Agentic AI for Next Generation AEC Workflows

This session will be presented by Greg Schleusner, AIA, owner of 2611 Labs, former Principal Director of Design Technology at HOK, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Lightweight laptops with large, unified memory pools have crossed an important threshold: they can now run capable AI assistants locally. For AEC professionals, this creates something fundamentally different from a chatbot or copilot that waits for prompts and returns suggestions. A local assistant can remain connected to design tools, carry out multi-step assignments in the background, and even create new utilities when existing tools fall short all without an internet connection or sending project data to the cloud. This session will demonstrate the power of such an assistant by combining state-of-the-art models, tool integrations, workflows, and agent harnesses into a practical working example of the power of one machine.  It will also examine the larger shift this makes possible: as models and inference software improve, the hardware you can buy today, becomes increasingly capable. We are only beginning to understand what becomes possible when every practitioner can have a private, persistent, and extensible AI collaborator working alongside them.