Can AI Save Us From Designing Ourselves to Extinction?

Ahuja and Chopson are the Co-founders of Cove, an AI-powered consulting and technology platform that helps building designers and owners do just that—optimize buildings for both lower carbon emissions and lower costs.

Every year, architects across the U.S. report their progress on reducing carbon emissions to the AIA, and Cove is the #1 tool they use to measure their impact with a goal of hitting a 70 percent reduction in the building industry’s emissions by 2030.

In the second episode of Deep Green’s newest season Deep Green: Deep Cut, produced in partnership with Mannington Commercial, Ahuja and Chopson sit down with METROPOLIS editor in chief Avinash Rajagopal to break down how Cove works, why we ignore cost and profit to our own peril, and how AI will be critical to the future of climate action. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, or listen to the full episode on the Surround Podcast Network.

Avinash Rajagopal (AR): How did Cove come to be? How was it born?

Sandeep Ahuja (SA): I will give you my 10,000-foot view on that. I’m ethnically Indian, this started a very long time ago. When I was in India, a late professor, Godfrey Dagenborough of Georgia Tech, was visiting there for a lecture. At that time, I was just a licensed architect practicing architecture and I happened to go into this lecture and for the first time I learned that buildings account for 40 percent of all carbon emissions.

I decided in that moment that I was going to change everything that I do in my life. It put me on this path to fight climate action and brought me here to Georgia to be his student at Georgia Tech and become a sustainability expert. That’s the true origin of Cove’s journey, I think Patrick might be able to give you a slightly better spin on it.

Patrick Chopson (PC): At one point, I didn’t even think climate change was a real thing. But as I started to read and learn things, I realized that there’s this book called “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It crystallized for me that it’s not just about running simulations or doing cool things, but there’s an overall bigger thing. When Sandy and I were thinking about starting a business together, it added that urgency and pushed me to get outside of working for Perkins and Will, which is where we were both working at the time, to try to make a difference and hack how the world works. Cove comes out of that idea that we can use costs to help drive better decision-making around sustainable outcomes.

SA: We knew we had to be a technology company, powered by tech companies. We didn’t want to have an impact on one building, two, five, or fifty buildings. We wanted to have an impact on 50,000, half a million, five million, and eventually every single building built from scratch or renovated because therein lies the carbon impact, cost savings, and optimization. It truly was the scale that made us do what we do.

AR: For those of us who don’t live and breathe carbon emissions day in and day out, why is it so difficult to measure the carbon footprint of buildings? Why do we need all this tech and what makes it so complex?

PC: There’s the saying that only God can watch all the sparrows, which is basically that there’s just too much detail of every single component to track the nutrition facts. You can’t track the carbon content of every single little thing as you draw; it’s too much for an architect and it’s too much for a contractor to keep track of as they’re purchasing things. We need technology to allow us to track that complexity because people have tried to do it manually and failed. Most architecture firms may have only done an embodied carbon study for one project when they’re doing 500 projects a year or more. Small firms don’t have enough staff to do it. I don’t think that to get to the outcome quickly we can continue to do it manually. We don’t have 20 years to figure it out. Last year marked the first time we surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius.

AR: Unfortunately, we are actively running out of time. It’s really interesting because METROPOLIS’s own first reporting the 40 percent number about carbon footprints in buildings was in 2003, and within a few years, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) created the 2030 commitment. We are five years away now, and it just feels like the sand has kind of slipped through our fingers. The good news, though, is that there’s a lot of reporting now, and Cove is the most used tool for 2030 reporting this year. How does Cove make the reporting part easier?

PC: We’ve seen people go from 30 to 60 percent of their projects reporting to a hundred percent, but they need help to get there. One of the things that we see right now is that climate risk equals insurance risk. What we’re observing from many of our customers, who are both developers and architects, is that one of the things that they’re most concerned about is the financial risk from insurance increasing. For them, resiliency and sustainability are reducing their exposure to the risk factors in their building’s location, and that will ultimately be what drives architects to change because the developers will identify that as the source of risk that has to be mitigated, rather than where we’re trying to do something good for the world. We have to think about how we make it real for the people who we’re working with, and insurance risk is a huge problem.

AR: The idea that cost and carbon should be considered in relationship with each other was one of your early insights, right? Tell me a little bit more about that. How do you make that connection?

PC: It’s the same exercise as what we do to get a carbon takeoff, which is when we get the quantities of all the materials and we apply how much carbon is in each material. You have to do the exact same exercise for a detailed cost quantity takeoff, it’s just a different number that you’re applying. One’s carbon and the other is cost.

A lot of times you can make things significantly cheaper if you know the exact cost of your building. A lot of times low-carbon materials actually don’t cost more, or sometimes cost less than a high-carbon material just because the electricity that goes into making something ends up costing more. There’s a relationship between low-carbon and lower-cost materials. People think that carbon is expensive. They just don’t know how to do the comparison, so they don’t do it.

AR: As you said, it’s about knowing what every sparrow is doing, right? There’s just no possible way that each individual team or each individual expert is going to be able to kind of tackle those problems one on one. What are some of the pieces of reporting and accounting that are still tough? What’s ahead for you?

SA: We’re currently spending most of our time on the cost estimating piece as it relates to building design and truly building our proprietary AI models to be able to do real-time, accurate cost estimating. The thing that I know is a barrier to most designs ever coming to life is budgets or inaccurate designs that are not buildable. It really throws the carbon agenda and the sustainability agenda out the window because a lot of times those are the absolute first things that get VE’d (value engineered) out. We’re continuing to innovate and have built our proprietary AI for building cost estimating that we use internally and test internally.

We have created a public facing taste of this technology. It’s called Betras AI. It’s free so everyone can log in and create real time cost estimates of their project all the way from conception to construction and it continues to upgrade in the level of accuracy.

PC: It’s even more interesting to see people unlock the benefits of using AI in their workflows and take those lessons and apply them back to the delivery of sustainability consulting.

AR: There is carbon associated with the materials that make up our buildings. Tell me about cove and embodied carbon. What has been your approach on that? How have you been addressing that part of the problem?

PC: We have a PhD on our team [specializing in] embodied carbon who shared that a lot of the embodied carbon of your building is in the structure. That’s where the high intensity energy is used to make concrete and steel and things like that. We’ve written a lot of code to be able to help people estimate that carbon during conceptual design. I think that’s been the big unlock but [the next step is] integrating that with databases like the EC3 database for embodied carbon and figuring out how we combine all that information with costs so that carbon on its own makes sense economically.

AR: How do you see teams leveraging the cost aspect on their projects? How are they currently using COVE to drive their projects forward?

SA: A project comes to mind where we were brought on as the consultants, which is a pretty standard way in which we engage with teams. Since it was the student center at Georgia Tech, it was really fun for us because it’s our alma mater. For a $100 million project, the campus had set out some fairly stringent carbon goals and they wanted to do the best by the world, but make sure that they were able to build 300,000 square feet for 100 million dollars, which is actually not very expensive. If you look at cost per square foot for a higher end building type, the only way that we were able to accomplish that was that we were partnering very closely with the contractors, Gilbane. We were working on real-time cost estimating and looking through various scenario modeling to be able to understand and showcase to everyone with data and clarity that the only way to design the building for the carbon and the budget goals that they had in mind was to renovate with a giant addition instead of a new build. For folks who may have never heard much about carbon or the differences between carbon types. Our new book, called “Build like it’s End of the World” is your end-to-end guide. We are truly thinking about it in a holistic way, because that is the problem that we’re facing and overcoming.

AR: I’m glad y’all brought up the book. Despite the title, it is a very hopeful and pragmatic guide to how we can get this right and unlock some of those win-win situations. What do we need to get better at doing so that we don’t end up designing ourselves to extinction?

PC: That’s a tough one. Honestly, I think everyone needs to take a long look at what has been done. If I had to wave a magic wand, I would say that architects need to get serious about using AI in their workflows if they want to affect the climate problem. Contractors and everyone else need to start thinking about it.

SA: I’m not entirely in a totally different point of view. There’s just so much that needs to still be done. The thing that we need to do more of is lean on each other. I have seen some openness in terms of data and process and workflow on what’s working and what’s not working in our industry. But there is a wall around the information. I challenge us to share as much as one can while looking out for your stakeholder interest and business interest. We have proprietary tech, but there are absolutely things that are worth sharing that will help everyone but not detract from your business.

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Listen to “AI and the Future of Low-Carbon Buildings” on the Surround Podcast Network. This season of Deep Green is produced in partnership with Mannington Commercial. 

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