[FULL DEMO - LONG] Writing PCAs with ARC

Hey, everyone.

I'm Alexa.

I'm, director of Operations here at Ark.

And today I'm going to walk you through how our product works and how we can help you complete a PCA a bit more efficiently.

So what you see right here is just our login page.

I just wanted to give a brief overview.

Everything that we are supporting you with comes after the site visit, so your process doesn't change all the way up to the site visit.

You'll go to site, you'll review the building as normal, and then you'll come to ARC and you will log, in.

This is where you'll upload all of your site data and where you'll really see, the support of our tool come into effect.

First things first, all of the information that you might require about industry knowledge, all of the information regarding Vertex's tone and style and language that you use in reports is already loaded into our system.

So all of that kind of context and information that you want to start with, including historical reports that you can refer back to for some examples, are already all in our system.

Let's log in and let's walk through completing a PCA report.

Awesome.

So this is where you'll land.

When you log in, you'll be able to see all of the past reports that you have written.

Just your personal, account.

And you can add any client information, that might not already be in the system.

If one of your colleagues adds a client, to their profile, it will kind of pass to the rest of the firm.

So just to give you a little bit of an orientation, you'll see your reports table, all of the reports that you have written using our platform.

And you'll also see a button that allows you to create a report.

You can go over to your client list as well and you'll be able to see all of your clients as well as who created them.

Let's jump in to creating a report.

So once you click on Create Report, you'll be offered options to select.

You'll do, the pca.

If you also sometimes do planning cost reviews.

You can jump over there as well.

And you'll come to this page where you're just filling in, kind of that general report information.

We'll always start with the address which will, autofill based on kind of Google search.

And then you'll have the issue date.

This is the day that you want to show up on your report that you are sending it to the client.

So maybe, we have a deadline of the 25th and I'll just put that in.

And then you can add your project number.

This can be anything.

It can be letters, numbers, et cetera.

And your project title will go, in here it's.

If you need to, you can edit your project title.

If it's not showing up the way you kind of would normally have it.

this is also what the Microsoft Word document will be named.

If there's a building name or a property name, you can always add that in as well.

And then you can go through and click who your client is.

Now we'll jump into adding, our field data.

So this can be any site data that you collected that was provided to you by the client, before you went to site, or any kind of historical data that you have on the building.

My favorite way to personally do it is just drag and drop, folders in.

You can also kind of search your computer as you would normally upload a sorry, a document.

so you can just drag folders in.

You'll see when they go in.

You'll also have a file count size so you'll be able to see all of the files that you put in.

and a couple of things to note here.

Any duplicate files, will be marked and you'll be told that they are being skipped.

If there's any file in your system that's over 50 megabytes, you'll also see a little notification down here that will tell you the file name and how large it was, just so you know which files couldn't get uploaded.

Don't really run into this problem a lot though.

So now we'll click upload and generate report.

At the bottom of the screen you'll start seeing all of the documents kind of come in.

This can take anywhere from kind of like one to five minutes.

It really depends on your Internet speed as well as the number of files.

However, it's usually pretty quick.

So now you'll kind of land on our report generation page.

You'll see a couple things happening here.

you'll see the report gener percentage going up on the left and you'll also see in the top right, what is actually being generated.

This is also where if you forget a file or you get a file from your client later on in your report writing process, you can always come here and just upload another file.

Very similarly to how we did the first time.

A little bit of context to what's going on right now is this is kind of where a lot of the AI is happening.

We're looking at every single file that you uploaded our system based on the industry context that we have added, as well as Vertex's specific firm context.

Like your tone, your language, how you review documents.

All of that is now going through a process to learn, and kind of make that magic moment happen in the assistant, which is where we are headed next.

So once this is fully generated, it will produce a Word document.

All of our Word documents are in your templates.

You do not have to change anything about them.

You'll just move through Microsoft Word as you normally would with a kind of assistant or managing partner, senior engineer to write alongside of you.

Awesome.

So we're now fully uploaded.

like I said, if you have any other data that you get during the report writing process, you can always upload it.

here.

but what we're going to do is download our Word document and get started writing our report.

So we've opened our Word doc.

As you can see, you land in your report, in your Word document exactly how you always have.

you'll notice that there's already some information pre filled on the page for you.

That's the information you gave us during COVID kind of that upload process.

And the first thing that you're going to do is open your assistant or your tool.

So if you go to add ins, you'll see our icon and you can kind of open up the side panel as as however big you need it.

If this is your first time accessing the assistant you will have to sign in.

So let's go ahead and do that.

So we're going to sign in.

It's the same, email and password that you use for the web application.

And the assistant will open for you.

Before we kind of get into all of the different things that it can do, just want to orient you around what it will look like when you first get started.

So on your cover page, what you will see is in the assistant, as you kind of saw while it was loading, it will provide you with a, summary of the, the building.

and then you'll also see down here that you'll have evidence.

So every suggestion that we provide for you, most of it will have evidence.

and you can kind of open up that evidence to see where the information is coming from as well as, kind of verify that the information that we're giving you is correct.

We'll walk through all of the different kind of parts of the assistant as we move through the, the report.

But one of the big things that every single kind of suggestion or piece of information that we provide you has is a, kind of confidence score.

So we'll always tell you how confident we are in the information that we're telling you.

And that will give you some insight into whether you should kind of double click on it, whether you can kind of take it at face value or what have you.

A couple other things before we start moving through report, just to orient you up top.

It will always tell you the current section that you're in.

and it will also always tell you whether it's following your cursor or not.

So if I go to the dropdown and maybe I want to actually look at the information provided for me in parking, I can jump down there.

The assistant will show me the information that we have about parking.

However, I'm still sitting in my page in the kind of COVID photo section.

So if I just go back to here and make that follow cursor sign blue again, it will follow my cursor as I move through the document.

The next thing I'll let you know is that in our assistant we have two tabs.

The first one is writing, which we've kind of been sitting in.

The second one is inputs.

So this is where it will show you all of the inputs that are relevant to the section that you are in.

you can look at them in kind of a grid view.

This will show you just photos, or you can also look at all of the documents that kind of COVID the COVID page.

Lastly, if you just want to look at all of the information that we have, you can go to all sections again.

This will stop following your cursor.

So you'll just make sure to click the blue.

Make that button blue again.

And you can also search.

So if I want to find some drawings, I can open that up and, and it will search information.

So it's usually searching anything that would use the term drawings.

So that's kind of how you can use the search feature.

And I will go back to following my cursor and we'll walk through a couple sections of the report just to get you kind of familiar with it.

First things first, for the COVID page, if you click on the photo, it should provide you with some images that you can use for your cover page.

Really easy to insert an image.

All of our images, you'll see two buttons.

One will just be for inserting photos.

The other will be for inserting photos and captions, which we'll get into at the photo blog section.

So if I insert a photo, you'll see that the photo will go in there exactly as the kind of placeholder holds it.

You don't have to reformat anything.

And if you want to kind of go through the different photos that we provided as suggestions for cover photo, you can open those up and just scroll through them.

You can open up any input or any document that we provide for you.

And you'll also see that there's details.

This is information that the AI has pulled from, the input that you gave us.

So to give it a title, there will be a caption for every photo which we'll talk about in the photo log section.

It'll also give you a summary of the photo as well as any photo details.

It'll tell you the time it's captured.

Sometimes it can tell you the elevation, if that's needed, and just the size of the file photo information.

All input information is there.

Let's walk through some of the different sections now.

I will personally focus mostly on section five and the photo log.

That's where we've been doing, the most of our building.

And that's where we'll also save you the most time.

But let's click through a couple of the documents first in your cover photo area.

We don't really do, too much here.

Anything where we don't have suggestions, suggestions for you.

you'll just see on the assistant that it will say no writing suggestions available.

You won't see that very often.

One thing I do want to talk about is the find and the search and replace section, what we have done here is we can't actually action the search and replace for you right now.

What we can do is pull all of the information from the files that you've given us.

So all of the information on the assistant that you can see is information we've pulled from the pieces of evidence that we have provided for you.

You can go through and make sure that what kind of we've said is correct.

As a reminder, we'll also give you a confidence score.

You can search in these documents if you need to.

So if I want to search, year built, I can search it and just verify that the information that we're providing is correct.

And then what you can do here is then just go through your normal find and replace exercise.

Anything that kind of highlights in blue is something that you can copy, so that you'll know you've copied it over and then you can go through your find and replace throughout the entire document.

Moving in to kind of section two and the upfront writing sections of sections two to four.

What we have done here is two things.

So first of all, any find and replace item that is on this page we will show to you.

so you'll be able to see if there is a find and replace item on the page and you can just double check that you've filled it in correctly.

the second thing that we will also show you is information to kind of help you fill through these top sections.

So this is kind of a great time to get into some of the different things that you'll see.

If we don't have any evidence for suggestion, we're not going to try and make one up.

We'll let you know that there is no evidence and you'll also see something that says it will tell you what to do next.

So we don't have any evidence in the documents that we uploaded that give us any indication of what the purpose of this report is.

The so we'll tell you to fill that information in yourself.

If we move through into another section we'll show you some other information.

So first things first, at the top we'll always tell you kind of the section that we're in up here and then we'll tell you where the information from the cards are going.

So this is coming from the cross threshold deviation.

You can also see where your, your your mouse is or your cursor is.

anything that says verify is something that you need to verify.

Our AI is, is confident in the information, but we need you to verify that it is correct.

anything that is a fill, is telling you that in your template that is a piece of information that is required for you to fill.

And if it is not pre filled it AI couldn't necessarily find that evidence with high enough confidence to fill in the information for you.

So there's also another find and replace in here.

So it's just letting you know to double check that that is done.

If we move down again just through some other sections, I just want to show you how the assistant will move with you.

and this is again a section where there was some find and replace.

So this already should be pre filled but it's just reminding you double check.

The other thing that I want to call out is any information that you provided us up front that we can autofill into the template.

We will.

So you'll notice that in the site reconnaissance section it will always say who the PCA was performed by.

And so that will autofill your name as well for you.

Let's get into section 4.

5.

The last thing that I will say is we haven't deleted anything that is pre filled in your template.

So any of the sections that you have like different options to choose from, like I said, we will kind of provide a suggestion of what we think you should write.

but we will never delete the original information that is in, in the template for you again.

All of this while you're going through is you can just remove the pieces that you don't need and you can always just copy and paste the text in there for you.

Evidence will also always kind of accompany each suggestion that we've provided.

So let's jump in to section five.

This is where a lot of your kind of thinking and time goes.

So we spend a lot of time here to kind of help improve your writing experience but also maybe help you write a little bit faster, so that you can kind of work on more projects, get a little bit of time back into your life, things like that.

So first things first, we'll start with site access.

A couple things that I've already mentioned that I'll call out again.

anything that is in your template that is required for you to input, we will attempt to input it.

pre fill it.

As you'll see on here it will say fill road name.

So at this point the assistant doesn't have high confidence in the name of the road that you would turn into the site for it knows the site address.

so what it will do is just tell you to fill in that information, on your own.

What you can always do though, is, copy the text or if you just go over here and highlight all of the text that you might want to delete, you can just insert the text, as all and fill that information You can always go back to your evidence to see where the suggestion is coming from and it will show you that information.

If there's additional pieces of the section that you want to see, you can always go over to inputs and look at any of the information that we pulled.

So you'll see for site access we're getting a lot of images of the roads and how to enter the site.

so you can just go through that as well, if you want to double check anything.

So if we go back into parking, it will just stay in the tab that you were already in.

So if you were in inputs and you want to go back to writing, you can click over here again.

You'll kind of see the description of the, the section that you're in as well as the evidence pieces that you have.

This one again has some low confidence because of the inputs that we updated uploaded.

So it will tell you certain sections to fill and like I said, as always, you can just highlight everything and insert text as a whole or you can go copy and then paste, and then paste it as you normally would and it will go in, in your kind of format.

So if I go into another section, in the in section five.

So let's go over to building exteriors and wall assembly again this will show you all of the different pieces of evidence that have kind of gone into us making the decision for you.

In this description, our confidence is high.

You can see that we have nine pieces of evidence that are explaining how we got to kind of this p.

This suggestion.

And then the other thing that I'll draw your attention to is the condition.

So we'll always provide you a description and a condition, to the building and in your template you have all of this great information that you can pull from.

This is kind of our system's suggestion based on everything in this part of the template that we think you should write.

One thing that I really want to call out that I haven't already is you can actually refine your suggestions.

So if maybe you don't like this suggestion, if you think it's too long, too short, if it's not formal enough, if there's something else that you want to call out, you can actually update the suggestion and it will tell you one, how many times you've changed the suggestion, and two, it will update it for you.

Then you can just go over here and enter it as well.

Similar to your template, anything that is a condition will be italicized.

Anything that is a description will be in regular kind of text, and you can also describe a change you want to see as well.

So maybe we only want this to be one sentence.

We can let the A.I.

know.

right now it doesn't think that it should only be one sentence.

So it will still give us, the previous condition, suggestion that it provided.

But now you'll see that we've now changed it three times.

So we can have an idea of how many times we've updated the suggestion.

and as well as you update suggestions or change them, your evidence might change as well.

That's just something to keep an eye out for.

and our evidence will always tell you why we think that this piece of information is required.

What I want to jump into now is really the photo log, but I'll just move through some of the other sections.

You'll be able to see that the assistant is still working through the different sections with you as you move through the report.

it moves with you.

And like I said, if we are not confident about something or we don't have any evidence to, provide a suggestion, we'll still pull the information from, your template and just let you know that there's no evidence backing this up.

This is coming from your template.

and so maybe just pay a little bit more attention to it.

So I'll move down to appendix A and the photo log.

And this is also where we'll be hopefully providing a lot of support.

when we were doing our interviews and talking to Jen and Jeremy and a bunch of other people on the PCA team, we know that the photo log is quite an exhaustive process.

so we really want to help you guys speed it up a little bit.

And it's also quite a repetitive process.

First things first, about the photo log.

You will not be provided any writing suggestions.

Don't worry.

We do help you with captions.

it just looks a little bit different.

So if I go over to recommended, photos or just the site inputs, you'll see that one you're in site overview.

So each page of photos is a different section.

you can change this if, if you want.

If you don't need all six photos for site observations, that's okay, we can just update what section we're in.

But if I go back to follow cursor, I can again view a document, how I would want.

If I want to zoom in to see if maybe the company name is on there.

I can see that as well.

And, and I can also scroll through the different photos.

So when I'm clicked into a photo space, like I said at the very beginning of this, kind of demo, you can insert a photo, but you can also insert a photo and a caption.

So if I click this button here, what you'll see is the photo will come in and the caption will come in.

This is, will happen for every single photo.

So if for the next photo, for site access, maybe I want to, add a photo of the road leading up to the building.

I can insert just the photo if I don't want a caption for it, or I can insert the photo and the caption together.

Like I said, you can just move through the process like so maybe if we go to electrical systems, I can move through the process like this as well as if you go to each page, it will reset and go to the next section.

This is following the order of section five and how that's written.

So maybe I want to start with, this photo of, the emergency generator.

And I can just go here and go click insert photo and caption.

The last thing I'll say about the inputs page, right now you'll obviously see that there's only seven items on here.

It means that our system kind of ranked these seven photos as the top electrical system photos.

You can always go to show more and it will show you more photos from, what we have determined and what the AI determined was the electrical systems.

Finally, if there's like a specific photo that you're trying to look for, you can always go to all sections and then just search a key term and you can add it in that way.

this was a bit of a longer video.

I really hope I kind of helped you, move through the assistant and we're really looking forward to having you all use our product and provide feedback so that we can help you, save more time, kind of be more efficient and get you back out doing what you probably love most, which is being on site and reviewing really cool buildings in our cities.

Thank you guys so much.

I hope you have a great rest of your day.