Michael Earle, Inspekt AI: Using drones and AI for building facade and energy inspections

another CEO wisdom pod AI Edition Rapid Fire Edition with Michael Earl he is CEO of and inspect AI uh drone uh building expect inspection company which I'm really bullish about the thesis being that us humans we can check out uh building facades from an external perspective but technology can somehow do it better technology can also provide us way more insights than the normal human eye and drones

are very versatile you know they can go everywhere they're very mobile they're the mobile mobile listing of mobiles uh if I can even say that really bullish on the startup I have heard of the concept before and Michael is building that at school with AI this podcast brought to you by podpoyer.com if you want to start scale or even be invited to podcasts get great guests like

Michael exchange insights with them get subscribers get views get leads getlines.com if you want help doing that that's my podcasting company Michael really glad to have you on can you introduce yourself tell us a bit more about your background sure great hi Charles and uh thanks for having me um I'm an architect who's uh been very fortunate and uh and been able to travel and uh design

in four continents and uh over those years I kind of came up with uh I started seeing a um kind of a problem that needed identifying and that's uh taller buildings and buildings at scale whether just tall or or in terms of size uh that have these these problems in in being inspected correctly and so uh we've been able to develop develop some technology that um that

allows buildings to be uh kind of scanned uh every millimeter of a building and the uh the AI is able to pick up flaws and we also use thermal technology to uh to find uh energy loss and uh on the exterior skin so it's been uh it's been an incredible ride and we're doing that sort of community by Community around the world so uh it's been really exciting and uh and rewarding experience for me and live from Bangkok uh Thailand so that is quite special right there tell me about um the current problem that you're fixing in the industry and what would be the total addressable Market here right so I mean we are business as a whole we sort of see about 400 cities around the world that kind of meet our meet our

spec and we see it well addressable Market is almost too big so we think of it more of like a Sam instead of a tam which you know Sam being serviceable Market we're looking to one one to two thousand projects per City around the world so it's an enorm per year so it's a normal enormous problem once we start doing this on buildings we realize that most

of them um need to have this done yearly uh you know cracks and issues that happen on buildings we find the second year you see the the movement from one year to the next and these kinds of flaws and it becomes uh it becomes something that our clients really want to watch and and repeat and once they're in this world they don't want to go back and it is is the Asian market ready for you is there less competition there um I wouldn't say there's less competition I mean uh some of the some of the biggest players in this industry are in Hong Kong and Singapore and some of the cities that were were just launching in uh but it's a worldwide issue and uh you know for example in in Europe they just come

up with a new green deal which is kind of a a multi-trillion Euro um investment in in kind of getting buildings to be uh having their envelopes be a lot tighter uh and so that's kind of an enormous Market there and then in the US obviously you have uh City by City they've got laws that require facade inspections but I mean they're still doing it the old-fashioned

way where a guy stands on the corner and looks up or repels from one point of a building and it's just kind of silly you know it's kind of like a doctor instead of using an x-ray he just looks at your finger and says no you're you're fine and lets you go right or looks at you from 100 meters away it's really not the way to inspect something right and why take why taking like such an ambitious uh challenge at this point of your career what led you to actually start the business sure great question I mean we uh you know as a as an architect I uh again I was very fortunate to design on a bunch of different continents have a lot of different opportunities and uh and I saw that at some

point it was something that needed to be addressed and uh you know now we're sort of at that Crux where technology is caught up to what we want to do and um and you know AIS advance to a certain point and also we're kind of at this sort of 75 years past the big building booms of uh post World War II and so it's kind of a breakdown age for a lot of buildings we have a lot of new technologies that are being used on facades uh that are that haven't really been tested I mean I was I met a guy recently was telling me about new Green Building Materials and I said how have you been testing these and he said oh we you know we spray them with water a day in the

lab and I said well that's not exactly kind of real world conditions so it becomes um a lot of these materials are not tested and they so they need new and advanced ways of inspecting them to keep up with uh keep up with the times how could disasters like Surfside uh condominium collabs be prevented with your technology okay great question I mean we use it in a

lot of our a lot of our a lot of our decks a lot of our information I mean the reality is that when we scan buildings we find cracks uh the following year we find a larger crack and you can see the the amount of uh of change that something has from one year to the other uh some of the cracks on Surfside that are further up in the building that were further up in the building obviously you're aware the you know salt water got inside and got to to acting on the rebar and little by little sort of uh deteriorating it to a point where some of that obviously moved down through that rebar and eventually you got to a point where the structure was damaged uh so we believe we could have completely

solved this problem uh in in that case we would have eliminated those risks by at least showing them the problem but uh when you see the development of a problem like this from one year to the next uh you're not going to ignore it the way you do when you just say well it could be better or could be worse I mean this is every millimeter and didn't they had like engineers and folks to inspect that business what would be the difference with drones here right okay so they you know again they inspected the basement they inspected around ground level I mean this is you know this is kind of classic thing that I get into with uh with with new clients right they say oh yeah we had an inspector a guy came around

and he walked around the building and you know he made all these assessments and we looked at the report and there's 10 or 12 images all that are two meters off the ground and you might have a building that's 150 meters tall and you're like what's the point of inspecting everything right at ground level right so you it's it's really about the whole building and and at

scale not missing any part of it right even if you uh there are drones now that some people say okay I saw a spot up on the fifth floor and they'll fly up to that one point and look around that's not a scan either right again it's it's about everything do you see an automated version of promoting your service AKA sending your drone and selling like a

pre-sample image of the building and then sending them an email saying that they could get the full thing um and just pre-offering them value up front uh conceptually I mean we want to do this at scale right so we're uh you know in our business their their companies that do this only as a SAS product and so literally all they do is they they process imagery and

then their engineering companies that are doing this with you know 10 Engineers on the ground looking around and using the Drone as one tiny little speck of that and we you know we believe what we offer uh is really comprehensive and also easily easy enough to be able to be used so um I could see a day where that would come um by being in a neighborhood

you know we do we do drone um coverage of full neighborhoods in other words we've done some neighborhoods where we've covered a hundred buildings and maybe only 30 of them were under uh were under inspection uh contracts and then we have gone back to some of the others and say here are some of the issues that you should be looking for I mean you know we believe

this is a community solution our our employees live in these communities you know where where we're inspecting and we want to make the uh you know our motto is basically to uh to make the built World safer and more energy efficient and making the bill World safer is a real thing Things fall off buildings all the time and uh and cause damage and obviously you hurt people

and in many cases kill them yeah it's very sad if I own multiple buildings um let's say that I own five of them like the one you have on the website which is a tall probably uh 16 20 floor uh condo with let's say 150 habitations or so how much money can I save if I use your solution via the classic way right uh the classic way of like not inspecting at all that's the classic word like people don't expect usually well I mean you know they they inspect when there's a problem I I mean I visited a 40-story hotel recently I was talking to the guy before we started to do work I said what do you normally do he said we wait for the guests to complain I mean let's literally their solution

and there is no other solution right so I mean we've done a lot of inspections on on hotels where after one month they've saved you know uh tens of thousands of dollars in uh in cost from the uh from the uh the energy loss that they have on buildings so sometimes the the savings are enormous I mean we have a we have a client right now who's uh actually suing the developer because there were some significant flaws uh and with the AI you know it used to be like an engineer would show up and say um we found uh you know we believe that this building is not built up to standard and then we show up and we've scanned the whole building and there's really not much argument you can look at three thousand

image 100 000 images of the building and see every little flaw on that building it really doesn't come down to is it did it happen or didn't it happen it's not a judgment call anymore it's a real fact and so they were able to get a three million dollar settlement out of that because of our technology so in many cases we're just we're trying to help everybody

to uh to have better conditions to live in and to work in every day what are your goals for that rest of this year there's four months remaining what are you focusing your CEO time perfect question um well we're just launching uh an office in Boston so I just flew back from Boston and that's uh we have uh you know operations right now in uh in Spain

and in other parts of Asia and we have uh we have a bunch of projects going in in Los Angeles and out west in the U.S so you know the Boston and uh and a couple other markets in the U.S or what I'm I'm focused on growing at the moment and um and then we're focused on Europe as well but definitely the east coast of the US for the next four months where can people find out more about you Mike okay um uh inspectai.com is a is a great place to start and uh reach out to me on my LinkedIn and um and look forward to uh to to hopefully helping the uh the bill World be safe for a more energy efficient there you go and I'm your host Charles Cormier that was another

CEO wisdom podcast AI Rapid Fire Edition and if you want to start your podcast or scale it or be invited to one that is my company