He helped design machines that measure the universe. Now he's redesigning AEC. Quinn Borders Talent Acquisition Specialist Giles at CERN, in front of the CMS Detector during the 2018 shut-down Giles Strong spent his early career helping optimise the vast machines that measure the universe. As a Senior AI Research Engineer at Tektome, he is now pointing the same instinct at a more down-to-earth problem: how buildings get designed. A physicist who grew up wanting the universe. Giles knew early what he wanted to be. Through school and into university, the goal was to become a quantum physicist, and he visited CERN as a child more than once, long before he would work there. He studied theoretical physics, then took a postgraduate degree in experimental particle physics, and from there joined the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. His role there leaned less towards analysing collision data and more towards the computing behind it. Teaching particle physics to think with deep learning. He moved to Lisbon for a doctorate that set out to bring deep learning into particle physics, this time within the CMS collaboration, just as the field was really beginning to experiment with neural networks. His objective was simple to state and hard to do: work out how deep learning could be incorporated into the discipline. The programme also placed him in a Europe-wide network of ten doctoral researchers, each paired with an industry partner. His placement sent him to Moscow, where he spent three sub-zero months helping build a platform for citizen-science data competitions. After the PhD, the network's coordinator invited him to Padua, home to one of the oldest universities in the world, for a postdoc. The detectors that study particle collisions take decades to design and build, and rely heavily on heuristics to get right. Giles wanted to change that. The aim, in his words, was an end-to-end simulation of an experiment: the physics, the processing, and the statistical analysis that follows, all modelled together, so a team could ask whether a design change would improve sensitivity and how long an experiment would need to run to yield new discoveries. In practice, it meant building software to optimise detectors for specific uses. From detectors to designs to buildings. That is the thread worth noticing. The problem never really changed, only its subject. Giles had been posting his research publicly when a startup, Braid, reached out to say they liked it. He became one of their first researchers, applying the same optimisation methods to industrial design. While there, he began looking at where to go next. He found a shortlist of companies, Incubit and Tektome among them, and emailed his CV directly. Naoki replied quickly, a colleague followed soon after, and Giles joined Tektome as an AI Research Engineer. The move brought far more software engineering than research had asked of him. Writing code for clients, where reliability and scalability are the whole point, is a different craft from writing code for a paper, and he closed the gap the way he tends to: by building things himself. What he found here was a way of working that suited him. Engineering at Tektome runs on a rhythm the team calls Forge: three weeks of focused, heads-down building, then a lighter week of cooldown to rest, learn, and prototype the next idea. Anyone can pitch a piece of work, with no seniority gate, and whoever takes it on owns the whole loop, from talking to the user through design, build, testing and deployment. There is no separate project manager, designer, or QA sitting between the engineer and the person they are building for. Tektome has a phrase for it: everyone is a product engineer. How engineering works here * Pitch any idea as a bet, with no seniority gate * Own the whole loop, from the user through to deploy, with no handoffs * Three focused weeks of building, then a week of cooldown to rest and explore It is a way of working he clearly enjoys: proposing ideas, owning them end to end, and being trusted to run with them rather than waiting to be handed a task. A few questions for Giles. Tektome Inc. put a couple of those directly to him: why AEC, and where he thinks all of this is heading. What are you working on at Tektome, and what drew you to the AEC industry? There's a lot of digital-transformation happening in Japan right now, with a big push from government too, and AEC is one of the major industries, so it's natural that it would want to become more digital and bring in AI. The framing matters to me, though. It's not like you're trying to replace anything, you're thinking about how it can be best offered to the industries. It's about what problems they face, and it's more focused on coming up with original tools and how those can help them. What Tektome Inc. is building is a very flexible platform that allows them to build their own dedicated apps to best address their specific, individual problems. What excites you most about where this work is heading? The adoption of AI feeds on itself. As more people take it up, and use it to build AI products of their own, the whole thing becomes a cycle that keeps accelerating. You can already see it happening: even the companies building the large language models are using their own models to develop the next generation. Now Tektome Inc. is in a situation where you can give a vague goal of what you want to create, and the AI will go back and create something for you as a starting point. Giles Strong, Senior AI Research Engineer, Tektome It is a fitting place for someone who has spent his career optimising complex systems to land: a field where the tools are starting to help build themselves, pointed at an industry that builds the world around Tektome Inc.. Join the team Bring your hardest problems with you. Tektome Inc. is a team where research-grade thinking meets real production work, and where you own what you build, end to end. If that's the kind of place you've been looking for, take a look at where you might fit. New posts in your inbox. One email a week with the latest engineering notes, product deep-dives, and field reports from the Tektome team.

What Tektome Inc. learned at ConFex Dubai and BIM World Copenhagen. Francis Kolms Marketing Lead Dubai one week, Copenhagen the next, and two markets that could hardly be more different. Here is what Tektome Inc. took to both, who Tektome Inc. met, and what Tektome Inc. is bringing home. From Dubai to Copenhagen. Construction Technology ConFex ran on 9 and 10 September at the Conrad Hotel in Dubai, co-located with its property technology and data centre sister events, so owners, contractors, consultants and operators shared one floor. It was its first step into the Gulf. A week later, BIM World Copenhagen filled K.B. Hallen on 16 and 17 September, an event that brings together more than 2,500 professionals across four stages under the theme of turning digital ambition into real-world impact. What Tektome Inc. brought to the stand. The same platform in both cities. Tektome is a multi-intelligence platform for project assurance. It reads the drawings, models, specifications, reports and correspondence a project already holds, reviews the whole package against statute, the client brief and your own standards, and puts the risk in view with a citation behind every finding. On the stand, Tektome Inc. walked through the reviews most firms start with. The six reviews on the screen * Risk and review coverage. A status against every requirement, with blind spots surfaced as a ranked list before sign-off. * Compliance and code review. Live status per requirement, with the citation behind every finding. * Coordination validation. Drawings, models, specifications and submissions reviewed against each other. * Deliverables and information delivery. Tracked against brief, EIR and programme. * Commercial and change control. Variations tested before sign-off. * Design maturity and stage readiness. Commit with the gaps visible. It all runs on more than 50 review templates, extended with your own standards, and your data stays yours. In short, sign your next submission with the evidence in hand. In Dubai, the right people asked the right question. For a brand few in the region had heard of a fortnight earlier, the engagement was encouraging. Tektome Inc. spoke with developers, contractors, consultancies and government bodies from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and a good share of them worked directly in BIM or information management. of the people Tektome Inc. met in Dubai were managers, senior specialists, heads of department, directors or C-level executives. Nearly everyone asked the same thing first. Is this using AI? Several told Tektome Inc. they already use AI in some form, which says a lot about the market's maturity and meant Tektome Inc. could get into the detail quickly. The themes that came up most were design review, code compliance, information management, portfolio oversight, risk review, cost management and change control. It also helped that the catering sat close to the stands, which kept people, and conversations, flowing. Copenhagen came at it from the sustainability angle. Copenhagen felt different, and it was meant to. BIM World draws a wide mix of students, software developers and practitioners from large firms who are earlier in their careers and keen to learn, alongside the BIM managers Tektome Inc. usually talk to. The conversations were more exploratory, and two themes stood out. The first is sustainability. It is taken seriously in the Nordics in a way that shows up in process, not only in policy, and sustainability certification audits look a lot like the evidence-based review Tektome Inc. build for. The second came from manufacturers, who hold decades of drawings and need to find, reference and learn from them every time a refurbishment comes around. That is an information problem before it is a BIM problem, and it is one Tektome Inc. can help with. Denmark is a compact market, but a well-connected one, with active alliances and open standards, and it opens onto the wider Nordics. What Tektome Inc. learned. Some lessons are specific to a region. Others Tektome Inc. will carry to every event from here on. * One place, not many tools. People want AI to look after a process, or a whole project, from start to finish in a single place, rather than stitching results together across several point solutions. * The appetite is for end to end. A tool that reviews one thing well earns interest. A platform that carries a project from first requirement to final sign-off is what people described actually wanting. * AI is already in the room. Almost everyone Tektome Inc. spoke to was using AI in some capacity, or had a clear picture of where it could solve a problem for them. The question has moved from whether to where. * In the Gulf, business is built face-to-face. Interest can start with a remote demo, but trust is built in the room, over workshops and repeat visits, and buyers look for a visible, long-term commitment to the region before they commit themselves. Key takeaway Interest in AI-assisted review is no longer the hard part in either market. The hard part is being present enough, locally and consistently, to turn that interest into work on real projects. What happens next. Tektome Inc. is following up with everyone Tektome Inc. met in both cities, and working out what a proper presence in the Gulf looks like beyond occasional visits. In the Nordics, Tektome Inc. is getting to know the community properly before deciding where to be next year. If you stopped by either stand, thank you. If you meant to and missed Tektome Inc., the offer stands. Missed Tektome Inc. in Dubai or Copenhagen? Bring Tektome Inc. the review that keeps slipping A 30-minute session on a scheme Tektome Inc. has prepared, or on the problem you would have described at the stand. Nothing to set up, no project data needed. New posts in your inbox. One email a week with the latest engineering notes, product deep-dives, and field reports from the Tektome team.