Building the Bridge: From Field Reality to Construction Tech Innovation with Erin Khan

Rishi Srivastava (00:00)
Welcome to Finance at the JobSite, the podcast where construction finance meets the field. I’m your host Rishi Srivastava, founder of Being Human. In each episode, I sit down with construction CFOs, controllers, owners, project managers, IT leaders, ERP consultants, and industry experts to uncover how they connect the back office with the field, choose and implement technology, manage cash flow, and drive profitable projects.

Whether you are running the numbers, leading the team, or designing the systems that keep projects moving, this is your place to learn what’s working, what’s broken, and what’s next in construction finance.

Rishi Srivastava (00:37)
Today, our guest is Erin Khan. Erin welcome.

Erin Khan (00:40)
Thanks for watching, great to be here.

Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
First section here is on career and vision. From Morley builders to Suffolk to your own consulting firm, what moment made you realize construction tech needed more bridge builders between field realities and innovation strategy?

Erin Khan (00:57)
Yeah, that’s a really good way to kick off.

What I want to say for my experience and probably a few others as well, it wasn’t really any one specific moment that kind of led me to say like, hey, we need more people doing this bridge building between the kind of two worlds, right, of construction and tech. But it was just rather a gradual building of like inspiration and passion and I seeing these opportunities really and just having to chase it. So

For me, it was, I see a way that I can connect PDFs to what we’re doing in the field through a digital platform or taking it a step further. Maybe if we test out these tech tools and run these pilots, we can transform our operational processes if we get people to use it. And it was just kind of spreading that, I guess, that excitement naturally that just kind of came up for me for process improvement. So many moments all put together, but

I feel like a lot of professionals who are in a similar vein of construction and AEC innovation, we kind of just live it and look back and say, yeah, that’s kind of how it happens. And I just noticed my cat is in the background, which I apologize for, but hopefully it will be exciting to see on the recording. So yeah, a good way to kick off the discussion for today.

Rishi Srivastava (02:16)
Yeah, I mean, when we started Beiing human, you were among the first few people who really gave us, you know, listening. So thank you for that.

Erin Khan (02:25)
Yeah, so I mean, for me too, and a lot of other, I would say good innovation professionals, that’s the first step, right, is to listen and see what’s out there and evaluate because if you don’t pay attention, you’ll never know, right? So glad I had my listening ears and eyes on when we first connected.

Rishi Srivastava (02:44)
Yep. Based on your experience from GC ops to independent consulting, what problem do contractors consistently underestimate when modernizing finance and field workforce?

Erin Khan (02:56)
Yeah, so the one that I see teams consistently come back to, and this is something that is beyond just the finance workflow itself as well, it’s training and implementation. So the training piece, like whatever tool or system you’re using, it doesn’t matter how great it is or how wonderful it works if nobody is actually.

hands on keyboard or hands on tablet, mobile phone, whatever, putting the inputs in properly. So garbage in garbage out. If the people at the end of the or I guess at the start of the workflow don’t know how to actually use the tool properly, you’re not going to get the benefit out of it. So that’s one of the problems when it comes to like updating your tech stack or updating how you’re doing your workflows, whether it’s finance or anything else that typically becomes the

point and it gets really frustrating for a lot of construction companies to get that far to get a good tool and it just doesn’t stick. So they don’t realize the full optimization of what they thought they would get. So that training and implementation piece, which is really a people problem, is one of the most difficult things to attack.

Rishi Srivastava (04:08)
Last time I was talking to a contractor and he was saying that, you know, a lot times the software have their own view of how the operations or finance need to happen. It’s very easy for the contractors to just kind of marry the software and try to change everything in their workflow and match the software’s need.

Erin Khan (04:27)
Yeah, it’s interesting. So I think there’s a good

homework exercise that needs to be done of your process evaluation. So if there’s something that’s really important to your process that is there for a specific reason, you probably don’t want to change that. Maybe it’s something that’s unique to your company’s culture or something that you you guys specifically provide that’s a competitive advantage. You don’t necessarily want to get rid of that to like put in a new software platform that might overwrite that value. So yeah, there’s always a bit of a balance to be had when you’re looking at

you know, process elimination or rework versus enhancement.

Rishi Srivastava (05:04)
Yeah. For a mid-market contractor, less than $100 million, what’s the pragmatic first 90 days of a finance and ops digitization plan? What goes first? What waits?

Erin Khan (05:17)
Yeah, yeah, so like mid market size.

From my perspective, and this is maybe going a little bit early in the process, but I want to touch on it because it’s so important. First 90 days, maybe it’s a little bit less than that, but around that timeline, it should be defining the problem. So what I mean by that is we have a team, they want to update something, they’re ready to change and build some strategy, and they don’t understand what problems

and

they’re trying to solve or why. So unless you’re starting there and really getting the buy in both from your end users and leadership and everybody who’s involved along the way, you’re not going to be able to strategically move forward from that point, right? Or you might end up wasting your time. So it’s worth taking that time to evaluate exactly what it is that you want to tackle, because some of these solutions

And digitization, like a whole strategy, takes quite a bit of time to execute effectively. So we’re talking years here, right? So you want to take that time to really understand what is that problem that you’re tackling and why. Then you can kind of move, hopefully easily, along into that actual execution phase of, all right, now that we know exactly what we’re pinpointing, let’s find the most relevant things that will help us execute that strategy and start that evaluation testing selection.

Rishi Srivastava (06:45)
Yeah, like buying from the field. A lot of it’s tough. The tools got a strong view on how things need to be done. The field’s doing something really different right now. It’s hard to get the buyin

Erin Khan (06:58)
Yeah, yeah, typically best approaches are bringing, you know, bottom up and top down together. So you’re getting the best of both worlds. Not easy to do, but yeah, I always say like innovation is a little bit of an art form with getting it just right.

Rishi Srivastava (07:13)
Yeah, and people like you, you are so valuable to this industry.

Erin Khan (07:17)
Well, I try. Yeah,

just a huge, huge construction tech nerd. So good to be here.

Rishi Srivastava (07:24)
Looking five years out, what single capability will define top quartile construction finance leaders and how should they build it now?

Erin Khan (07:33)
Yeah, so I have the type of perspective at this point that it’s really not about any specific tech tool or process really. It’s definitely.

again, in my experience at this point about the people. So I think the call for finance leaders is to develop their capability and really, really try to improve this of their ability to influence good change effectively in their organizations. So what does that mean? It means ⁓ making sure that the culture of everybody who’s in the organization can readily adopt and adapt to all these new tools that are coming out. So, you

We see, or at least I see, every week, maybe even every day, a new tech capability, a new finance capability, something that is being launched or introduced. And we have to be able to move so fast, even if we’re a large organization, to be able to take advantage of that. So where the linchpin is really in effectively being able to evolve rapidly is our people.

So finance leaders and other leaders as well, I think it really comes down to their ability to make that strategic decision. Like, OK, we need to move this direction quickly and then also in tandem with that, be able to influence all of the people who need to follow that to make it successful as well. So it comes down to that culture influence being a leader. Like, yes, we want to be innovative and adaptive and kind of bringing that along, especially in this industry, where a lot of folks tend to be kind of

in like the old traditional ways that we’ve kind of always done things.

Rishi Srivastava (09:13)
seen one story where the contractor who tried to do multiple changes at once tried to implement an ERP and another tool at the same time and the implementation failed for both of them.

Erin Khan (09:25)
That would be rough. Yeah. Yeah, you get spread too

thin, too fast, and or it’s too much for people to handle at once and they just reject it. It’s too much change all at once. So yeah, it doesn’t surprise me too much to hear those types of stories. But yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (09:41)
Yeah, the rate of change has to be properly calibrated. The next section here, Erin is on operations, change, and adoption. At Suffolk, what miserable improvements did you see when process and tech were deployed together?

Erin Khan (09:56)
Yeah, yeah, throwback to the construction solutions team, ⁓ great experience at Suffolk. So this without, you with the time that we have here today, there’s a lot we can get into, but there are so many different processes that happen in construction. And with, you know, having the ability to run multiple pilots and kind of assessing how each technology when deployed ⁓ for that process,

We kind of saw benefits across the board, right? Depending on what it is. if it’s, let’s say, you know, for the purposes of this, this topic, like financial tool that helps, maybe it’s managing change orders, the ROI or the benefits really, it’s the value on saving the team’s time on having to, you know, maybe they don’t have to chase down data. They just have it. There’s also some qualitative improvements as well that you see that are maybe a little less measurable.

but maybe way more important. So transparency with your owner and your client on costs, that’s huge, right? So you’re building relationships, you’re building trust through the deployment of this technology that’s giving you a way to communicate in a way you haven’t before. So that all, you know, with even with like, you know, the hard time savings plus this qualitative piece, it all comes together with just improving the overall experience and ability to be more predictable.

builder in general so yeah without going into too much more detail

Rishi Srivastava (11:21)
Any KPIs you can remember or tell us?

Erin Khan (11:25)
Geez, well, it kind of depends on like the process you’re targeting, right? So again, to kind of pull on the change order example, are you identifying them early? How long does it take to actually close them out? Are you preventing change orders? Maybe there’s something that helps flag some issues earlier on that is helping you to reduce the amount of, you know, changes on your job over time. And you can see those trends maybe on a longer term scale. You know, is the client replying

reporting in that they’re happy with their monthly meeting or their monthly review of the costs of the project. Are they a repeat client? Did they say anything specific? So yeah, there’s a lot more. How long is it actually taking the team to process the paperwork? Does it have an automatic approvals process? How much time has that saved versus manually routing a document around for review and approval?

So those are some of the, you know, maybe KPIs that you might track for that specific process. But yeah, again, without going into a ton of stuff, that’s kind of what it might be like.

Rishi Srivastava (12:29)
Change management, what cadence, training, office hours, champions, actually drives adoption on job sites versus one-off workshops.

Erin Khan (12:39)
Yeah, this is a good question. So you mentioned it there, champions, your innovation champions on your job site. So that’s pretty much anyone who’s on the team, who’s gung ho about new ways of working. They’re going to pick up the new shiny thing and try it and figure out how to make it work. They’re also going to talk to everybody else on their team like, hey, so and so check this out. This saved me five hours and I got to go home on time today. So they’ll spread.

you know, excitement about the tools naturally those innovation champions on the job site. I think it’s also kind of a call to action to of innovation management professionals to actually go to the job site and walk and talk to people and do a job walk, just observe what’s going on. Because when you’re in there in person, you also start to get different ideas and come up with better, better ways to connect with the individuals who

actually going to be using the tools, right? So that’s huge. We already talked about field buy-in as well, so I harp on that, but that’s also very important with driving adoption, like actually on the job site.

Rishi Srivastava (13:45)
You’ve implemented tools like Bluebeam and BIM 360. What won superintendent buy in and what absolutely didn’t?

Erin Khan (13:54)
Yeah, I love this question. it’s kind of getting at, you implement all these tools, what makes or breaks implementation with supers, right? So what it really boils down to, did it make their day better? That’s it. Did it improve something about their day? And to take it a step further, kind of tying into what actually drives adoption in the field, like, is it something that they can

Rishi Srivastava (14:04)
Mm-hmm.

Erin Khan (14:20)
not live without for their next project. So those are kind of the two things. So to expand that a little bit more, did it make their day better? What does that mean? So did it save them time? Did it make something easier? Did they realize, ⁓ know, I actually, just, it’s all in the system. I don’t actually have to go dig something up or I can easily find what I need.

This can be, you know, example of like using a new delivery management app. So this used to be a whiteboard, right? When I was on the site, you had a whiteboard, you wrote down all your deliveries on the whiteboard and you hoped that everything showed up exactly as it should. it, you know, it sometimes doesn’t, a lot of the times doesn’t. And then you end up chasing a lot of people down with calls and emails and literally running around the job site, trying to find things. So with new technology solutions,

that helps automate a lot of the reminders, the notices tells you who’s arriving when and where and what’s on the truck. Can we connect that to a submittal and check it in automatically and verify that the materials are there and it’s exactly what we approved. So something like that actually made it possible for a team on a mega project to be able to effectively handle delivery management without having to just have a whole dedicated staff just to managing a whiteboard.

which sounds crazy but that’s how that’s how it was done. So they didn’t want to do another project without that digital tool that kind of helps solve that. So is it making their day better? Are they going to bring that to their next project because they just have to have it?

Rishi Srivastava (15:50)
And the cost of change should always be measured against the amount of benefit. A small benefit is just usually not enough to justify change. It has to be significant enough. Pilot to scale. What criteria prove a site pilot is ready for company-wide rollout beyond the team

likes it.

Erin Khan (16:15)
Yeah, so this is so much fun. like, go deep on this too, but we were talking about KPIs and like, what’s the value of the tools that you’re deploying? So you can take those KPIs and again, hopefully you have some quantitative as well as qualitative feedback and do it, know, test it out on more job sites, right? Or more projects. And this can take some time, right? Depending on how

many things you have in your pipeline or how long you want to wait for your evaluation phase to be complete. you know, see if you’re going to get consistent results. So that’s kind of one of the key indicators. Is it consistently going to provide, you know, the same amount of value, if not more on one type of project versus another? Are different types of teams going to get the same results out of the tool or different departments that, know, depending on the use case, right? So that’s one thing is to look

for is that consistency and the reliability because you you never really know what kind of building you’re going to be building right and everything’s different in construction so something that’s versatile enough to have those results be dependable is one sticking point I would say to look for and then again kind of getting back to that qualitative piece are people just demanding it so you know we have or I guess

in my experience, you know, I’ve seen where we’ve had like 10 plus teams all demanding the same tool. And it’s for a reason, right? Because they just absolutely have to have it. They usually find some way to get it, whether or not it’s, you know, through official channels or maybe it’s just through something that the project is specifically getting. So, they’ll find a way to get it. So if the demand is there to and there’s word of mouth and people are also consistently asking for it, that’s a good indicator that, this thing’s not

going

to go away and we might as well take a serious look at making that enterprise.

Rishi Srivastava (18:08)
Next section is on data integrations and risk. Data model and ownership. How should CFOs think about APIs, exports, and vendor lock-in before they sign in? Any must have MSA or SOW clauses?

Erin Khan (18:24)
Geez, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this one, honestly, because you’ve been deep into that, I think to a level of detail that I haven’t been.

Trying to think. let’s see. Security is always huge. That’s kind of a no brainer, but I’ll say it anyway. Like who owns your data? Where is it stored? Who has access to it? If something goes wrong, like we, think we recently had an AWS outage. Like what happens? What’s the backup look like? So a lot of the like cyber security, like the more IT security types of

questions are ever more important now, especially with the advent of AI in the industry. So I’ll just put that out there. There’s also things like, know, renewals, what’s your renewal period? What’s the structure? Are you going to, you know, include new feature developments automatically? Or, you know, you kind of want to hope you’re not going to get nickels and dimes later on to get access to a new thing. If you’re an enterprise customer or something like that. What’s

the pricing model? Are you locked into that? Like, do you have a good estimate of what that’s going to be projected for the length of your contract? So that’s just me brain dumping. But yeah, that’s a few things top of mind that teams and leadership should really think about.

Rishi Srivastava (19:39)
Yeah, you get did say a lot of good things. One thing I want to say is, you know, integration among tools writing from one tool to another tool is. Very difficult a lot of times because the tool that you’re going to write into, let’s say software platform, you know it has all the requirements and the tool that is trying to write on on that other tool is usually has a lot of difficulty and we we got a.

be clearly able to understand how the write looks from one tool to another when you’re integrating systems. It’s usually very easy.

Erin Khan (20:16)
Yeah, 100 percent. Great insight. Yeah, that’s why I’m like, well, I think I want to hear Rishi’s thoughts on that, but maybe another another episode or people can reach out, I guess.

Rishi Srivastava (20:28)
The next question is vendor selection. Your red flag checklist. What’s burned teams before you want tolerate again?

Erin Khan (20:38)
boy, yeah, what says don’t go with this solution? So, I mean, there’s the typical things, right? If they’re unresponsive or if, you know, maybe you’re not able to get access to a demo or typical things. What else? Is the team, you know, maybe…

Gosh, I keep coming back to like responsiveness. Like, do they have training ready? Are they going to support you? Those are some red flags because you will have people who will call and say, hey, like I have this issue. Who do I go to? And you don’t want that to always be maybe it’s I.T., maybe maybe it’s the CFO. I don’t know. So you need somebody else from the team to support on that. So so I come immediately back to support and accessibility. So that is a huge one.

I think, I guess a green flag in comparison would be, they willing to take your ideas and suggestions into consideration? Do they have a pipeline of developments? There are some other, I would say maybe housekeeping things as well. Is the company fairly strong? Like you don’t necessarily want to go with a solution that might be out of business in the next month, right? So a couple things to evaluate.

there.

I generally find though, like if you do a pretty good job of just structuring your testing process and you do like a typical thing of like, let’s go through a sandbox, let’s do a demo, let’s bring our key people in to talk to the team and understand these requirements. It usually can be okay. And always recommend a pilot, right? So the beauty of pilots, you pay for the

pilot, you get some sort of a benefit and a huge learning opportunity, right? So it’s just a huge win-win to do those early pilots regardless. And like some red flags will look different for different companies as well. So keep that in mind. Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (22:31)
Yeah,

construction generally has been really strongly sales driven kind of, uh, you know, industry where at least in software, you know, there’s all these organizations that have so much, uh, so many salespeople, you know, similar to the size of product dev. So it’s kind of, makes me think about, uh, you know, uh, this industry a little bit differently, you know, compared to a marketing driven industry. What is your take on that?

Erin Khan (22:59)
Yeah, gosh, so I think what happens a lot is especially from teams that maybe aren’t from construction or industry, they’re…

I guess, unfortunately, like shocked or surprised with just how long the sales cycles are. And then it’s like, well, I guess we need to add more sales to salespeople to the team to kind of make up for that. But it maybe isn’t the exact right approach. So, yeah, AEC construction specifically as well is a bit of a different a different game. Right. So you have to adjust for that. And I think, you know, having the relationships and

Rishi Srivastava (23:12)
Mm-hmm.

Erin Khan (23:33)
building those relationships again is huge. And you’re not necessarily going to get those quality relationships if you’re focusing on quantity out of the gate. Not to say you shouldn’t scale, but I think there’s a strategic time and place for that. Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (23:46)
Yeah. When ERPs don’t match how teams work, what’s the playbook? Customize, integrate, or replace? And how do you decide?

Erin Khan (23:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

So ideally you’ve done a ton of homework on the front end and you don’t end up with a solution that is gonna go against what you’re trying to do. So hopefully that doesn’t happen. But if you do end up in a situation where, you know, the software, the tech, it is causing friction. It’s not actually doing what your teams needed to do. And they’re finding all sorts of funky workarounds. I’ve seen that happen a lot. I think it comes down to the company’s like size, resources.

And then their, you know, their capabilities, right? So if it’s a large organization, maybe they have some internal development resources, maybe they can make their own little tool that kind of supplements where the gaps are in that ERP. If it’s maybe a more mid-sized company and they do like the tool overall and they don’t necessarily have another way of solving the issue, I would say that’s a great opportunity to, you know, work with the

provider and see what they can customize and again or integrate. But sometimes you might just need to scrap it. Maybe it just doesn’t work out. It’s causing too much friction and too many challenges to get through. And that might be a good indicator of when it’s time to find something new. So yeah, it really, really depends.

What is interesting though, one thought on this that’s a bit like future looking, but maybe not because like things change so fast, but there’s more and more like open source code solutions out there that are, you know, quote unquote easy, but you don’t necessarily need to be, you know, an expert software developer to make a solution. But with these open code solutions, you can just spin up something that’s very customized to you that goes

exactly to the workflows you want to want to do. So I think something that we’re going to see in the future is not necessarily internal, you know, build or buy, but rather like a crowdsourced and personalized customized software dev to each individual’s processes, which might get chaotic, but we’ll see. We’ll see what happens.

Rishi Srivastava (26:02)
Yeah, it’s definitely software world is changing so fast.

thing we know is that tomorrow is not going to be the same as today.

The next section here is on finance, AI, and KPIs. Where is AI today reliable for construction finance? Invoices, coding, reconciliation, and where do you still insist on human in the loop?

Erin Khan (26:24)
Okay, so.

Yeah, great one. So I think finance is actually a perfect application for AI in a lot of ways. I think where AI shines and is reliable and something that we should be looking at to automate matching numbers to other numbers, right? That is a task that people like humans, some poor soul sitting at a desk for hours and hours and hours a day

Rishi Srivastava (26:46)
Hmm.

Erin Khan (26:55)
It’s just looking at one document. Okay, it’s this number.

looking at another document, OK, it’s also this number. And then they can click a button and move on. Like that is that’s crazy to me. So it’s the perfect application of AI that can also do that much faster, more accurate and a higher volume than a human can ever do. Right. So those types of tasks, those back end tasks that are just really busy work, it doesn’t take much mental computing from a human.

Rishi Srivastava (27:02)
Finish me.

Erin Khan (27:24)
That’s absolutely perfect use case where AI is super reliable. And we have the accuracy data as well. So we can see that and get that actual number. So there’s a lot of good training that’s gone into it. Where we still need a human in the loop, and I don’t think this will ever really go away. Knock on wood, it does never really go away because it’ll be scary. it’s when we need to make some sort of

key, like strategic decision. And maybe it’s something involving ethics or a relationship or something in the human connection that no type of bot or computer AI can ever really understand or simulate. So, you know, if it’s well, well, this is this thing is late, maybe like, do we just send out blast notices and say, Hey, you’re late, you know, you’ve done, you

you’re

on thin ice here with us, blah, blah. Or do you actually understand some context behind what’s going on and say, oh, hey, subcontractor, see this invoice is blah, blah, blah. And we know that this specific situation is happening that might be holding up any sort of documentation or payments or whatever it is. There’s all sorts of stuff that come up. But a human needs to be able to understand that context and then be able to make a decision on, here’s how we should communicate with this party or here.

we should make this decision to maybe send or don’t send something or maybe we adjust the language like this or maybe it’s a phone call that we need to have or maybe it’s a meeting. So it’s like again getting back to that relationship building. The other thing with human in the loop like we should be checking right so in construction the phrase that we use in the field is trust but verify. So yeah you know AI it’s reliable for some of these tasks we can trust it but we

should also be verifying, right? So it’s a tool like any other tool, which means we need to check our work. So that’s the other place too. So it’s matching numbers. Quick check. Looks good. Move on.

Rishi Srivastava (29:23)
I used to work as a chemical engineer a long time ago. There was a quote, you don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect.

Erin Khan (29:26)
wow.

ooh, okay, wow, yeah. Say that one more time. I’m like, I gotta remember that.

Rishi Srivastava (29:35)
Yeah.

You don’t get what you expect. You get what you inspect.

Erin Khan (29:42)
Okay. Right. So you have to actually look at the data in front of you. Yeah. Yeah. Love that.

Rishi Srivastava (29:50)
What

data sources are most underused in construction finance and how can CFOs turn them into early warning signals for risk or cash flow?

Erin Khan (30:00)
⁓ this is a really good one.

I, you know, I’m just going to give some thoughts on this. don’t know exactly how it, how the data might stack up, but one under, underutilized source of data is definitely voice information, conversations that happen. We do capture it sometimes. Sometimes we very specifically like maybe don’t record things or something, or maybe it’s just not public information,

But yeah, conversation. So you’ll hear all these little tidbits come up in the fields. And I’m thinking of the scenario where a superintendent goes out for their job walk and it should take maybe 30 minutes, let’s say, and they end up doing their job walk for two hours. Why is that? It’s because they get stopped like every few feet with somebody coming up to them with some really important thing that’s happening in the field.

They talk about it, they coordinate it, and then you move on. And that happens throughout just walking around the job site. But the task then on them is to capture it somehow if it warrants capturing, right? But how do you do that? So you can either be constantly typing on your phone, or sometimes some supers do get voice memos and things like that to help follow up on later on. But I don’t think we’re really analyzing

any of that data right now. So that’s an interesting one. We’ll see where that goes. But that’s just one that’s top of mind. Interesting data source that hasn’t really been tapped into. Yeah.

Yeah, because things come up and it’s like, this is running late or, you know, or maybe it’s like, hey, you know, we kind of already finished all this work. Our crew is ready to go. Maybe they’re ahead of schedule. And yeah, yeah. Anyway.

Rishi Srivastava (31:48)
So one modality where the AI is still behind is voice to text. That transcription is not super high accuracy. If it’s in a noisy environment in the job site and you try to record all this stuff, the transcriptions, models are just not yet there. And I feel like they’re going to be there in next year or two. But go ahead.

Erin Khan (32:07)
So

yeah, finish that thought, finish that thought for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (32:11)
One thing

I’m saying is that construction is always behind in adopting things. So even if they are there in year and two, we’re probably talking about another 10 years before anything’s going to happen on that source of data.

Erin Khan (32:19)
Yeah.

Maybe we’ll see. Maybe it’ll be more natural. I don’t know. I think I think speaking.

Like every, yeah, no, speaking might catch on. I’m optimistic. But the other thing I was thinking too is like the harder piece on the technical side is to also train these AIs up on like very specific industry lingo that, you know, you’re not going to, you can’t Google it. It’s not on the internet. You won’t know unless you literally ask the person like, so what is this? And then they tell you what it is. There’s a lot.

of weird you know nicknames and things too that are varied by region so that’s the other piece of it as well as just learning the industry lingo but yeah it’s an interesting one.

Rishi Srivastava (33:01)
Yeah, so

definitely for any entrepreneurs listening, know, voice to text construction specific model, you know, you’ve put a two, three years on it is a huge opportunity for any super technical people. ⁓ You don’t think so?

Erin Khan (33:14)
Maybe. Yeah, there’s a couple out there.

We’ll see where they go.

Rishi Srivastava (33:19)
So,

okay, or maybe there’s people already building it. I’m not aware of it, you know.

Erin Khan (33:22)
Yeah, yeah,

there are for sure. 100%. Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (33:26)
Yeah,

yeah, it’s very hard for us to even fathom that anything that is not getting built right now,

Erin Khan (33:33)
I

Rishi Srivastava (33:34)
The last section here is on culture and talent. As director of operations at Women in Construction Tech, what practices help underrepresented talent thrive in finance and tech roles on project teams?

Erin Khan (33:49)
Mm hmm. These are lots of lots to dig into here. But I would just say, you know, bringing together there’s a lot of things. So bring together like a collaborative, inclusive environment. Obviously, the big one feeling a part of the team is huge, but also just like believing in in in the talent that’s in front of you. Right. So does it matter somebody’s background or

they are, whether they’re, you know, women, otherwise, whatever, having some sort of like mentorship and investment in their potential really helps, you know, those individuals say like, yeah, I’m act I can absolutely do this and like, get some confidence with, you know, growing their skills and not just like surviving out there and whatever role they’re in, but strategically getting guidance and building confidence to thrive. So

So yeah, there’s like so many things that are coming to mind. like, which ones do I want to pick on? But also you might be surprised by who might be successful in a specific role.

Rishi Srivastava (34:54)
Thank you.

Erin Khan (34:54)
So yeah, there are a lot of different backgrounds out there. I want to say, know, on the innovation team that I was on, we had a bunch of different majors, right? Like, I think there’s like biology or history or psychology and accounting. yeah, so it just matters if like, you know, are you passionate? Are you going to improve something about the way we work? Are you, you know, able to connect with your

team members effectively and really listen and find solutions to problems together in a good environment. So you might be surprised by who who kind of, you know, shines. There’s so much more. mean, there’s so much more like building pipeline and encouraging more, you know, underrepresented people to see themselves in these roles. So I’ll leave it at that. We’ll be sitting here forever and ever and ever.

Rishi Srivastava (35:46)
The last question here for you, is you mentored many emerging professionals. What’s your advice for young women who want to lead innovation without being pigeonholed as the tech person?

Erin Khan (35:59)
Hmm. Yeah, gosh. So I guess a couple of things it.

may not be a necessarily bad thing to be seen as the tech person. This might be and it depends on your organization, right? It might be a good thing. Let’s say if there is no tech person and there is no department that kind of looks at it and there is no specific role that is looking at technology and innovation. So if you are starting to be seen that way, that is an opportunity to

step into that role and really demonstrate your leadership as a technology expert. So there’s a couple ways to frame it. And again, it depends on your specific environment, but it can be a huge plus, right? And if you’re passionate about going down the road of construction, tech and innovation or AEC innovation, you kind of want to develop that reputation, right? Like I’m a tech expert, I can implement

you know, strategically find ways to make our processes more efficient. And hey, ultimately, it saves the company money maybe and makes us safer. So that’s, know, an amazing benefit and value that I would argue most organizations should be looking for and should be holding on to a lot. So that’s one side of it. But let’s say maybe, you know, you want to be an innovation leader, but you don’t really want to have this label of, you

know, tech person on you, because you have all sorts of different experiences. You’re an expert in the field, you know how to do effective project management, you run quality projects that deliver on time on budget or whatever the case may be, there’s more to the story there. You can always share what you have with other team members, right? So bring, bring them along with you. So you’re not just the tech person, everybody’s the tech person. So if you

how to do something, show somebody else how to do it. So people aren’t always coming up to you. So it’s like decentralizing your knowledge on certain things. So yeah, it originates with you. You’re the leader, but there are going to be more quote unquote tech people around you that can also be effective and also be a resource to the team. So I envision, you know, maybe a future workforce where it is an I think this will happen like it.

It

is an essential skill to know how to effectively prompt an AI and chat with it and get the data that you’re looking for out of it. And we get into things like robotics, like can you operate your robot? Do you know how to feed in the data from your model so that can get the effective output that you want? All sorts of stuff and new roles that all come back to tech competency.

enhanced level of tech sophistication that will just be needed to do construction. So yeah. ⁓ Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (38:52)
Yeah, that was a

great answer. mean, sophistication, technology is getting more more sophisticated and we as people or we as women, we can’t be too far behind.

Erin Khan (39:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so.

Yeah, I know it’s going so fast too. you know, the more you can like invest in your skills as well, you know, for anyone out there, it will definitely help. I think also, you know, developing your own expertise, being unique, right? Like, don’t be afraid to stand out. For myself as a woman in construction tech, I feel like I had always naturally stood out because it’s like, there’s only one, you know, woman on the job side. Like, this is weird.

Okay, well, I guess I’ll get into this tech thing, which also seems weird and I’ll also get into this innovation management stuff, which is like making me stand out more and more. So lean into that maybe, you know? Yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (39:50)
Yeah, and ⁓ it was fantastic chatting with you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Erin Khan (39:54)
Likewise, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

Rishi Srivastava (39:56)
Thanks for listening to Finance at the Job site. If you found today’s conversation valuable, share it with a teammate and subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. You can listen on Apple podcasts or Spotify or watch on YouTube. Just search Finance at the Job site. Until next time, here is to building smarter, faster, and more profitable projects.