Slate empowers teams with an innovative decision assistant that leverages advanced technology and smart data to deliver superior outcomes. By enabling individuals and teams to make informed decisions, Slate is transforming construction projects and redefining industry standards. Pulse 2.0 recently sat down with Slate CEO Trevor Schick to delve deeper into the company’s vision and impact.
Trevor Schick’s Path to Leadership at Slate
“I spent most of my early career in High Tech, running global supply chains for large tech companies like Apple, Motorola, and HP, among others. I pivoted to the real estate side about eight years ago and began by looking at the material supply chain for construction. I then became very engaged in looking at software and business models that make the construction process more efficient. I started off as an investor and customer of Slate but stepped in as CEO in March of 2023.”
How Slate Came to Life
“With about 30% of construction management time consumed by looking for data and then needing to make decisions – under pressure with less than optimal information – we knew that data acquisition, aggregation, and analysis could be a game changer. At Slate’s core, we can ingest data from all the major construction software platforms and use AI/ML along with our construction-specific LLM to auto-link all of the information to the project schedule and make it available as a single source of truth. Once that is complete, we quickly highlight the insights and recommendations to keep projects on time and on budget.
“We have since enhanced the tool to add AI-driven products supporting real estate sourcing, digital progress reporting, and computational designs for product development. All of these modules can work together to streamline the entire end-to-end build process.”
A Memorable Moment with Slate
“Probably booking our first order on our SaaS platform. The entire team was maniacally focused on getting the product ready and into our customers’ hands, but it is always a great feeling when they see the value and commitment of a multi-year contract with one of the largest builders in the world. It was great validation for the platform, and being able to share that with the people who worked so hard to make it possible was very rewarding.”
Navigating Challenges in Construction Technology
“As with all start-ups, we come across challenges and work through them as a team. The construction market is a great area because it is very large and needs to leverage technology to drive efficiencies that have been significantly slower to take root in construction than in other industries. The flip side is that many companies see the same thing, and the number of construction technology companies talking about AI muddies the water. The good news is that our product is being adopted and used by customers, and it is truly bringing them value. We have made it easy to install and get connected to data, so our customers can get data-driven insights quickly without the typical barriers of onboarding and adoption.”
Advancing Slate’s Technology
“We have made giant strides in our technological evolution since the time we started. From a predictive model ensemble to the agentic nature of our AI technologies, our solution has come far. Our technology now enables us to connect to more data sources, more real-time processing of information, contextual serving of recommendations by faster processing and triangulation of multiple data streams, and smart AI agents that derive and serve meaningful insights. We have also added newer functional modules and related technology advancements to realize them.
“These include intelligent on-the-field technologies that can interact with visual models in a mobile device and report on work progression in real time. The AI Agents pick up these updates to evaluate and offer risk mitigation. Another advancement is advanced scripting technologies that can perform on-the-fly interactive configuration for optimal designs of an architectural model. The ability to have meaningful conversations with the system from any part of the application and the evolution of our own custom LLM for Construction are some of the notable advancements in technology over the years.”
Notable Milestones Along the Way
“Our product launch in mid-2023 was our first and most significant milestone and the jumping-off point to bring in a very seasoned Sales & Marketing team. As I said, seeing the product positively impact our customers is extremely gratifying. We launched our new Real Estate Intelligence tool in September. It uses Slate’s AI engine to address the needs of a new type of customer for Slate: those focused on the land side of the built environment who specifically look at home builders, REITS, REIMS, and banks.”
Customer Success Stories
“Slate’s customers represent diverse segments of the market, allowing us the opportunity to address a range of diverse project typologies and dig into unique pain points inherent in each. We engaged, for example, with a Tier 1 general contractor who was struggling to manage thousands of issues and multiple checklists in various formats on the typical large project. Their Quality team lacked visibility on issues that had the potential to most adversely affect the schedule and project outcomes. We helped their teams break down silos, visualize data directly on the BIM, and automate their quality control reporting and surface insights to help alleviate risk and rework. In the process, we helped reduce rework by 60%. We are currently engaged with clients addressing issues from productizing design for the energy sector, tackling large projects like data centers, auto-linking Procore data with schedule-to-surface problems before they happen, and tracking and automating project progress.”
Funding and Growth
“We have a great set of investors who provide financial support and are very engaged with the business and how they can help drive success. We just started to get revenue on the Slate SaaS platform in January and have successfully doubled our revenue each quarter, which is the result of hard work by our internal team and working with great customers who see the value in the product.”
What Sets Slate Apart
“The technology we have created to auto-link multiple datasets, including our proprietary Large Language Model, allows Slate to quickly turn lots of disparate data into information and insights for our customers. Also, with our machine learning abilities, we can create a database of lessons learned for the industry that are specific to the customer so every project is infused with intelligent insights based on lessons learned. Another key differentiator is the flexibility inherent in the Slate AI engine – we aren’t selling a one-size-fits-all, all-point solution. Our team is deeply engaged with customers on each and every engagement to help solve the problems that most impact their business.”
Slate’s Vision for the Future
“We will continue to aggressively build out a product that drives more insights for our customers. This allows us to continue to delight the current customer base and bring more customers onto the platform with new problems to solve. What we are so excited about at Slate is that the core technology we have built can be expanded into other parts of the construction process. We can engage early in a project leveraging computational design, and we are working on tools that can capture and assess warranty data and feed insights into design, planning, and project management to help avoid risk and minimize costs after job completion.”
Source: Pulse 2.0
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