Thriving In The Digital Age: James Garner and The Future of Construction

James Garner, A Senior Director at Gleeds, discusses the challenges and opportunities in the construction industry and the role of technology in improving project delivery. He highlights the complexity and fragmentation of the industry, the slow pace of change, and the lack of data utilization. Garner emphasizes the need for standardization, digital transformation, and the adoption of AI and data analytics to overcome these challenges. He also discusses the cultural barriers to change and the importance of a gradual and strategic approach to digital transformation. Garner explores different scenarios for the future of the construction industry, from optimistic collaboration to pessimistic domination by tech giants, and emphasizes the role of governments and institutions in maintaining competition and safeguarding the industry.

Transcript

Joe Crist (00:02.448)
Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of Thriving in the Digital Age. Joining me today, a dear friend of mine, James Garner, who is the Senior Director at Gleeds. James, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you tell the audience a little about yourself?

James Garner (00:16.269)
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be on the podcast and looking forward to the conversation. A little bit about myself. I am in the construction industry, so I'm a senior director at a global construction consultancy called Gleeds. We deal with project management. We deal with cost management. We deal with various construction advisory issues, including dispute resolution, business cases, etc, etc.

So that's kind of the day job. then as well as that, I also have a newsletter and podcast that I call Project Flux, which specifically looks at how data analytics and AI is going to help this particular industry, so the construction industry, to deliver projects better. So yeah, I keep myself nice and busy, but my background actually is, and it may be something that lot of folks in the US don't know too much about, because it's a very commonwealth.

so called quantity surveying, is effectively the cost management of construction projects. So I spent about 20 years doing that from graduation through to when I moved into this digital transformation role. And I had the pleasure of dealing with lots of amazing projects, mainly in the UK. And I was mainly in the education sector, actually. So I got to deal with a lot of projects at Oxford University. That was one of my big clients. Very proud to have been involved in a lot of those projects.

Imperial College, a number of projects there as well. So I had a really good grounding in major building projects before I moved into this digital transformation AI world. And the reason I moved into that kind of world was because I was very aware, having spent 20 years in project delivery of the major challenges in the construction industry and how digital data AI can help overcome some of those challenges.

Joe Crist (02:13.786)
interesting. So you brought up a sort of interesting point, right? There are a lot of challenges right now in the construction industry. I'm sure both here and in the UK as well as well the rest of the world. What are some of the challenges you're actually seeing that a lot of companies are actually dealing

James Garner (02:29.689)
So construction is complex, right? I mean, at a very basic level, it feels like it's quite simple. Okay, you're building something. And, you know, at domestic level, yeah, it can be, okay, building an extension, simple thing to do. But when you get to major projects, whether that's a building, whether that's an infrastructure project, whether that's an energy project, they're incredibly complex and there's loads and loads of moving parts. And the supply chain is huge. You know, if you think

If you go down from the client to the contractor to the subcontractors, to the consultants, to the subconsultants, to the sub subconsultants, there's literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of parties involved. So that makes for a very, very fragmented industry. And because of that, the pace of change is very slow. It trickles through much slower than it would do in other industries. And also because a lot

And it is true to some extent that every time we do a building, it's unique, it's bespoke, it's new, even though that's not fully true because the process is still the same. And that's something I'll talk about later in terms of how we can improve it. But effectively, it's not like a car going through a manufacturing process or a piece of equipment going through a manufacturing process where you're repeating, you're repeating and you can improve. Effectively, you are starting in a new site and a new place each time, which means

It's not as easy as it would be in other industries to use that data to learn from mistakes. However, having said that, it's also not impossible. And part of my challenge, a part of my role is saying, okay, we may be different, it may be more difficult, it may be more fragmented, but it doesn't mean we can't still use this data to improve project delivery. Now there's an incredibly good study and there's a number of studies around, but the one that I always refer

is a study by a man called Professor Ben Fleubier, who is from Saïd Business School from Oxford University in the UK. And he and his partner, think they're called Global Oxford Economics or Global Oxford Projects. They did a study, or this is a continuous study actually, of around 15 ,000 projects throughout the world. So this isn't UK based, this is 15 ,000 projects.

James Garner (04:52.239)
all different kind of projects. So that could be IT projects, could be infrastructure projects, could be building projects, whatever it may be. It could be small, large, any type of project. And they found that from that sample size, only one in 200 projects are delivered on time, on budget, and to the benefits outlined in the original business case. So that's a startling figure. You know, that's one in 200, Joe, which is crazy.

Joe Crist (05:22.633)
I'm imagining the cost of that alone is astronomical to

James Garner (05:25.335)
Yeah. Yeah, and it's incredible study. It's well worth reading. I'll give you the link to it so you can put it in the show notes if you like. But what so that was interesting in itself that the the rate of success is so low. So clearly there's something we've got to do better within within the kind of project delivery and industry. But the other thing that was interesting about it was he determined whether there were

certain projects which were more predisposed to failure than others and he found that there was. So if you take an Olympics Games project we've got the Olympics coming up very very soon so it's quite topical but what he found with Olympics projects is that almost 100 % of Olympics projects finish on time right because they have to they have to finish on time but that same 100 % almost 100 % finish massively over budget.

And that kind of makes sense because they throw all the money at it to make sure it's finished on time because it has to finish on time because there's an absolute drop dead day of when the games start. And then there's other industries, I think like solar industries, which perform better than maybe other industries. And that's because they have a far higher rate of pre -manufacture or off -site manufacture. So there's less risk going into what's happening on site.

So the outcome of this study was effectively some projects are more predisposed to failure than others. And that there is learnings that you can make from the successful projects about what you can do to improve projects. And there's also learnings or lessons that you can make from projects that fail more often about what you shouldn't do. So this is why I kind of moved into this area and feel that data analytics and digital

which enables the data analytics is so important to the success of the industry. It's because if we can harness that data and utilize it properly, then we can start improving those pretty terrible dismal stats.

Joe Crist (07:32.964)
Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing, too. When these products are delayed, there's a lot of downstream impacts, right? facilities can't be used if it's a business moving in, can't start operating. Right. So it hurts a lot of different, you know, like opportunities. So, yeah, business and then obviously cost. Right. So it's like, and then who's left holding, you know, the bag? It's like, well, this is your guys responsibility. Why isn't it done?

James Garner (07:49.986)
Absolutely.

Joe Crist (08:00.526)
we've already paid you to do it. agreed for this amount and obviously I've got to change orders, but yeah, it creates a lot of complications. So that's interesting. So you mentioned supply chain, right? So obviously supply chain is a really big deal in construction. When it comes to actually setting up your supply chain, how does that work in the construction

James Garner (08:08.494)
It does.

James Garner (08:22.403)
Well, it kind of varies. this is the other complication, as if there wasn't enough. The other complication is region to region. So, for instance, construction is very different and it leads to a global outfit. So we are around the world and we've got presence in the US, we've got presence in the UK, that's obviously where we were founded. But it's different. It's how you deliver projects are different in the UK to the way you deliver them in the US, to the way you deliver them Europe, to the way that you deliver

elsewhere, which just makes it that much difficult. And to answer your question, so there's no real standard way. You know, I believe in the US it's very much more contractor focused. You you bring the main or principal contractor, whatever you call it, in a lot earlier than we might do in the UK, which obviously then changes the whole procurement methodology. It changes the supply chain arrangements. And again, that will be different, again, to other parts of Europe, to parts of the Commonwealth, etc, etc. So there isn't one answer.

But I think it goes the route to improving is around standardization. So what we're seeing a lot more in the UK is frameworks where you can go through a framework. in essence, the framework does a lot of the heavy lifting of doing the vetting and getting people onto frameworks so that they can you don't have to go through reinventing the wheel every time. So we're starting to see a lot more of that happen. And you know, talking about digital transformation, I think the opportunity the industry has

is with that, that supply chain procurement, because it is quite wasteful at moment. And if you look at other industries, it's a lot more automated. The whole process of supply chains and procurement is a lot more automated. So I think there's a route to making that better. But there isn't like a starting point in construction industry because it does differ from region to region, unfortunately.

Joe Crist (10:13.26)
That brings up another interesting question, Because obviously there's a lot of things going on and I'm sure a lot of construction companies are trying to really mitigate these risks. What solutions are actually out there to these challenges?

James Garner (10:25.859)
Well, mean, the solutions, there's two ways of looking at it. You've got the kind of the technical solutions when we talk about digital in terms of deploying better systems that you're more efficient, more productive, more, you know, more bang for your buck as you would say. So that you're just getting more done with less time and that's good. But then there's the bottom up approach, which is systems that we have sort of used over

years, decades, sometimes in some cases in the UK, centuries. What's happening at the moment with the rise of digital and the rise of particularly AI, are now like, actually, have we got the system set up in the right way for how the world is inevitably moving? And what I mean by that is, if we've been doing something in the construction industry,

effectively the same way for 100 years? And I do mean in some part in the UK, we're there's some things we've been doing the same way for 100 years, right? Does that mean we should carry on doing it that same way in 100 years and just digitize it, you know, or should we look at a totally new model and a new workflow so that we can bring in the systems, the large language models, the generative AI, the

so that we can totally blow up the model and build the model up from the ground up. The best way I look at it is if we all woke up from a collective amnesia and we looked around and said, wow, all these buildings have been built, but I've got no idea how they were built. We need to sit down with a blank piece of paper and work out how we think those guys got those buildings built. Would we come up with the same solution now as we're all using? Probably

because we know things that we didn't know then. And all we're trying to do in a lot of cases is shoehorn a digital solution on top of a workflow that's been around for decades.

Joe Crist (12:39.402)
Yeah, you bring up an interesting challenge that not just happens in the construction industry, but happens across the area industry, right? Where you have frameworks and practices that were made for another time, right? They're made for a different sets of problems, right? And they worked back then, they worked great back then, but obviously as the world has changed, we need to change with it. As society, we really need to understand it's like, hey, here is what's going to really benefit the end customer here,

James Garner (13:02.595)
Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Crist (13:08.922)
whether you're building a building or a building computer systems, it's understanding is like, hey, our needs have changed and we need to change with it. Right. So.

James Garner (13:16.941)
Yeah, and I'm sure it's exactly the same in other industries.

Joe Crist (13:21.458)
absolutely. I see it all the time where it's the people say, well, we've always done it this way. Right. And then that's, that's a big problem too. You guys, know, as companies grow there, they really have to change their operating model of how they really do deliver value and how they manage risk and how they really just operate as a company because

James Garner (13:27.782)
That old chestnut.

Joe Crist (13:47.22)
Integrating these technologies, what it really does is it does minimize that risk and it does help them deliver faster and more safely. Because even back then, safety standards weren't what they were today. And we need to actually keep that in mind when we're actually utilizing this stuff because it does create that better flow.

James Garner (14:08.047)
Absolutely, yeah, there is huge advantages to this. yeah, I'm absolutely sure construction, the industry is not the only one struggling with these issues. And it's difficult, you know, because we've talked about the technological side of it. And then what we haven't touched on really, Joe, is the cultural side. Getting people to change habits over a lifetime is really, difficult. And I'm just as guilty of that with, you know,

coming up to 50 years of age. And there's certain things I just do because I've always done it. And I'm sure you're the same because you just get these habits ingrained. That doesn't mean it's best. So, you you look around the workplace and of course a lot of senior people are that older generation and getting them to change and sometimes change at pace because the pace of technology changing so fast is a real challenge. And what you can't do, I found, and I'm sure you've got similar kind of case studies, you can't go in there.

like a blunt tool and just force people to change because that's the worst possible strategy. You've got to bring people gently along with you on that digital transformation journey. But at the same time, you can't also be too relaxed about it because the pace of change is so fast. mean, another stat that I'm sure you're aware of, you know, if it took, think the status or it took 17 years for the Internet to reach mass adoption by one measure. And that same measure took chat GPT.

five days, you know, so the pace of change, we haven't necessarily got the luxury and the time to go as slow as maybe culturally we would need to. So it's like walking a tightrope between not upsetting people too much and putting people off because you're putting too much pressure on them and at the same time not going so slow that you let events overtake you and then it gets really, really difficult to catch

Joe Crist (16:01.68)
Absolutely. And that's a challenge I've set across every industry, right? One of the biggest factors I found digital transformation, the high failure rate is the cultural issue, right? It's obviously with digital transformation, it's about, you know, really thriving the digital age and leveraging data, but being able to pivot with that data once new, you know, that new information emerges. But in organizations that aren't used to changing that quickly, it becomes very difficult. It's an uncomfortable situation.

Yeah, you're absolutely right with

James Garner (16:30.605)
Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it's the, you know, there's the infrastructure issues as well where, you know, to make that change, you've to deal with some deep founded issues with the underlying infrastructure. And the problem with that is people want the nice shiny new tool and probably prepared to pay for that, for the shiny tool. They're less or more reluctant to pay for something which they can't touch it, those infrastructure investments that they won't see the benefit of for maybe a few years, you know.

That is quite difficult. And we're all the same, we? We want the shiny tool. We don't want to be told you've got to spend £100 ,000 now on this and then you're not going to see any benefit for two or three years until we then ingested the data, created the models, displayed the dashboards, you

Joe Crist (17:16.944)
Absolutely. And that's another big part too. It's right. It's people want to have the quickest return on investment possible. Right. When you say you're going to start seeing your account going back into the black from this investment like three, four years from now, your CFO is going to be like, on now. Right.

James Garner (17:29.103)
Yeah.

James Garner (17:35.651)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I totally get it. You know, we can't you can't dismiss that because businesses have to survive and they have to thrive on a yearly basis as well. So you can't dismiss it. often there's a there's usually a compromise. Right. There's usually a compromise where you don't have to go for the big. I mean, the good thing now for me, what thing I've seen change probably in the last four years is whilst you probably did have to make that big bang investment maybe, you know, four or five years ago.

to do anything. You can go a bit more incrementally now. You can do the low hanging fruit. You can invest in bits. Take for instance the latest trend, the rollout of Copilot for Microsoft. They've got tiers, right? So you don't have to jump in. You don't have to jump in at the deep end and spend however much it is for the full suite. You can go for like little parts of it and then see what the benefit of that is.

do a business case on that, some kind of ROI on that before you go to the next bit. So I think a lot of the big companies are realizing that now that it's very difficult to give companies an either or kind of deadline, know, or, or, or, or, or, or, or,

but still getting some benefit out of that relatively small investment, think is a really, really smart.

Joe Crist (19:07.204)
Yeah, you bring up a good point too. So in the US, a lot of companies are actually switching to more

James Garner (19:12.717)
Yeah.

Joe Crist (19:14.522)
you put out work and that incremental approach really does help because what a lot of companies are seeing is they're able to not only understand risk, they're able to mitigate a lot faster, right? Because they are delivering value. So if they find out they're going to, because they have that short feedback loop, if once they deliver things, they can really see it's like, hey, this is not going the right direction, what's going on? Or this is going the right direction and we're already starting to get results out of it, which is great, right? And it's a way to really minimize risk and deliver that value as early as possible.

James Garner (19:38.009)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Joe Crist (19:44.058)
but you have to do it incrementally. But by doing so, they're saving money, they're saving money, they're cutting back on production time, and they're risk, right? Who doesn't want that?

James Garner (19:55.149)
No, and it makes so much sense. But funny enough, in the construction industry, whole Agile methodology can sometimes be a bit of a barrier because it's alien to them because construction by its nature is very waterfall methodology. Because if you think of a construction schedule, you start here, you end there, and you've got a massive Gantt chart that takes you from there to there. And so you always know the start date and you always know what is meant to be the completion date. You know what you're working towards. So the concept

let's break things into sprints and chunks is alien to the industry. So that in itself takes a little bit of a culture change to say, actually, this is OK. You don't always need to know what the final destination is. Because the other thing with digital transformation is it's kind of an endless task, You never get it's not like a building where you do have a finish date and you have a the ribbon cut and ceremony and you have the big opening where we can say it's finished.

You never have that with digital transformation because the tech is moving faster. So you're always just on an iteration of it. So it took a bit for me to understand that coming from a construction background to a digital background and merging the two together that, you know, this is not something where we're going to get a big, you'll have successes along the ways and you'll have, you know, rollouts along the ways, but even those iterative. So say you roll out a piece of software or you roll out some kind of solution, you know, it's only until the next iteration.

software. So it's taken a bit of a culture check even for myself to really understand that difference.

Joe Crist (21:30.136)
You brought up something really interesting too. So you talked about the speed of technology, how it's developing, how things are always changing. So what does the future look like for the construction industry? From the lens of technology and really how it's going to impact

James Garner (21:43.587)
Yeah, see that's a great question and there isn't one single answer and it depends who you talk to and it also depends what time of day and how positive they're feeling. So you've got me on a good day, you got me on a Friday, so I'm being positive. But genuinely, I think there's huge opportunities for the construction industry with technology because of some of the things we've talked about before in terms of changing the workflow. So I'm gonna kind of go through three scenarios, an optimistic scenario.

pessimistic scenario and a realistic scenario in my mind. So the optimistic scenario is that we really embrace this change and the industry comes together to find standardized ways of doing things, whether that's the process or whether that's the building on site to speed up construction, cut down on costs and improve the quality of what we deliver to clients. So everyone's happier. Our respective countries GDPs go up

and we just become a powerhouse of an industry. And we're utilizing these tools, whether that's large language models, whether that's machine learning, whether that's robots, whether that's VR, whether that's AR, whatever it may be, to just improve how we deliver projects for the public. And I think that's entirely possible if we all come together. I think that the pessimistic one, and I am worried about this.

because I've seen what's happened to other industries. So if you look at what's happened to, say for instance, the music industry or the taxi industry, particularly in the UK, I'm not sure if we had the same impact in the US or the kind of entertainment industry with the likes of Netflix, where industries have been entirely decimated because we've let third parties come in and they've changed the model for their benefit. And if you take the music industry, artists now struggle to make a living because

their revenue stream has been taken away from them, you know, to make the equivalent of a record sale with Spotify streams. don't know what the figure is, but it's horrific, you know, only the very, very top artists make it. there's people who can't make a living anymore in that industry. And that is because we've allowed these third parties, we've given over control to the third parties, the Spotify's, the Apple's, the Amazon's, the

James Garner (24:02.411)
to take control of the industry. my pessimistic snide for the construction industry is we sleepwalk into this area where we just hand over control to the big tech companies, whether that's Autodesk who do all the design, whether that's Microsoft, whether that's Apple, whoever it may be. And we end up with situations where they've basically taken control of the industry. And lots of people are out of work, clients being basically

thinking they're getting a good deal, but in the end, all that ever happens, same as Netflix subscriptions go up and they end up worse off. And then the only people who wins are those big tech companies that end up bigger than countries. That's the pessimistic scenario. The realistic scenario is probably somewhere in between where we do something to control that, but probably not enough. So in the UK, we've got institutions. We've got the RICS, which is the World Institutional Charter Phase. We've got the APM. I know in the US you've got the PMI, which is

Project Management Institute. Those guys have got a huge responsibility to put some guardrails down around what these these tech companies are not allowed to do. In the UK, we've got bills going on. We've got the at the moment, we've the EU AI bill, which is which is going through. But that kind of doesn't work unless the whole world does it because, you know, lot of these companies aren't based in the EU, so they'll just bypass it. So I've just had, for instance, that Meta have said, well,

Okay, I've seen the EU bill therefore. We're just going to ignore Europe. You know, well, that's not the answer You know all we're doing is in Europe. We're going to go without a fantastic Potential solution because we haven't worked with these tech companies to find a solution that works for both companies so That's looking at experience. That's probably where we'll end up We'll end up kind of ticking along putting some barriers and some guardrails in place, but not enough

not let the tech companies really start having a major, major impact on our industry. So one my other roles I didn't talk about is I do some work for the RICS and I also chair a task force called the Project Data Analytics Task Force, which is based in the UK, it's, you know, all the outputs are global. So I'll give you the link to that as well, Joe. And the idea of that is exactly around that, raising people's awareness around how we can use AI.

James Garner (26:24.571)
and data analytics safely. And interestingly, it did feed into a government paper in the UK, which has just been published by the IPA, the IPA are the Infrastructure Projects Authority in the UK. So they look after all the big, big infrastructure projects and they released a paper which we supported around the use of AI and data to better deliver government projects. yeah, that those bit long winded, but those are the three scenarios I can see.

playing out. I'm hopeful for the optimistic, we'll probably end up somewhere in the

Joe Crist (26:59.864)
Ideally, right. You brought up something that I found pretty fascinating was, obviously pessimistic, right? Where it's, you know, the larger tech companies are basically owning the space when it comes to the technology. But the challenge here is if once they build a product, it doesn't really get a lot of updates or it's not really tailored to your overall needs. that means good technology, like useful technology is built within the user in mind, right?

I imagine and hopefully it's not true. don't think it will be, but you know, worst case if all these companies dominate the market, it's going to be really hard for new entrants to actually come in and start really innovating, right? Because it's going to be, everyone's already going to have a tool and no one's going to want to buy something new, right? Because it's

James Garner (27:44.569)
Well, it's exactly in the latest issue of the newsletter that I published, the Project Flux newsletter, we talk about this. There were three stories that came out last week about OpenAI and they're all connected. Number one was OpenAI released their five stages to AGI. So this is the five stages to get to advanced human level intelligence. The second story was all around the facts.

taken to your point that all these big companies are starting to buy up all the smaller companies. So that's what they're doing. There's an arms race going on and they see an interesting or unique startup and one of the big companies just goes in and swallows it up. So the allowance for competition goes down and down and down. And the third one, I've forgotten the third one, it was connected. But those two make the point anyway

you know, whilst these companies are getting more and more powerful, building better and better models, they're also swallowing up or consuming a lot of these startup competition. And also from the startups, if you're a startup in the tech world, what's your end goal? It's probably an exit to one of the big companies, right? So it is a bit worrying.

Joe Crist (29:04.272)
It's either you're trying to get bought or you're trying to disrupt. And both are very hard to do, right? If you're going to disrupt, it's definitely an uphill battle and you really have to differentiate, but you're going against giants, right? Who have the resources, who have the tools, who have the manpower, have the expertise. And it's going to require a lot of creativity and it's a very far -brisk across.

James Garner (29:11.843)
Yeah.

James Garner (29:19.951)
Absolutely.

Joe Crist (29:31.108)
But if you're trying to get bought, yes, it's going to be a little easier, but still you have to find something that they really do want. Right? So it's a very difficult game to play as a startup.

James Garner (29:42.477)
Yeah, but like you say, it's how do they go up against it, especially when we're looking at things like these large language models where, you know, the big five are spending, it's not millions, it's billions on these models. So you're restricted in some ways from not doing anything with them. So you're right, it's incredibly difficult. And for the consumer or for the clients, it means that it doesn't give them much competition.

And that's where I think the only people who can really kind of help with it is to maintain some semblance of competition and some semblance of kind of normal market forces working are the governments and the institutions. And that's why I am trying to work, you know, specifically in my area, because you can only control what you can control. So I have some kind of small degree.

of influence within the construction industry and institutions. And I'm just doing my best to make sure that they understand what is coming down the line and not to sleepwalk into a scenario where it's too late. Because when it's too late, it's too late. There's no going back. You sold your soul. And nobody does it. I genuinely don't think anyone would do it on purpose. Take the music industry, for instance. I'm sure that artists didn't do it on purpose.

They just didn't know it just looked like a good deal at the time. Yeah, I can get my music out to all these platforms and I get some extra money. They didn't realize that would kill off, you know, their income stream and their income revenue. They didn't realize that, you know, that free freemium model that consumers were currently using to listen to their records was short term and that subscriptions were going to come in and then those subscriptions were going to be double, double, double year on year. Nobody does this.

I say nobody, of course there are some three nasty people out there, but the vast majority of humans are decent people and I don't think anyone's doing it for that reason. But what we do is, you only got to look at history, we're very able to sleepwalk into situations that we can't turn back

Joe Crist (31:54.544)
Absolutely. So James, I actually do have one more question for you. So obviously you've been in the industry for a while, right? You know the game. You've seen a lot of changes. If you could leave the audience with any one piece of advice, anything at all, what would that

James Garner (31:59.694)
Of course.

James Garner (32:11.194)
Yeah. And the up skill up skill and learn whatever doesn't matter how old you are, what industry you think you're in that doesn't need it. It's almost certain that within the next five to 10 years, the landscape is going to change significantly with the advent of AI. So it's never too late to learn, but the longer you leave it, the harder it's going to be. So I would just get stuck

Don't be afraid of any of these tools out there. And if you're afraid of using it in your work environment, my best piece of advice is start using it at home on one of your home projects. Just play around with it in a place of safety because you can see what it's capable of. And that will usually set a brainwave off that, I can use that in that particular project in a safe way. So that's my number one advice. Don't be scared. It doesn't matter how old you are, where you're on your career. Get stuck in. There's loads of amazing resources out there.

I could do a plug for my newsletter as one of them. So if you want to find out about the information, you know, we try and convince that down so it's manageable, but just get stuck in. Don't sit there waiting. The sooner you get started, the better.

Joe Crist (33:23.664)
Yeah, it's very powerful advice and I agree too that will definitely change a lot of people's lives. It's never too late to upscale and get better at things because the world is changing.

James Garner (33:32.332)
Absolutely.

Joe Crist (33:33.946)
James, thank you so much for joining us today. I really loved our conversation.

James Garner (33:38.287)
It's been a pleasure, absolute pleasure.

Joe Crist (33:41.25)
everybody that was James Gardner. So we're definitely gonna drop the links below in the description so definitely check them out you won't regret it. And everyone thank you so much for coming out having to listen hope everybody learned something and I'll join you next week for another exciting episode of Thriving the Digital Age. See you everybody.

James Garner (34:01.135)
See you later.