Earlier this year, ArchTam created and launched an interactive web-based tool called the Virtual Consultation Room, which enables our clients around the world to engage and consult interested stakeholders from their computer or mobile device, simulating the community meeting experience in a virtual environment. In addition to providing a safer environment for participation during the coronavirus pandemic, the Virtual Consultation Room creates a more flexible and inclusive approach to community engagement. This tool allows our clients to reach a wider audience — beyond those who might be able to attend traditional in-person meetings — including those with physical limitations.

In the past six months, our Virtual Consultation Room platform was visited more than one million times. We have had the pleasure of working with top clients across the globe with an outstanding, 100 percent customer satisfaction rating, including from clients such as the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy, Public Health England, the City of San Diego, Highways England, Roche, Georgia Department of Transportation, among others.

“The Virtual Room was simple and fast to deliver. It gave us an easy-to-implement solution to meet challenging and unforeseen circumstances. Yet at the same time there was the opportunity to flex the product so it better suited our needs. A big benefit for us was that it didn’t slow down the timing of the consultation, or our overall project programme. You were able to mobilise the product quickly and efficient in delivery.” – Melissa Williams, Senior Communications Manager, Highways England

Through the new platform, clients can curate a virtual stakeholder engagement event to show consultation materials including virtual reality and sound demonstrations, videos, maps, plans and pop-up banners, just as people would experience at an in-person engagement. There is also a chat function for on-hand experts to remotely answer questions as visitors view the materials, further simulating what would happen at an in-person event. The tool allows for instant feedback, so public comments can be captured and saved for analysis, and to ensure accurate reporting.

“I’m delighted to announce that Roche was the first company in Ireland to use innovative virtual consultation technology to share plans for the decommissioning of its Clarecastle site with the public. The technology, developed by ArchTam , enabled us to display a series of information boards about the project in a dynamic virtual room and undertake live chats with the public.” – Gerry Cahill, Roche Managing Director/ Site Head, Ireland

Prior to the global pandemic, digital tools were already featured heavily during ArchTam’s in-person community engagement events — including 360-degree Virtual Reality (VR), visualizations, sentiment mapping, sound demonstrations and interactive apps — so the logical next step was to bring them all together into one digital platform.

The adoption of digital tools and processes has differentiated ArchTam from its peers in the sector and helped us work faster, smarter and better, and our industry is benefiting from improvements in quality, cost and schedule. As clients and communities start experiencing the benefits — in terms of savings, collaboration, efficiencies, better environmental, social and governance outcomes, and more effective operation and maintenance — we’ll continue to bring to market new digital and innovation offerings that will reshape the infrastructure industry.

“The Virtual Meeting Room developed by ArchTam to support Fort Benning’s HOMMTA public notice period provided participants with a platform that delivered the necessary materials and information to effectively conduct our virtual public meeting. This platform enabled Fort Benning to use modern digital capabilities to adapt to the COVID environment.” – U.S Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District

If we are to build a better world for generations to come, we need all members of our society to be active, vocal participants in the process. Virtual public consultation, incorporating VR, is a powerful tool in achieving societal equity and improving our built environment for our communities.

I would like to thank the people who helped bring the Virtual Consultation tool to life and make it a success. Through their hard work and innovative approach to problem solving, Andy Thomas, Xavier Xia and Jamie Lord were able to bring this offering to market quickly and ensure our clients’ work kept moving forward.

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As we look to the future of our work, we are comforted to see that our vision for the firm’s digital transformation holds true. We will remain a talented, efficient and focused team — benefitting from our scale and the strength of our digital tools to deliver the best results in the industry. For example, virtual collaboration tools are table stakes in our industry and we have transitioned seamlessly to a remote work environment during the coronavirus pandemic.

Looking to the future of how we deliver work, some of our most important investments are in creating artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms to enable our teams to become even more capable and efficient. In today’s world, a secondary benefit is fast becoming apparent: Applying ArchTam’s digital tools allows more of our work to be delivered remotely, by a connected global workforce, than ever before — especially critical when our clients or the global environment demand it.

In our design business, we have developed a platform called ArchTam Learned Intelligence, or ALI. ALI is an artificial intelligence engine that is constantly learning from our engineering work. Whether it be a campus, a structure or a transportation network, ALI is capable of processing all the three-dimensional elements of each design. Over time, ALI is building an ever-growing library against which to check every future design that ArchTam creates. In close to real-time, ALI advises our designers in order to improve the quality of their modeling.

Tools like ALI present several benefits for our business. First, they improve the quality of our work by taking full advantage of our scale. It’s as if every ArchTam engineer is looking over the shoulder of our teams as they create a new design, ready to provide input and potentially catch errors and omissions before they happen. Second, they allow our organization to effectively collaborate remotely. ALI doesn’t depend on being co-located in the same ArchTam office. Tools like ALI allow our employees to work naturally at scale, involving the most capable people from our global footprint in our projects. Finally, they provide immense value to our clients. Imagine a world where any infrastructure owner could tap into our collective experience to review a design.

Another exciting innovation from ArchTam involves our field work. We believe that computer vision and artificial intelligence will revolutionize the way in which we collect data outside of our offices. We have created a platform that uses video and imagery collected in the field and applies artificial intelligence to find and assess infrastructure assets. Eventually, any decision that our engineer could make in the field — the condition of an overhead electric grid, the quality of a building facade, the suitability of roadway for autonomous vehicles — will be made by artificial intelligence. By training models using our skilled engineering workforce and fully leveraging our industry-leading scale, we will provide our clients even more efficient and effective infrastructure services. Today, putting less people in the field and collecting data in more efficient ways means less impact on our clients and the communities they serve.

Has our digital future changed? We don’t think so, but our journey is accelerating. At ArchTam, we continue to lead the industry in imagining what’s next. Visit our new Innovation + Digital microsite, where we share innovative solutions, products, thought leadership and success stories from across our global business.

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