Empowering construction: CONXAI’s proactive approach to move beyond today’s challenges

Embracing change, moving quickly, and enabling its customers to do the same, is in CONXAI’s DNA. To do this, it has found that it is important for everyone to be aligned and have a common understanding and interpretation of the opportunities and WHY something is being done or needs to be done, as well as the underlying risks. “Aligning different understandings, views, and interests is important, but it can take time. However, once people are aligned, everything moves much faster. That’s why we always start with WHY,” says Sharique Husain, founder, and CEO of CONXAI. “And we take the same approach with our clients.”

CONXAI observed that most companies in the construction industry tend to focus more on solving the problems they are facing “today”, rather than what they would face few months from now. It learnt that it is important to not only talk about the impact and benefits, but to actually show the potential customers what CONXAI can do for them. In addition to short demo videos, it offers small tests, a proof of concept so to say, of a few weeks. By participating in these tests, potential customers can experience the practical applications of CONXAI’s technologies and services in their contexts. This hands-on approach allows customers to get a clear understanding of the business case and gain confidence in CONXAI’s ability to deliver the target outcome. Starting with such smaller projects can pave the way to a larger project.CONXAI describes its approach as “Think big, start small and grow as you go.”

CONXAI’s approach is based on two concepts. The first is the IKEA effect: the increased value of do-it-yourself products (Norton, Mochon, & Ariely, 2012). By participating in the solution or product creation, customers tend to be more committed to its adoption. For this reason, they are encouraged to be involved earlier in the process. This approach of “partnering with customers” also gives CONXAI a different perspective on its offerings. Most companies focus on selling products, software, and technology instead of actually solving customers’ problems,”says Sharique Husain, referring to the “jobs to be done” theory (Christensen et al., 2016) which is the second concept. In his experience, sometimes the companies not only want the tool, but they also want someone to help them use the tool to solve their problem.

After all, there is always a risk of failure when trying something new. Yet failure is looked upon badly. But as Sharique Husain quotes the 13th century German philosopher, Meister Eckhart: “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.”CONXAI is a team of AI engineers, data scientists, and designers helping the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry leverage the vast amount of under utilized data to unlock greater economic value using advanced AI technology. It provides a platform that can process large amounts of data from disparate sources and turn it into actionable knowledge.Its focus is on improving productivity and knowledge loss issues in the construction industry, where 90% of project data is not used at all and 30% of collected data is lost as soon as a project is completed. CONXAI is located in Munich, Germany, and has currently 25 employees.

Sharique Husain founded the company in 2021 and has been CONXAI’s CEO since then.