any device, anytime you have an internet connection, you can get to it.

Egnyte was designed as a file server replacement tool. I won’t go through every option here with permissions and settings, but we built our permissions very similarly to how businesses have managed data for years with on-prem file servers.

In this case, my finance department has access to the finance folder. By default, that permission cascades down through the subfolders, but at any subfolder level, you can make adjustments and be more restrictive.

That’s a simple example with employees for a department. You could imagine that there are use cases for projects and templates. And we’ll get into some of that here today as well.

In addition to permissions and a central view of your data, Egnyte is built on immutable object storage with built-in geographic redundancies.

Part of that includes versioning, so I can always roll back to a previous version of any file. You’ll see this Excel document has versions, and I can see who made each edit and when. I can recover past edits, restore deleted files from the trash bin, and review audit reports that capture almost every interaction with your data.

At its core, Egnyte gives you a central repository where you can manage permissions for users and groups and ensure your data is preserved and readily accessible anytime you have an internet connection.

From an end-user perspective, you might simply work from this mapped drive. We’ve even had cases where people replaced file servers without telling users. That’s relatively infrequent, and normally you do tell users, but it’s a powerful point: you shouldn’t need to learn anything new to use Egnyte.

That said, it is a new set of technology. You don’t need a VPN when you’re remote, and you can right-click certain folders to mark them for offline access or share content.

We provide hundreds of integrations, including many that are AEC-specific. You’ll notice I have mine linked to Autodesk Construction Cloud and Procore, so I can sync projects back and forth. You’re taking a modern sync-and-share set of capabilities and layering it onto a traditional mapped drive.

Part of the beauty of that is that many applications common in this space, like drawing files and design files, were built to work from a mapped drive. ArcGIS and Civil 3D are good examples.

They have locking mechanisms built in, and they link to other files based on consistent paths to data. So Egnyte providing that mapped drive, automated file locking, and the experience of everyone working as if they were in the same office on the same file server is core to what we do.

That concludes my first portion of the demo. This is the core functionality that got us in the door from the beginning, and we’re really best in class at being that file server replacement tool. We’ll dive deeper into more specific use cases as we go.

Kelly Paletta: Thank you so much, Kyle. Jeff, I was hoping to loop you in and get your perspective on what it’s like when we roll this out. Can you speak to the end-user perspective? Is it disruptive? Is there a lot of frustration? What have you seen when clients move from a file server, SharePoint, or some other collaboration system to this framework?

Jeff Shaflik: When we’ve received requests, a lot of clients have wanted to get away from the on-prem file server. When I’ve suggested Egnyte, the transition has been pretty seamless. As Kyle mentioned, you can almost put it in place without saying anything to end users, because they’re accessing the data the same way they’re used to. It’s just a network drive. They double-click the file, it opens, and away they go. They really don’t see much of a change.

Dan Burke: I’ll jump in here too. We’ve seen scenarios where performance is actually a little better, depending on the age of the equipment. Everybody has switching equipment in a closet somewhere, old hardware, old disks, and the standard performance issues that come with them. So in addition to that seamless Friday-to-Monday transition, sometimes it actually works a little better. And from a TCO perspective, it’s not just the file server you’re replacing. You’re often replacing VPN tools, backup tools, data protection, storage, snapshots, and more. Egnyte handles all of that as part of the system.

Kelly Paletta: That gets me thinking, Jeff. The things we’re talking about replacing can require a ton of support and maintenance. File servers need patching, backup systems need regular test restores and monitoring. Do you have any insight into what the support effort has been before and after this kind of migration?

Jeff Shaflik: Many clients are surprised by how smooth the transition goes and how few support calls we get afterward. When clients move from a file server, SharePoint, or solutions like Dropbox that rely more on syncing, we hardly hear from them. Previously, we might have dealt with a couple of sync issues, and support costs would go up for the client. So it’s been a good solution for anyone who’s moved in that direction.

Kelly Paletta: So if you’re working with an IT support provider where support has an incremental cost, and those sync issues go away, those incremental costs go away too. I’m not trying to give away our consulting services, but one of our values is to do the right thing. We want to guide clients toward a more stable environment, even when it means a little less support revenue for EXP.

Dan Burke: To Kelly’s point, in addition to supporting EXP and your clients, I work with other MSPs and onboarding teams. One of the top things we talk about is that OneDrive support tickets are going to fall off to practically nothing, because you’re just not going to have those kinds of issues. And not to belabor the point, but there’s even a comedian who does a bit about OneDrive and SharePoint.

They’re great tools. We are a Microsoft partner, so I’m not bad-mouthing them, and Egnyte certainly isn’t for everyone. But there is a real appeal to simply saving data on an S drive instead of in some SharePoint folder you can’t find or scroll to, and hoping it syncs.

Kelly Paletta: That’s good. I’ll have to look for that. That might be a good segue to our next segment. We have another guest joining us: Brandon. Brandon’s a mopey AI, but we’ll hear his issues and concerns.

Here comes Brandon.

Oops, we still have Gaia. Let me move on to Brandon. Here comes Brandon.

Brandon (AI cameo): I walked the job site this morning and I took about forty photos. They’re all still on my phone. At some point I’ll email them to myself and then download them then try to remember which project they belong to. That’s usually how it goes.

Kelly Paletta: I think they should call Brandon. He’s pretty good. Disclosure: he’s AI, but he’s mimicking my voice. It’s not my voice, but it was my pacing, so maybe that mopey pace came from me.

Kyle, this might be a good segue to another example of the end-user experience with field collaboration.

I understand you have some information prepared to speak to that as well.

Kyle Wallstedt: For this portion of the demo, I’m going to walk through a handful of features and functions that Egnyte has built specifically for the AEC vertical. Some of these could be useful in other industries too. Some ad agencies work on projects and things like that as well. But generally speaking, we didn’t initially set out to target any particular industry. After being in business for about five or six years, we looked up and noticed that a large percentage of our customer base had a similar profile.

A lot of the reasons were the large and complicated file types, the need for file locking, xrefs, and the collaboration requirements that are common when you’re working with architecture firms, specialty contractors, and general contractors who all need to be working from the same plan so things don’t get built in the wrong places.

Those were the reasons the industry gravitated toward Egnyte from the beginning. Then we started listening more closely to our customers and trying to understand what we could do to add more value to the workflows that are common in this space.

I’d classify these into a couple of buckets. We’re not going to show every feature today, but generally speaking, some of it is about how organizations work with projects: the lifecycle of a project, creating new projects, managing project data, collecting data, closing out projects, cleaning up data over time, and helping with the workflows associated with projects.

The other piece is certifying Egnyte for specific file types and optimizing it to work as well as possible with the common file types we see in the industry.

So we can kind of talk about that a little bit as well.

The first thing I’ll pull up is my projects folder. One thing you might notice is that these have a slightly different icon. The same is true when I’m accessing them from my mapped drive. These folders have been marked as what we call projects. A project is a type of folder that can include a dashboard, an address or map, specification files, saved bookmarks, and other key details associated with the project.

If I go into the project settings, you can do things like associate a timeline with the project. When you mark a project as done, you can clean it up automatically by removing guest access, disabling external links, or moving the folder to a closed-projects area where it’s read-only for employees. That helps make sure you don’t have loose ends floating around after a project closes.

You’ll also see this smart upload folder. This speaks directly to Brandon’s pain point. Smart upload lets you set a geolocation for your projects and apply a radius so your mobile device knows when you’re there.

The idea is that you can take photos, and the Egnyte app can recognize that you were on site. I actually have my home address saved as a project location, so it’s recommending that I upload photos to the site. You don’t need to have the app open. You’re just on site, you take photos, and later the app reminds you that it looks like you took photos while you were at that project and asks whether you’d like to upload them.

Maybe you decide you only want to upload eight of them, not all of them, because some were from lunch or something like that. You can absolutely do that, and those photos will be saved right into your smart upload folder.

In my case, I’ve got a photos folder for each project, and this is applied as the smart upload folder for each account. You can see some of the photos I’ve taken around my house. Sadly, a tree died and had to be taken down. But the point is that we’re helping people in the field make sure photos are collected in the right place for a given project.

And again, this is that same exact folder structure that somebody might be working from their mapped drive on, or when you’re closing out the project you can share the link to the client right from here.

A couple of things I’ll highlight quickly. I’m trying to keep an eye on time, and I think we’re doing all right for a few more minutes. Kelly will interrupt me if I’m going too long.

Yeah I’ll bring out the big hook for you. You’re doing fine. You’ve got plenty of time right now.

Okay, good deal. Let me briefly walk you through the process of creating a new project, because I’ve built some automation into the permissions and set them up dynamically.

I’ve got a template for projects, and you could have multiple project types associated with this. I’m going to use this construction project and call it Webinar, Project ID, Pending Project.

I can go ahead and save this. It walks me through adding a timeline, files, an address, smart upload, and other metadata you might choose to add or import.

If I skip the setup, what I want to highlight is that this dynamically created a few groups that I can now use when applying permissions for the project.

I have this template, and we want the permissions to be the same for each one. But the people filling those roles can differ from project to project.

In this case, I’ve got a group set up for the external team. So when I’m working with specialty contractors, a design agency, or any other partners on the project, all I have to do is add their email to that group.

Then I know they have access to the external folders we’re sharing for that project. And if I’m working on multiple projects with them, I just add them to the groups for each project they’re involved in.

From there, I know they have access to all the right subfolders. I’m not inviting them and then asking myself which folders I need to add them to. This is a dynamic group that gets created and applied automatically.

Similarly, I’ve got different project teams. I can assign whether this is project team A, B, or C, and who the project managers are for this particular project.

So the permissions are consistent from project to project, but the people serving those roles can be different. We built that right into the project template feature.

The last thing I want to touch on is adaptive block caching. This can be hard to show in a demo because it’s one of the things we’ve done behind the scenes to make specific applications faster.

You can think of adaptive block caching like watching a video on YouTube or Netflix. You don’t need to download the entire video before you start watching.

If I run this, you’ll see two versions: one where it’s actually downloading the file, and another where it’s using adaptive block caching.

You can see it’s able to pull up the image right away, along with the external reference points, so you can get in and start working much more quickly. It’s accomplishing the same thing on the other side.

Your mileage may vary depending on file size, operating system, and other factors. But the point is that we’re doing a lot to understand key file types, certify them, and optimize our app for performance.

So when Dan talked about how Egnyte can sometimes be faster than your local on-prem environment, a big part of that is because we’re caching data, syncing only incremental changes or blocks, and streaming those blocks to users’ machines.

Even though they’re working over an internet connection and potentially with large files, we’re doing a lot to optimize what I call perceived performance, because users don’t care how long it takes to download or upload a file.

They care how long it takes to open when they click on it, how quickly their colleague can see the changes they made, and whether they spend an hour working on a file only to discover someone else was in it too. They care about not working from the wrong version of a file.

So we’ve built a lot into the product to make it very fast, or at least feel fast, even if you have poor bandwidth or are working with very large files.

So maybe I’ll leave it at that for now. Again this portion of the demo was really focused on some of the features that we’ve built very specific to our AEC customers.

Kelly Paletta: I’ll jump in on perception, just as an end user. Slow load times are the sort of frustration that lead to morale issues. Executives and operations professionals might look at this as increased productivity because people are working sooner, and those are real payoffs.

But if people have to sit and wait for a file or a model to upload, they get irritated. “Be responsive” is one of our values at EXP because we know people hate waiting, and they hate the uncertainty of not knowing how long something is going to take.

So it’s interesting to see that from my perspective, which reminds me, Dan: in one of our prep sessions, you said you had a personal connection to someone who fell in love with some of the smart upload features.

Dan Burke: Actually, it’s not mine. It’s my boss Tim, our director for MSP. He said that when he first started a couple of years ago, he was having dinner with his brother and mentioned he’d gone to work for this company, Egnyte.

His brother said, “Wait, Egnyte with a ‘Y’?”

Tim said yes, and his brother said, “Oh my God, this has made such a huge difference for us.” It turns out he’s a general contractor out in the field building things.

He said, “This is incredible. I can access drawings on my iPad, take pictures, and have them automatically uploaded to the project folder.” He said it’s made a huge difference in productivity for his folks in the field.

I thought that was a great story. I don’t have a big construction or AEC background. I spent my internal IT years working for law firms, and they care a lot about productivity because they want to make sure they can bill.

But being able to access files from anywhere, especially with how much internet is available now, is a powerful change.

Kelly Paletta: I’m just shocked that he said “Ignite with a Y” and not “Ignite with an E.”

I think the Y is what stuck out.

Why is in your logo though?

Dan Burke: Yeah exactly. That’s probably why.

Kelly Paletta: The Y is part of your branding right?

Dan Burke: It is.

Kelly Paletta: Hey Jeff, I didn’t mean to speak over you. Were you going to say something there?

Jeff Shaflik: I was just going to say that a lot of clients who have started using Egnyte have realized how much better the experience is in the field.

Many field techs used to have to use a VPN to connect to the file server on an iPad or iPhone, and it was super painful. They needed access to that file while they were there, and this alleviates that completely.

Being able to open the Egnyte app, pull up the PDF, and show what you need while you’re out in the field is a huge win for clients.

Kelly Paletta: Definitely. In the interest of keeping us moving, there are a handful of questions coming into the Q&A, and I think I’m going to batch them because we also have an agenda. We’ll get to those.

Be patient. If you posted a question, I see it and we’ll get to it. Our next segment is focused on some of the practical AI applications available within this environment.

And again, back to you, Kyle. I feel like the Anchorman here, but go ahead when you’re ready.

Kyle Wallstedt: I’ll share my screen here in a moment as I introduce the topic. One of the things we hear is that, first of all, this is a tech presentation, so I’m sure you expected to hear the word AI at least a few dozen times.

One of the challenges is that people are trying to figure out how to use AI, how to use it well, how to implement it, and where they’ll get ROI.

So what I’m going to highlight is a little of my methodology and a few tips. I call this practical implementations of AI.

I break these things into crawl, walk, and run use cases. It helps me get my mind around it.

And hopefully it’ll help me articulate this clearly as part of the presentation today.

Generally speaking, when I’m talking about a crawl use case, it’s one that requires no setup. It’s just available, and users can use it.

How someone uses it today may be different from how they use it tomorrow. How one department uses it might be different too. Simply making AI available and letting users work with it can be very valuable.

So when I say crawl use cases, they can be just as valuable as walk or run use cases. The difference is that they don’t require setup.

They can extract insights from data, help you find what you’re looking for, or answer a question.

Then we’ll talk about walk use cases, where you can do a little setup. You might say, “I want to make a knowledge base for this project,” or “I want to enrich my data.”

We’ve taken all these images in the field, but now I want to know what those images are. I want to be able to search, sort, and find similar images, and do things like that.

Those are what I would call walk use cases. Run use cases are where you’re really starting to lean into something more agentic, not to replace people, but to improve their work or reduce the time it takes to do certain tasks.

So we’ll talk about some of that here today.

A couple of crawl use cases, real quick: you’ve got the ability to ask questions of documents. I’m going to pull up this PDF file from my file system.

And I will start asking questions of this file.

Before I click “Ask a Document,” I’ll point your attention to “Send to Studio Session.” I think that was one of the questions in the Q&A. Yes, this integrates with Studio Session.

This is where that shows up. You can send a PDF to Studio Session.

In this case, I’m going to choose “Ask a Document,” but I wanted to pull up the file first so you could see the type of file I’m working from.

In this case, it’s a specification sheet. My user right-clicked on the file, selected “Ask a Document,” and can begin typing questions.

I might ask, “Tell me about the trusses,” or some other question, and get a response.

So this is going to go through this document it’s going to identify anything that can about trusses and it’s going to provide me with a response.

So this is telling me some details about floor trusses and roof trusses, how far on center they must be, some of the key requirements associated with the trusses within this, as well as sources showing where in the document it found this information.

So again, simple single-document Q&A.

Now you might have multiple files or folders that you want to ask a question of, or maybe you just want to run a search and want Egnyte to help you find what you’re looking for, and you don’t even know where it is.

So if I pull this up, you can do this in the browser or on the mobile device or in different areas as well.

I’m pulling this up in the desktop app because a lot of times users aren’t always working in the browser with Egnyte. They’ve got their mapped drive and the desktop app running on their machine.

And maybe I say, bids for airport project.

I could probably actually not even fix that and it would figure it out but I’ll go ahead and fix it just for practical purposes here.

So I will say that is one of the things I like about AI is when I make typos it usually figures out what the heck this dummy is trying to ask.

But first, what you’ll see here are typical search-type results. These are based on keywords. This has the word project in it, the word airport in it, and the words in these documents get shown here. This has bid in it.

But then we’ve got this AI overview where it’s trying to understand what this person is actually asking or after, and then it’s providing me with a result.

So this is telling me about a particular airport project, that there’s an RFP out for it, and some of the key aspects associated with bidders. And it’s giving me the detail and the sources of where it found that.

Right, so again, another crawl use case. These are just tools that are available to help you accomplish more using AI. You don’t need to set anything up.

Now the next thing that I’ll highlight here is a bit of a walk-type use case, or maybe the framework for one. So you can do a couple of things.

You can create knowledge bases. When you’re creating a knowledge base, we’re doing some advanced indexing and chunking of the data within that knowledge base. We’re expecting that you might ask questions of that knowledge base. So we’re effectively preparing the data into a RAG and agentic React architecture that sits underneath the file system.

So you can turn folders into knowledge bases and effectively enrich the data there. So maybe for different projects, for your SOPs, or for your proposals, or whatever the case might be, you can do that.

Another thing that you can do is build workflows. So here’s a couple workflow engines that I’ve built.

So in one, I’ve built a little workflow with my investment analyst where, when a new opportunity comes and hits our desk, I’m creating a preliminary investment recommendation through AI and sending it to the investment analyst team for review.

And if it passes their review by at least two of those analysts it goes for executive approval. And then if it’s approved then it moves forward right?

So this is an example of a workflow that I’ve built around a specific set of steps that users need to take. So I’m helping prevent the need to manage this externally to Egnyte and helping automate and push these steps forward when you’ve got, in this case, new investment opportunities.

This other one here is for image analysis.

So this is an example that overlays or plays nicely with that smart upload folder where, basically, in my projects folder, any of these image types, when they get added anywhere under projects, I’m running this AI prompt to extract insight from the image.

Like what is this image of? What are some of the objects in this image? What project stage is this associated with? What other context can you offer me associated with this particular image?

And so when I come back to my folder structure and take you into one of these folders with photos, the metadata is associated with all of these.

Did I click? Sorry I must have double clicked there.

We are live folks.

I’m not quite sure I’m got seems to be hanging in the browser. Let me see if I can just refresh this push this forward. Okay so here we go.

Yeah I don’t know what was going on with that. But what you’ll notice here is that I’ve got this metadata associated with these images.

So here’s an image that I just took this afternoon and uploaded from my phone just five minutes before this demo started. This is what I see out my window here: a couple dog toys, lemon tree, cactus, etc.

But you’ll notice that it’s got these tags associated with it. So this data is being enriched with details about what it is, as well as the project, the address, and some of these other details associated with this particular location.

Now the last thing that I’ve got a couple minutes of time to spend on is a couple of those run-type use cases.

What I would say is run use cases are going to have to be specific to you. These are a couple ideas, some common things.

And we’ve actually kind of built Egnyte to help with things like a specification analyst to help with the proposal coordinator to help with you know some of these different types of things effectively giving you templates of use cases that we found to be common across you know kind of the industry and then allowing you to modify the template for your own kind of usage.

So let me give you just a couple of examples here.

So if I go to agents I you’ll see I’ve got a proposal coordinator agent I’ve got a RFP bid leveling agent right? The sky’s the limit with this stuff really.

What I’ll do in this particular case I’ll show you through a workflow for an RFP bid leveling agent right?

But I can come here I can find my files I’ve told this agent that I’m going to provide it with an RFP and with bid documents.

And so if I click into my project here and find my bid documents I can add the bids that came in for this particular project. And then I can click here and add the RFP.

Just type RFP there.

And so this is the RFP for this for those particular bids. So I’ve given it proposals and the RFP and I’m going to go ahead and hit send.

So effectively what this is going to do is this is going to analyze each of those proposals as it compares to the RFP.

It’s going to identify in key areas you know how well it lines to the requirements laid out in the RFP.

It’s going to identify various kind of risk that might exist in any of those you know bids. And then it’s effectively going to grade them on a scale one to and compare them to one another and then offer a human kind of analyst some advice for next steps that they can take right?

Maybe you know you could throw out these couple of bids they don’t match maybe you know maybe clarify this point or that point on this particular bid before considering it right? Things like that.

So in this particular case it’s telling me hey this particular proposal technical steps there you know specs there’s a medium risk. There’s some kind of gap in terms of what it explicitly states right?

So maybe an opportunity for us to make sure we clarify before moving forward and so forth.

And here’s the next proposal. This has low risk across the board. So this appears to be a good you know match and so forth.

And then here now it’s given a grade for each and then a total score out of and then an executive summary of kind of potential next steps to take.

And again this is one example where I’m the one creating the RFP and receiving bids but you could imagine the reverse right? Helping you create the proposal to you know match the RFP and to win the bid in the first place right?

Or again really the sky’s the limit with a lot of this kind of AI stuff so to speak.

But wanted to start with a couple of practical use cases and see if I can get the juices flowing a little bit.

Kelly Paletta: Right. Well it certainly does for me as somebody that writes proposals. I mean so we’re talking about all of this in the context of scenarios that apply to architectural firms engineering and construction. But every business practically every business is in the business of generating RFPs or responding to them with proposals or if you’re in the nonprofit world it’s grants and applications.

We all have SOPs we all have you know what I’m saying are things that apply you know pretty universally.

I want to change gears a little bit in the interest of time and get Jeff and Dan to speak to this because one of the things that’s really worked well for eXp is that Egnyte has a process that’s pretty easy to kind of try it before you know to experience how this works and to do a little bit of exploration before you make a commitment.

And maybe Jeff I’ll start with you. Can you talk a little bit about what the experience has been when a client when it looks like it might be a solution? Maybe we have a demo a proof of concept a working session? What are your thoughts? What’s the experience been Jeff?

Jeff Shaflik: Many that have looked at the solution it’s nice to see this beautiful presentation that Kyle and you put on but to actually start using it in the real world in your own environment is what is going to you know help you decide on if it’s a good solution for you.

And most people use similar applications but it’s also good just to test all the applications that you have and we want to make sure it’s a good fit for your business.

So to do the demo it’s pretty quick. I mean you can reach out to myself or your primary consultant or Kelly.

Kelly Paletta: If you’re not already an EXP Technical client you can connect with me and I can coordinate but I’m sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt.

Jeff Shaflik: No no that’s correct. And we can get you set up in 15 minutes something like that and get you kind of a tutorial on how to use it.

And then you can start putting real projects in and testing it out.

Kelly Paletta: And you know maybe more specifically Egnyte is very generous or maybe generous isn’t the right word but they have a demo or a trial license process that works really well where we can actually migrate data correct?

And Dan it looks like you’re coming off. You wanted to speak to that I think.

Dan Burke: Right. We understand that this has changed you know to Jeff’s point we want to make sure that everybody has the ability to get their hands on it.

So yeah we have a flexibility we have a variety of different plans that you can use with different features. Kyle showed some of the project stuff and AI.

And so we want to give people the ability to use the tools and make sure that they feel comfortable with it.

And then a lot of times what will happen is they’ll identify a small group of folks move a project or two in get them using that go home work remotely on it you know really vet the thing out.

And then once they’re ready to move forward we can keep that trial domain and convert it into production.

And then start we’ve got tools to help migrate data. Of course that’s what BXP specializes in but we’ve got built in tools to help with those migrations including you know SharePoint and a variety of those things.

So we make it easy to both try and to cut over.

Kelly Paletta: And just to be clear when you say trial license you mean there’s no cost for that trial license for a limited period?

Dan Burke: Correct. Yeah our default I mean I’ll say it out loud our default is a couple of weeks but we do tend you know by the time everyone gets their hands on it and they start using it everybody says hey can I use it for another week or so whatever that’s fine.

We can accommodate those sorts of requests.

Kelly Paletta: That eliminates a lot of the uncertainty. And I think Kyle you were talking about maybe having like workflow sort of brainstorming sessions or that kind of exploration.

Kyle Wallstedt: You know look I well you can approach this in a lot of different ways right? You know one thing that I’ve seen be successful for folks is what I like to refer to as like a workshop right?

Where instead of just doing an hour long demo with Egnyte or a half an hour long demo with Egnyte and then leaving and then oh here let me try this in a trial et cetera.

You know the format for these workshops you know that I’m kind of thinking of and obviously this is all open and flexible but you know typically it’s all right five ten minute you know quick overall kind of pitch get some of the juices flowing in terms of hey here’s some of the things that are possible that we’re hearing.

Then let’s start talking about your data your use cases some of the challenges that you have finding documents some of the processes that you have.

I love to do them in person where possible but generally like whiteboard: hey let’s get use cases for your business written down here.

And then let’s actually use the remaining time to build two or three of these right? So that you actually come and leave with some working prototypes to you know accomplish some of the use cases for your business.

And then usually that leaves us with some next steps to work with you through to the other seven you know items that we didn’t kind of get to in that first meeting right?

But you know it really I think kind of breaks down the barrier of entry right? This stuff doesn’t need to be so you know or I guess it feels intangible sometimes.

And then kind of making it tangible is you know really the goal that I often have with a lot of those workshops.

Kelly Paletta: It’s tangible when people see their own processes or their own data in that environment.

Dan Burke: I think it’s also helpful not to I don’t want to belabor the point but about the AI stuff you know what we find is that a lot of organizations really don’t even know where to get started.

There are so many tools out there you know it feels like you’re throwing you know a dart into the darkness right? And maybe you’ll hit something and it’s kind of nice to have some very specific tools AI tools built to leverage your data your individual customer data so you can create some agents or create some knowledge bases.

And you know happy to work with you Kelly and Jeff Kyle to put on maybe a follow up session so people have some other questions about that.

Kelly Paletta: Speaking of questions we’ve got like two minutes and I want to be respectful of everyone’s time.

We have hit several of the questions kind of in line very adeptly.

Are there any in the list? It looks like Kyle has addressed each of them either during the presentation or sent a note directly to each of those.

So I think that knocks off all the questions.

There was one that came up earlier I think about integration with Claude and other AI tools.

Kyle or Dan do you want to speak to that at all?

Kyle Wallstedt: Yeah I mean the answer is yes.

We Egnyte provides an MCP server so you can add Egnyte as a connector to something like a Claude or a GPT and things like that. And it’s going to respect all of your permissions and things.

It’s also got tools that you can provide that reach far beyond just being a file system right?

So Claude can actually use our advanced search capabilities. It can take advantage of some of the rag and React you know architecture that we’ve built on our side to enrich that data right?

And kind of make the experience even better.

I’ll say we’re also an MCP client ourselves meaning you can add non Egnyte sources like your email or your Slack or your Procore or different environments to the AI within Egnyte.

So when you’re using Egnyte’s AI of course it can pull and access the files in Egnyte but you can actually connect non Egnyte repositories as well just like you would be able to in Claude.

Kelly Paletta: Awesome. That might be a next session or maybe a personalized specific session for a client.

I would say for those of you that are in attendance if you have questions if you want to schedule a workshop or a demonstration or migrate some of your data you can connect directly with me.

Everyone has my contact information. Or if you’re an EXP Technical client you can connect with your primary consultant and we can coordinate that demo process.

I want to thank all of our panelists for joining us today. Kyle especially thank you so much. Dan thank you as well.

And Jeff.

Dan I’m going to give the last word to you. We’ve got I think about seconds here.

Dan Burke: Yeah great. I know sometimes you go along we wanted to make sure that we’re providing everybody with something really tangible understand what the solution looks like.

If you’ve got any questions at all EXP is a fantastic partner. They do a ton of work with us and reach out to them. They will loop in Kyle and myself.

We’ve got subject matter experts all over. So even if you’re not in AEC as you said Kelly you might be in life sciences or whatever it is we’ve got all sorts of expertise and we can help.

Kelly Paletta: Perfect. Thanks. I think that’s a great last word.

Thank you all for attending. And I think we’ll call it good today. So thank you again and we’ll see you all soon.

Kyle Wallstedt: Good deal. Thank you very much.