A wide range, here and overseas
Shayne Whitehouse is the founder and principal of UrbanTech Plus. His background spans business transformation, property, infrastructure and complex organisations, both in Australia and overseas. UrbanTech Plus turns that experience on one question: how organisations decide.
UrbanTech Plus is based around helping those organisations make better decisions and also the governance to help get better outcomes.
Big decisions, big impact
His clients are organisations making complex decisions, from infrastructure and “major transformations of business or IT” right down to small businesses. What they share is how much rides on the call.
So if you're looking at the impact of large decisions, people making big decisions that have a big impact, and what we're trying to do is help them make better decisions so that we get better outcomes
More with less
He came to AI with a plain question, and quickly saw the catch. AI speeds up any process, good or bad, so the work has to start with the process itself.
I think the challenge that I saw where AI could help was, how can we do more with less?
A challenger for his own ideas
He uses AI for research first. Then he turns it on his own thinking, so a weak idea shows itself early and what holds up becomes something he can “create products out of”.
It has also changed how much he can get through. AI “has allowed me to do a lot more, a lot quicker”: he has used it for web design and for research that goes looking for updates on a regular basis. In his words, “it's like having another staff member.”
I'm using it to help me make better decisions, so a lot of it is the research, being able to take different research, come up with my own ideas or offerings, and then have that challenge and using AI to challenge it to fail fast if it's not right
Before the board asks
His message is about assumptions. Behind a complex decision there are often assumptions nobody checked, and those can leave people explaining the decision later, “to boards, to inquiries”. UrbanTech Plus works on the decision before that point.
We help those decisions become stronger and to also be made when the evidence supports those decisions being made.
Another pair of eyes
AI Pathfinder gave him a place to test ideas, with coaches providing insights and some good connections along the way. Asked for the best part, he described what he does for his own clients.
Having another pair of eyes look at what I'm doing, testing it, testing assumptions, and actually coming up with suggestions on how it could improve.
Traditional, modular, or the middle
Next is housing. Shayne is working on a framework in which modular construction supports traditional construction, so the industry is not forced to choose. It is still in development.
it's not do we do traditional construction or do we modular? What is the best outcome in the middle?
