KA Connect 2025 | Sundance

Unlocking the Promise of Knowledge Management with AI

KA Connect 2025, our annual knowledge management conference for the AEC industry, will take place at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Sundance, Utah from August 12th to August 15th, 2025.

Our focus this year is Unlocking the Promise of Knowledge Management with AI. We’re excited to explore how AI is transforming knowledge management into a more powerful, practical, and strategic tool for AEC firms. Together, we’ll discuss how AEC firms are accelerating learning, reducing time spent searching for and recreating information, streamlining workflows, and empowering experts to share knowledge more effectively through the thoughtful deployment of AI.

Over two mornings of general sessions, you’ll hear real-world case studies and actionable insights illustrating:

• Strategic AI Deployment: How leading firms are applying AI with precision by identifying high-impact business problems and designing focused solutions that deliver meaningful results.

• Critical Knowledge Transfer: How AI is making expertise more accessible, actionable, and available in the flow of work.

• Upskilling for the Future: How AI-augmented learning experiences are helping both emerging and experienced professionals rapidly adapt to new roles and evolving industry demands.

In the afternoons, we’ll shift to a "choose your own adventure" format with roundtables, hangouts, an intranet café, nature activities, and plenty of unstructured time to connect, reflect, and recharge.

Sundance’s stunning location—at 6,100 feet in the north fork of Provo Canyon—will provide an inspiring backdrop for you to learn from and with your fellow KA Community members.

We can’t wait to explore this exciting new era of AI-powered knowledge management with you.

General Session Talks

At LS3P, knowledge management started with a single project: building a data manager program to improve the quality of project information. Over time, that initiative sparked a larger strategy—one that now connects marketing, KM, and AI into a unified system for learning, communication, and practice improvement.

In this talk, Chief Marketing Officer Katie Robinson shares how LS3P is connecting the dots across disciplines to make better use of their people and content. She’ll begin with the firm’s data manager program, which ensures consistent data collection from project start to closeout—and feeds everything from analytics dashboards to survey responses. She’ll then walk through LS3P’s AI-powered marketing assistant, which helps team members find better proposal content faster, reducing the time spent hunting through old documents and increasing the time available for strategic customization. Finally, she’ll spotlight “Expert Hours,” a casual but powerful mentorship series that surfaces critical knowledge from senior staff—and fuels both search and marketing insights in the process.

The result is a culture where knowledge flows in multiple directions so it can be captured, reused, and recombined to support both business development and professional growth.

What do you do when your firm grows by 70 people in two years—and your senior staff is stretched thin trying to bring new team members up to speed? At BWBR, that challenge became a strategic focus for knowledge management and AI. Rather than trying to do everything, Kari Shornblom and her team concentrated on one high-impact goal: helping emerging professionals learn faster, feel more confident, and contribute sooner—without relying solely on overburdened mentors.

In this talk, Kari shares how BWBR is building an integrated upskilling system to support this next generation of talent. From documenting the firm’s project lifecycle in clear, role-based guides, to capturing deep expertise from Communities of Practice through structured knowledge mapping, to transforming their long-running Landmark Learning program into modular, AI-searchable resources. The upskilling system is designed to make knowledge more accessible, reusable, and aligned with how people work. AI supports both the creation and discovery of content, helping junior staff ask smarter questions and get relevant answers when they need them most.

What if your knowledge management team included not just people, but AI? That’s the experiment Boulder Associates Principal Todd Henderson is running as he tackles a fast-moving L&D challenge: helping experienced architects—new to healthcare design—quickly get up to speed on the complexity of hospitals, user group meetings, and planning workflows.

Without a formal L&D team to lean on, Todd is taking a focused, pragmatic approach. He’s zeroed in on a single business problem, then tapped AI as a thought partner, content co-creator, and even a potential simulator to help accelerate learning. Along the way, he’s using expert interviews, real user feedback, and rapid iteration to drive results while stretching what a KM “team” can be.

This session offers a timely case study in building AI-augmented KM teams to solve targeted, high-impact problems. If you’re wondering how to operationalize AI within your own KM or learning function, or how to go further, faster, without boiling the ocean, this story offers a compelling glimpse into what’s possible.

Knowledge Management is entering a new era—KM 3.0—where AI-powered tools are transforming how firms capture, share, and activate their expertise. But this transformation isn’t just happening. It is asking us to participate. To change. To evolve.

In this talk, Knowledge Architecture Founder and CEO Christopher Parsons explores what KM 3.0 wants from AEC firms, leaders, knowledge managers, users, technology partners, and the broader KA community. Drawing on real-world patterns from early adopters of Synthesis AI Search, he’ll outline the behaviors, systems, and cultural shifts enabling firms to realize the full value of this new generation of knowledge tools. 

You’ll leave with a clear understanding of what it takes to participate in—and accelerate—the evolution of AI-powered knowledge management in your firm.

In this spirited back-and-forth between Snøhetta’s Director of Knowledge, Kate Grimes, and their Design Technology Lead, Chad Carpenter, two longtime collaborators explore the promise and pitfalls of AI in architecture practice. One brings a cautious, human-centered perspective; the other sees potential for creative acceleration—and together they wrestle with the real implications of AI in the studio today.

Grounded in active projects and tool testing—from AI Search to emerging design technologies—this session unpacks how AI is reshaping how professionals access knowledge, learn new skills, and collaborate across disciplines. What happens to information architecture when AI can pull answers from anywhere in your firm’s knowledge base? Should we still train for broad knowledge, or shift to just-in-time learning in the flow of work? And how do we balance trust in automation with the responsibility to stay sharp and informed?

Kate and Chad will share real-world use cases, tough trade-offs, and evolving insights from inside their practice. If you’ve ever wondered how to bring AI into your firm without losing what makes your people great, this conversation is for you.

At Shepley Bulfinch, videos surprised everyone by being one of the firm’s most powerful knowledge management tools once AI Search came into the picture. From town halls and training clips to design discussions and their Birdfeeder learning and development series, video plays a central role in how the firm shares knowledge, preserves expertise, and supports learning across the practice. But it didn’t totally happen by accident.

In this session, Jess Purcell will share how Shepley turned video into a KM superpower—starting with the foundational work of centralizing archives, cleaning up transcripts, adding chapters, and making hundreds of videos searchable via AI. More importantly, she’ll show how that foundation unlocked a new mindset. Armed with the knowledge that video can drive real value, Shepley is exploring new ways to capture critical conversations, formalize content around knowledge transfer, and even create new training materials with video at the core.

Jess will also share how AI search isn’t just helping people find the right video—it’s now being used to summarize and distill video content into new pages, insights, and documentation, making video a vital part of their content creation pipeline. If you’re looking to get more value from the videos you already have, or are curious about how AI can amplify your future recordings, this session will offer practical ideas and fresh inspiration.

At many firms, the challenge of launching a learning platform starts with creating content. At RIOS, it was the opposite—the challenge was figuring out what to do with all the content they already had. Years of specialist-led trainings, recorded presentations, detailed Revit tutorials, and in-house manuals meant there was no shortage of material. The real question was: Where do we start?

In this talk, Project Operations Director Gillian Hutchison shares how RIOS is preparing for Synthesis LMS by shifting from content creation to content strategy. Her team began by cataloging their existing learning resources in a centralized planning system, surfacing redundancies, identifying gaps, and collaborating across disciplines to define what mattered most for launch. They’re now developing role-specific learning paths that reflect how people actually grow at RIOS—whether stepping into a new role, learning a new tool, or expanding into project management.

Rather than trying to do everything at once, RIOS is focusing on what will have the biggest impact first. It’s a thoughtful, scalable approach to building a learning program—one grounded not in starting from scratch, but in turning a rich base of internal knowledge into meaningful and flexible learning experiences.

At RDG, Ron Heims is building custom low-code, AI-powered apps that solve real, specific problems inside his firm—starting with project data capture. His latest app makes it easy for senior project leaders to quickly review and update key project metrics—like construction cost, square footage, schedule, scope, and client goals—by pulling in existing data from systems like Deltek and prompting them to confirm or revise.

But the app goes deeper: it also enables leaders to speak freely about the story behind the project—design ideas, key challenges, and owner objectives—with AI transcribing and structuring those insights automatically. By combining structured data review with freeform voice capture, RDG is closing the gap between hard numbers and the narrative context that’s often lost.

Ron will share how he approaches app-building as a technically fluent non-developer, how he partners with internal teams to target high-impact workflow gaps, and why these lightweight, firm-specific tools are proving more effective than one-size-fits-all software.

Program Overview

Early Registration is Now Open

We’ll announce the full conference program in the spring of 2025. In the meantime, take advantage of early registration pricing while we plan!

Your registration to KA Connect 2025 includes all sessions and activities, all meals, and Salt Lake City (SLC) airport transportation to and from your hotel (either Sundance Mountain Resort or Provo Marriott), as well as transportation between Provo Marriott and Sundance Mountain Resort during the conference.

Please Note: Due to limited space, only active employees of AEC firms will be eligible to attend KA Connect 2025. If you are unsure of whether or not you meet this criteria, please email us at connect@knowledge-architecture.com.

Why do our attendees keep coming back to KA Connect?

“KA Connect is one of the best AEC industry events if you are looking to get inspired and learn from firms that are in various parts of their KM journey. There is relevant learning and engagement at every level, whether you are a firm leader, design professional or a business partner. Every conference, we meet and forge connections with other firms that inspire us and our attendees go back to our firms with immediately applicable action items — big and small. The KA team also has a secret sauce — not only are they connection builders, but they truly make you feel like they SEE you and your firm and proactively help you navigate through your KM journey, no matter where you are in that journey.

KA Connect was the jump start into knowledge management we didn’t even know we needed. The connections I have made within the KA community are genuine and long-lasting. I still search prior KA Connect speaker recordings for inspiration and won’t hesitate to reach out to another firm to ask questions or openly share details about our own KM journey.

If you are seeking a community that values empowerment through knowledge sharing for the betterment of the AEC industry (and beyond) above all else, consider going to KA Connect. If staying curious is one of your firm’s core values, you will never stop learning at KA Connect…get ready for a transformation!”

Where to Stay

Watch KA Connect 2024 Talks

Questions about KA Connect 2025?

Send us an email    |     415.523.0410