Let’s Partner on Conversations That Matter in AEC
Pirros partners with editors, podcast hosts, conference organizers, and industry voices to explore what’s actually changing inside architecture and engineering firms. Our story ideas span four topic areas:
- AI in architecture and engineering
- Design technology and BIM functions
- Firm knowledge management and enablement
- Design production efficiency and quality
Each pitch is a ready-made angle for thought leadership, podcasts, webinars, articles, social posts, or panels, and we’re always open to other ideas.
About Pirros
Pirros is the AI project hub for architecture and engineering firms. We connect design knowledge across every project, team, and office, standardize production workflows, and embed quality control—so teams produce better construction drawings, faster.
Founded by former structural engineers and backed by Y Combinator, Pirros is a profitable startup trusted by top AE firms across North America including KPFF, Lake Flato, DCI Engineers, Arup, WSP, and more.
Our Speakers
Ari Baranian
Co-Founder & CEO, Pirros
Background: Ari is a former structural engineer who experienced firsthand the operational inefficiencies at the center of AE practice. Also a software engineer, Ari co-founded and built Pirros to be mission control for every layer of an AE firm. Pirros is proudly Y-Combinator-backed and profitable.
Positioning: Ari speaks as a builder who was a practitioner first. He brings a founder-level perspective on why the current model of design production is broken and what the next generation of AE operations looks like. Having worked inside design firms as both a structural engineer and programmer before building Pirros, he speaks with authority grounded in both sides of the table.
Best for founder-focused podcasts, AEC leadership panels, technology strategy conversations, and conference keynotes.
Peter Johann
COO & Co-Founder, Pirros
Background: Peter was a structural engineer at KPFF, where he saw the same problem play out on project after project: firms redoing work not because they had to, but because they couldn't find or trust what already existed. He built Pirros to solve that directly.
Positioning: Peter speaks as someone who lived the problem at a firm level before building the solution. His perspective is grounded in the day-to-day reality of design practice, which gives him a practitioner's clarity about what design teams actually need.
Best for technical podcasts, product deep-dives, AEC technology platform discussions, and developer- or product-focused industry conversations.
Ross Wagner, Assoc. AIA
Head of Industry and Product Strategy
Background: Ross Wagner, Assoc. AIA worked in architecture before stepping into design technology to drive broader industry change. He went on to play a key role at PlanGrid, helping scale the company from under $10M to over $100M in ARR and contributing to its acquisition by Autodesk. At Autodesk, Ross led GTM industry teams supporting AECO customers. Today, as Head of Industry and Product Strategy at Pirros, Ross brings both practitioner and operator perspective to helping firms capture their collective memory, making the best of what they have already built easy to find, trust, and share across every project and team.
Positioning: Ross is one of the few people in AEC technology who has operated at every layer of the stack: as a licensed architect, as a growth operator who helped take a category-defining platform from early traction to acquisition, and as a GTM leader at the largest software company in the industry.
Best for practitioner-focused podcasts, BIM and design technology community conversations, AEC technology business discussions, and webinars targeting AE firm operators.
AI in Architecture & Engineering
These pitches explore how AI is reshaping the practice of architecture and engineering—and why AE firms face a distinctly different set of challenges and opportunities than any other industry. Pirros speakers bring first-hand perspective from working inside real AE workflows.
Autodesk Built an AI Assistant for Revit—But Is Anyone Asking the Right Question?
Early testing shows a tool that fails more often than it delivers, and Autodesk admits it's primarily aimed at beginners. But the more interesting question isn't whether it works—it's whether Autodesk is successfully reshaping how the industry thinks about model interaction, even if the tool itself isn't ready. Because while firms debate the assistant's reliability, a more important question goes unasked: who is AI in Revit actually for? If the answer is beginners, this is a better onboarding experience. If the answer is production teams, the missing layer isn't inside the tool—it's the firm-wide knowledge underneath it that Autodesk will never have access to. Only the firm does.
AI Is Only as Smart as the Data You Feed It
AI systems trained on single-project data sources struggle to provide value for AE firms. This is a conversation about the biggest opportunity in AE for AI—the ingestion and application of data from across projects—and how AE buyers can discern what contextually-rooted AI actually looks like versus generic AI tools. What questions can AE technologists ask to ensure that their AI tools are unifying data across projects, enabling learning loops between teams and projects, and facilitating measurably faster deliverable production?
Why AE Firms Are the Last Profession That Can Afford to Get AI Wrong
Architecture and engineering firms carry public-safety liability, regulatory accountability, and contractual exposure that most industries simply don't. This is often overlooked by headlining reports like the recent Anthropic study showing AE to be among the least-exposed AI professions, yet with the greatest opportunity for application. But when AI is introduced carelessly into design production workflows, the downstream risks—RFIs, coordination failures, construction errors—can far exceed the efficiency gains. This conversation examines the conditions under which AI earns trust in AE firms: design-native training data, transparent provenance, human oversight embedded in the workflow, and accountability structures that hold.
Design Technology & BIM Functions
These pitches address the evolving roles of Design Technologists and BIM Managers inside AE firms—drawing on original survey data, firm enablement research, and direct experience supporting design technology teams at architecture and engineering firms across North America.
Beyond BIM: How Large Design Firms Build, Staff, and Scale Design Technology Teams
Most firms don't realize they've outgrown their design technology model until someone burns out, standards slip, or a quality gap makes the problem impossible to ignore. This discussion shares first-of-its-kind benchmarking data from a 2026 survey of large AE firms, conducted by DIALOG and Pirros, covering how design technology teams are built, titled and resourced across the industry. Attendees will leave with real data on BIM versus design technology roles, staff-to-DT ratios, and utilization targets. Plus, frameworks for building a design technology function proven out by DIALOG and others that hold up through growth, leadership changes, and the demands of cross-functional work at scale.
The BIM Manager's Next Chapter: From Overloaded Operator to Strategic Enabler
The 2026 DT Survey confirms what many in the field already feel: design technology professionals represent just 4% of firm headcount on average, yet carry a weight of responsibility that grows faster than the teams supporting them. BIM managers are expected to be enablers, enforcers, trainers, troubleshooters, and innovators, often simultaneously, often alone. But the more important conversation is not about workload. It is about trajectory. The firms where BIM leaders are thriving have given them something most firms have not: the systems and language to measure their own impact in terms of firm-wide quality and production efficiency, and the organizational authority to evolve the role beyond constant firefighting.
Firm Knowledge Management & Enablement
These pitches address one of the most underreported structural challenges in AEC: how firms capture, retain, and activate institutional knowledge across projects, teams, and generations of talent. Several of these angles are original to Pirros—grounded in data and implementation experience from working inside real firm workflows.
Architecture Firms Are Sitting on a Gold Mine of Knowledge—and Watching It Walk Out the Door Every Time a Project Closes
Every completed project is a compressed archive of solved problems: details that held up in the field, decisions that prevented RFIs, lessons that should inform the next team. Most of it is never used again. Not because firms don't value it—but because they've never had the infrastructure to extract and reactivate it. Every time a project closes or a senior designer leaves, that intelligence disappears back into scattered folders and aging models. The result: teams restart from scratch every project, junior designers re-solve problems senior designers have already solved, and the firm's institutional intelligence never compounds.
The Lessons-Learned Trap: Why Everything Firms Try to Fix Their Knowledge Problem Fails
Most AE firms know they have a knowledge retention problem. They've tried to fix it: post-project retrospectives, lessons-learned documents, shared drives, internal wikis. It almost never works. The reason is structural: every traditional solution treats knowledge management as a documentation problem when it's actually a workflow problem. Post-mortems produce documents. Documents don't get opened under deadline pressure. Insights stay locked in individuals. The next project team starts the same cycle over. This pitch explores what distinguishes the firms that have broken the cycle—not better documentation, but systems that embed learning directly into the moment of production.
AEC Firms Are Buying More Sophisticated Software While Cutting Their Ability to Make It Work
Architecture firm leaders' confidence in navigating digital disruption fell from 74% to 46% in a single year—not because tools got worse, but because enablement hasn't kept pace. Only 64% of AEC firms have continuous learning programs in place, and nearly half lack the resources to design them—even as the software stack grows more complex every year. Drawing on Pirros's Enablement Guide—built from hundreds of AE firm deployments—this conversation makes the case that AEC's digital transformation problem isn't a technology problem. It's an enablement gap.
Design Production Efficiency & Quality
These pitches address the practical reality of design production inside architecture and engineering firms—where quality, speed, and consistency are constantly in tension, and where the stakes of getting it wrong extend from RFIs to regulatory non-compliance to firm reputation.
How the Next Generation of Architects and Engineers Learn to Detail—and Why Quality Must Be Taught, Not Policed
New designers are entering AE firms with different learning styles and a different relationship to technology than any prior generation. The apprenticeship model—absorb a senior designer's judgment over years of proximity—is breaking down under remote work, fast-paced projects, and lean teams. Meanwhile, quality control in most firms remains reactive: a BIM manager marks up a model in red, a principal catches a detail error at permit, a contractor sends an RFI because the drawing was ambiguous. Both problems share a common solution: systems that surface real, vetted examples of firm work at the exact moment a designer needs them—teaching quality through proximity to excellence rather than through enforcement.
Why Standards Don't Scale in AEC—and Why the Approval Process Is the Real Bottleneck
Most AE firms have tried to scale quality through stricter standards, tighter templates, and more enforcement. Most have watched fragmentation increase anyway. The common diagnosis is that teams don't follow standards under project pressure. The more accurate diagnosis is that the standards approval process itself doesn't scale. Firms invest in defining what 'good' looks like, but leave the mechanism for getting new content approved as a linear, multi-stakeholder review that becomes a bottleneck as the library grows.
The Hidden Cost of Starting From Scratch: What Documentation Inefficiency Actually Costs AE Firms
Most AE firms know, intuitively, that their teams spend too much time recreating work that already exists in a past project. Few have measured it. Pirros data from firm deployments reveals designers spend an average of 15–30 minutes searching for a single detail—and often recreate it from scratch anyway when they can’t find something reliable. Aggregated across hundreds of projects, this waste compounds into millions of dollars of billable time redirected away from design.
Pirros: The AI Project Hub for AE Firms
The Search Problem AE Firms Have Accepted for Too Long
The biggest productivity drain in AE firms is not a lack of capacity. It is time spent searching for work that already exists. Pirros connects a firm's entire library of Revit details and families, making it instantly searchable with no manual tagging required. The returns are concrete: On average with Pirros, firms spend 50% less time opening models, upgrading, and previewing Revit content. Lake Flato Architects save 5 minutes per detail found and 15 minutes per detail download with Pirros, recovering more than $200,000 annually in billable time.
How Pirros Makes Trusted Content the Default, Not the Exception
Architecture and engineering firms are producing the design documents that determine whether buildings are safe to occupy. When a detail is wrong, the consequences extend well beyond a revision cycle: construction errors, code violations, and real liability and safety. Most of those errors do not start with negligence. They start with a designer working from an outdated detail or copying from the wrong project. Pirros tightens this exposure by automatically de-duping, comparing and surfacing vetted content as the easiest option to find; keeping past project details in reference-only mode so they can be learned from but not downloaded; and giving teams a live detailing environment to mark up and review content before it ever reaches a drawing set.
A Firm's Standards Are Only as Strong as Its Ability to Enforce Them
Defining firm standards is the easy part. Keeping them alive across projects, offices, and years of turnover is where most firms lose ground. They don't have the tools or resources for the administrative burden of policing standards. Pirros gives BIM leaders and standards champions the infrastructure to change this: Automated standard content suggestions based on usage across projects; AI that eliminates the manual tagging and organization of content; In-platform flagging and vetting of content that saves firms from the 'review by committee' bottleneck.
Let’s build something together.
