[BD 2602] Never Draw It Twice, Giving Design Firms a Working Memory

How can architecture firms unlock decades of buried institutional knowledge, and what happens to the apprenticeship model when every detail the firm has ever drawn is just a single query away?

In this bonus episode of Practice Disrupted, host Evelyn Lee dives into a conversation created with Pirros, exploring how technology bridges the gap between historic firm data and daily production workflows. The episode features Ross Wagner, who leads sales at Pirros, alongside Xander Ellenbogen, a senior BIM manager at Clark Nexsen. Together, they explore how firms can transition from hunting through endless subfolders to operating with an intelligent, centralized knowledge base.

Ross shares his trajectory from designing high-rise residential projects to riding the technology wave at PlanGrid and Autodesk, eventually joining Pirros to help firms maximize their workflow efficiency. Xander provides an on-the-ground perspective from Clark Nexsen, discussing his evolution from a traditional architect and the firm’s first commercial drone pilot to managing advanced BIM workflows. He explains how his firm used Pirros to adapt to a post-COVID, discipline-based model, allowing team members across multiple offices and states to access vetted, high-quality details instantaneously.

The conversation digs deeply into the broader implications of AI in the AECO space, specifically addressing the common comparison to the historical CAD-to-BIM shift. While the CAD-to-BIM transition still resulted in flat 2D drawing deliverables, the guests argue that AI represents a fundamentally different leap focused on data portability and knowledge preservation across an entire firm.

They also tackle the crucial element of change management in a trust-driven profession, outlining the “sandwich effect” required to achieve widespread software adoption from leadership down to production staff.

“We’re not here to flatten creativity and just be a place where you copy and paste. It’s a place where you learn, you mentor, but also ensure that you don’t go through the tedious tasks of reinventing the wheel each time and basically spend a bunch of hours hunting for something that you are trying to learn from.” – Ross Wagner

Finally, they look ahead to the future of design with recent tools like Mira, a Revit agentic copilot, and discuss how firms can maintain the critical thinking required in the traditional apprenticeship model while letting AI do the tedious heavy lifting.

Guests

Ross Wagner, Assoc. AIA, began his career in architecture before moving into design technology, where he helped scale PlanGrid from under $10M to over $100M in ARR before its acquisition by Autodesk. Now Head of Sales at Pirros, he helps AECO firms improve productivity by transforming historical design content into trusted, accessible knowledge.

Xander Ellenbogen, AIA, is a licensed architect and Senior BIM Manager at Clark Nexsen, where he leads BIM standards, Revit workflows, and reality capture initiatives across the firm. With a background spanning architectural design and BIM leadership, he is currently directing a firmwide template rebuild as part of the JMT merger while continuing to serve as an Associate Principal.

This episode is especially for you if:

• You want to understand how Pirros captures a firm’s historical work into an intelligent, AI-based search engine to prevent team members from redrawing existing details.
• You are curious about the “sandwich effect” in change management and how to secure software buy-in from both firm leadership and production staff.
• You want to explore why the CAD-to-BIM shift failed to move past 2D deliverables and how the AI shift focuses on data portability instead.
• You want to learn how firms can preserve the traditional apprenticeship model by using AI to handle 70% of the baseline work while keeping designers focused on the remaining 30% of critical problem-solving.
• You are interested in the potential of agentic workflows in Revit, such as Pirros’ recently released chatbot copilot, Mira.

What have you done to take action lately? Share your reflections with us on social and join the conversation.

Show Links:

• Learn more about Pirros
• Learn more about Clark Nexsen