[00:00:00] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. Good morning, everybody. My name is Todd Zabelle and a couple of things before we get started today. First, I’d like to welcome everybody to the 10th Annual PPI Symposium. We’ll talk a little bit about what we’re going to do here today. It’s different than we’ve done in the past. And before we get started, I’d like to thank Kristen for and Gary for doing an amazing job on putting this together.
[00:00:22] Todd R. Zabelle: All right, so if you’d just join me in a round of applause, that would be great. Thank you. There’s a lot of work that goes into this, and thank you to TAMU as well. So this is interesting this year because before COVID, we had about 195 people at this event. And we sat back this year, and we said, look, if we’re going to do one of these, And we get a lot of interest in, in doing these.
[00:00:48] Todd R. Zabelle: Why don’t we constrain it down to people that we think are really influential as to what’s going on out there and would get value out of being here. So we moved from a big I’d call it literally a free lunch and networking session to inviting the people that we really think have influence as to what’s happening in the industry.
[00:01:05] Todd R. Zabelle: Alright, so everybody’s here for a reason. I’d like to just tell you about some of the people that are in the audience for you, for you that do not know. So we’ll say from the lean construction representatives, Glenn Ballard, who we might call the, the father of lean construction, next to him, Will Lichtig who basically, I guess, invented integrative form of agreement.
[00:01:28] Todd R. Zabelle: Is it fair to say that, Will? And then we have John Strickland and Dr. Sanvito. Now Dr. Sanvito, while he was at Stanford, did some research for the Design Build Institute. In the mid 90s around design build and the benefit of doing what would be a more integrated approach to project delivery. And I think some of that content is probably still relevant today.
[00:01:55] Todd R. Zabelle: We also have Fernando, where are you Fernando? Fernando Espana, who is a leader in the area of advanced work packaging. We have some academics, consultants that are here with us, and owners including BP, Petronas, Brian from EdgeConneX here, who is in a very fascinating field of data center construction, right, the delivery and operation of data centers.
[00:02:25] Todd R. Zabelle: This is just a paper I’m thinking about writing. Hopefully no one will steal the idea. I personally have no concern about AI whatsoever. It’s not going to make a big impact because we can’t build the stuff. And so as all the tech guys are going on about how much AI is going to change the world, they’ve got one flawed concept is we literally can’t build it.
[00:02:44] Todd R. Zabelle: We can’t get the equipment, we can’t get the people, and there’s no power. But I’ll let Brian talk about that. And then we have some contractors. Okay, Tripatra, who’s traveled all the way over. And Binsky to talk about what’s happening in that area. The keynote today, Alex Kershaw, I saw him speak with James Choo at an event in San Francisco.
[00:03:05] Todd R. Zabelle: An amazing speaker, and you definitely don’t want to miss that. Alright, so without much further, Gary, I’m going to hand it over to you. Thank you guys for attending, and hopefully you have a productive and enjoyable day.
