BuiltWorlds US Summit 2021 Sessions: Josh Kanner, Founder & CEO, Newmetrix

Imagine if you could predict which 20% of your projects are about to experience 80% of your incidents in the following week so you could head those problems off before they happen. That is the aim of Boston-based startup, Newmetrix. In this BuiltWorlds Sessions episode from our 2021 Summit, we had the opportunity to meet Josh Kanner, CEO and Co-Founder of Newmetrix and here is reflections on how artificial intelligence in construction has changed and is continuing to change the way we are able to monitor our projects at an enterprise level, as the industry moves through three waves of data analytics: IoT-enabled data collection, cloud-enabled object recognition, AI-fueled predictive analytics.

With a long history in the industry, Kanner was co-founder and coo of Vela Systems, a company that deserves significant credit for bringing Building Models from the office into the field, during a period when iPads were first debuting.  By extension, Kanner and his team at Vela deserve significant credit for the current wave of cloud-based, mobile systems that are gaining dominance in project management in the industry. Having pioneered the use of modeling information in the field, Kanner then went on to become one of the very early leaders in the field of AI in construction, founding Newmetrix in 2014. While claims of being able to leverage artificial intelligence have become almost commonplace in the industry’s software today, in 2014 the idea of leveraging machine learning to identify safety issues on projects was pretty fresh.

More recently, Newmetrix rebranded from the name Smartvid. According to the firm’s own release, the move was inspired, in part, by a transition from one of being able to spot safety issues automatically on a project to “the next frontier” of also being able to predict safety issues. Additionally, the firm announcement indicated the addition of several new customers, including The Boldt Company, NMCN, and Lovino.

In this Session, here Kanner’s thoughts on how the industry is “wakening up” to the possibilities of capturing more data than ever, analyzing that data better than ever, and increasingly performing predictive analysis of that data.  Hear his thoughts on what AI is and how it works best for the industry.