How Pathways AI and Giatec are Decarbonizing Concrete

Podcast Transcript

Pouria Ghods  

Hello and welcome to the Construction Revolution podcast. I’m Pouria Ghods, the CEO and co-founder of Giatec Scientific, where we are transforming the concrete industry through smart technology. On this show, we explore the trends, technologies, and innovators that are reshaping the construction landscape and driving real change.  

Today, I’m joined by Leise Sandeman, the CEO and co-founder of Pathways AI for a discussion on the intersection of sustainability technology and innovation in concrete and construction. Leise brings a unique perspective on how environmental product declaration, EPDs, can be more than just a compliance tool. Her team is building technology to help producers and contractors take real action and decarbonization by unlocking insights from their material data.  

Join us as we talk about the future of sustainability in construction the challenge of operationalizing carbon transparency and how companies like Pathways and Giatec are working to accelerate change across the industry. 

Good morning Leise Sandeman. Yeah, very happy that having you part of this Construction Revolution podcast today and hope we can have a very productive conversation, right? And learning from your experience, especially from your background EPD and how basically you and your firm are going to basically bring impact to construction industry. 

Leise Sandeman  

Thank you so much Pouria, excited to be here and it’s always great to spend time together. 

Pouria Ghods  

Absolutely, likewise, right? So yeah, that’s quite my pleasure having this conversation today with you and yeah, without further ado, let’s kick this off, right? So maybe I can start with asking you a question regarding your inspiration, right? So how you started the Pathways AI, the organization? 

What was the kind of inspiration you had and also describe the core value you bring to the construction industry and concrete industry as a whole. Yeah, that would be perhaps nice a little bit of understanding, you, your firm background and also how you started this company. 

Leise Sandeman  

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me give a quick intro for anyone listening in on what we do at Pathways. So, in the simplest possible terms, today we help manufacturers generate product level sustainability. So most typically that’s environmental product declarations, but it’s also a lot of other outputs that are needed to both understand the impact of the products and communicate that in sales and marketing.  

We work across whole set of manufacturing sectors, but of course, for the conversation today, really most interesting to talk about concrete and the derivatives we have, we have aggregates and a bunch of other inputs into the concrete space. In terms of core values and why me and Alex, my co-founder, was so passionate about starting pathways, really had a few different legs.  

The first one was that today, generating and understanding the emission footprint of your mixing concrete is just really time consuming and quite consulting heavy. The typical method is that you hire a firm that sends you a big Excel and they say please fill out this Excel with all of your data from last year and then you are left whether you be a one, you know, one site facility or managed at GM for like 20 sites to figure all this out yourself. Right?  

The typical quotes I heard was well, I am managing 30 different concrete sites and I had to sit on Google Maps and calculate transport distances.  And this felt like a really obvious technology challenge to us, something that we knew we could automate and do much easier.  The second part was that sustainability is exciting when it’s integrated into the workflow, production of improvements of reliability of kind of customer service.  And often it became a bit of like a stick to hit manufacturers or concrete producers in the head with you’re not doing enough, when actually what it is, a helpful tool to understand and improve your own production. So that’s a bit of a value and a philosophy we think we bring to the concrete industry. 

Pouria Ghods  

This is definitely the first point you mentioned is a pain we are hearing very often from our customers, right? Ready Mix producer, right? Generating EPD. Old traditional way or old-fashioned way has been very tedious and also yeah, like not user friendly, right? So, there are lots of complaints we are hearing, kind of confirming your basic observation, which is very valid basically, based on our basic visibility to them, the industry.  

Okay, so yeah, that was a good start. And then with that, maybe I just want to learn a little bit from your point of view. What is your take on how progressive procurement policies or processes are impacting the daily decision making of the ready-mix producer, right? How do you see that these two are kind of related to each other? And if you can add a little bit, elaborate on that side, I think that would be very beneficial for our audience to understand the impact of the procurement policy as well as processes of the procurement even, right? So yeah, how that impacts basically. 

Leise Sandeman  

Yeah, let me give a few different examples and then really curious, because I know, Pouria, that’s certainly also one of the places where people often will turn to someone like Giatec to solve these solve some of these problems and challenges. So, we see our customers get hit by a whole host of different requirements coming from their customers.  

That is sometimes driven by procurement policies that could be, you know, everything from a city, that has included now new development needs to have scope three and embodied carbon that then trickles down to the real estate developer, trickles down to the general contractor, and then that requirements hit the concrete producer. In New York City, that’s things around public projects. So, anyone, almost out of the blue, at least in the experience of some of our customers, they were suddenly asked, well, hey, if you don’t have an environmental product declaration, you can’t even bid on this project.  

Right and what often happens here is that it comes quite out of the blue. And that’s because there’s a whole host of different procurement policies that are potentially ending up in a requirement of an EPD. It can be by-clean policies at a state level, it can be city requirements in terms of procurement and permitting, or it can be larger companies having their own internal policies. So, we see a host of our customers, get requirements from the likes of Amazon and Google about the data centers, right, both across concrete and steel.  Recently, we published the fastest ever EPD in North America in Florida. This is a customer who’s not impacted by any type of traditional policy, but because one of their customers demanded it. 

Pouria Ghods  

That’s cool. Yeah, that’s very important, right? So, considering all those three, four, basically level of kind of policies that can impact ready-mix producers’ kind of serving the industry. Yeah. And thanks for sharing that. Maybe another question, right? So, since you touch on the EPDs, right? So I’m also a little bit focusing of this conversation around EPD or sustainability as a whole. EPDs are becoming more as a baseline, right? So generally, there’s a requirement, right? We see more often, right? In regions or in different countries globally, even, even locally in Canada, right? This is more becoming a kind of standard, right? So, to ask for EPD. How are producers approaching this shift, right? I’m just curious to understand from your lens, what do we need to do to make it a little bit more seamless part of their process and what kind of reaction or right so you see or shift from the previous perspective to that kind of demand right become more standard and how basically they’re shifting their approach to address with new things or new requirements right for say yeah just curious to understand a little bit from your view right so how the producers are reacting to that kind of new norm 

Leise Sandeman  

Yeah. So, I’m sure for anyone listening to this podcast, if they are producer, they might sit in completely varying realities, right? You’re seeing cities that border each other, where in one city, it’s completely the baseline and norm and it is unthinkable to push out a mix without an EPD. And then we’re seeing in a neighboring city that EPD is much more of like a unique selling point or you use it as any sales advantage, even though your competitors don’t have it.   

What we are seeing consistently though is that as this is moving into being much more of a baseline assumption, and maybe for anyone less familiar with environmental product declarations, what does it mean when we say a baseline assumption? Well, it means that your customer understands the exact emission footprint of the mix you’ve had, or by using something like Giatec, you can combine your underlying EPD data and actually optimize based on sustainability.  

And that’s something that requires it to be much more bedded in the workflow compared to what it has been traditionally. And I think that’s a lot of what we’re thinking about at Pathways. So, we’ve just launched a new feature for our ready-mix customers where it’s possible to just upload your mix document. And we all have seen mix documents, right long PDFs with all kinds of information onto our site, and it automatically populates using AI.  

What would the emission footprint be of this mix. That might be relevant if you’re a smaller producer who doesn’t have all of this standardized and integrated into a system. But then there’s also kind of a different play, which is how do you integrate this into coding tools and into your sales process or your QC process whether it be a command or stone mount, like wherever this information might live for you as a  

Pouria Ghods  

Interesting, very interesting. Speaking of workflow, right? So yeah, this is just touch on workflow. In your world, right? So, what would be perhaps ideal EPD workflow, right? If you have no barriers, like no limitation, right? So, to your basic division, what would be a basically good EPD or ideal workflow, right? Seamless, I would call it seamless workflow for EPD generation.  

Yeah, can you maybe walk us through, right? Basically, maybe with example, what will the workflow look like, whether it’s an integration with maybe a smart mix at Giatec or Pathway AI tools that you have or other solution you have, right? If there is no limitation, let’s say that there is no change management, limit barrier, just what would be ideal world, right? So, from that point of view. 

Leise Sandeman  

Yeah, I love that question. We spend a lot of time thinking what is the ideal and then what are the shortcuts that can get us to that? Maybe let me start with kind of two different pieces first. So, what is an environmental product declaration? It really includes, you know, a few pieces of data. What is your input materials? So, who did you buy your cement from? And where did it come from? 

Did it come out of Turkey, or did it come out of a plant closer located to you?  That drives, of course, transport. And then what’s your actual plant intensity? So, are you linked up to the local electricity grid or do you fuel or gas in your kind of production process? And then, course, where in some ways I think of kind of Pathways and Giatec being perfect complements is mix optimization. 

What Pathways is really good at is scenarios around your supplier or your plant operations.  But where I think of something like SmartMix, it’s all around how you optimize the mix. 

Pouria Ghods  

And also, ingredient of the mix, So yeah, yeah, proportionally how basically, yeah. 

Leise Sandeman  

Absolutely. It’s kind of like one play is like, which are the suppliers of the different ingredients, and the other one is how do you actually mix that in? 

Pouria Ghods  

Yeah, the quantity of each gradient so that you can basically aggregate them into the one EPD per mix. 

Leise Sandeman  

That also means that for environmental product declarations, there are in some ways two steps. There is getting your plant set up in the first place, and then there is the ongoing use of integrating it into your mixed software and making sure you’re constantly pushing and updating it. When we think about setting up a plant, let me take the example of Southwest Concrete in Florida.  So, this is a plant where we don’t necessarily have some kind of big data integrations with the systems they’re using. 

But what we’ve enabled through our technology on the Pathway side is really to say, just send us, just upload exports of, you know, whether it be your utility bills, your waste information, often it’s just exports from your procurement system. And then we can actually build all of the, all of the setup in terms of an EPD. Why is that an ideal workflow? Because for a one plant or two plant or five plant producer, it means they really don’t have to spend more than maybe an hour finding all this data and uploading it.  

For bigger customers, and here there’s an interesting example with Heidelberg where we are rolling out across a bunch of their ready-mix concrete plants. We’re building integration with a player like Command Alkon. The philosophy there is, if this is all about data, go to the system where the data already lives. So instead of their own plant having to go in and log in and export and upload to Pathways, we at Pathways are building integrations with these main systems so that we can get it from there. In my ideal world, you then don’t really have to do any work as a producer, it’s mostly about giving allowances to sharing data. 

Pouria Ghods  

Okay, that’s very interesting. But just curious, just adding to that, right. So how do you see the role of verifier or those organizations that need to be externally validated or verified or maybe a better terminology? I cannot remember, maybe it’s a better term, you can correct me. Yeah. Well, what would be the role of those?  

Are they going to add significant values or in the ideal world, you rather just have kind of like a trust system, right? So self-claim and if anybody wants to basically ask for kind of audit the system or ask for external information, right? So that kind of, even on the certification and the hardware, right? Coming from the hardware background company, right? There are two systems, right? 

So, CE, for example, in Europe, you can claim it, but if somebody questioned you or asked you for documentation backup, you need to have all the test data basically to show them, right? This is the right claim. 

Do you see the ideal world that approach is better or kind of, know, I think current approach at least in North America, I understand it needs to be validated, the third party verifier. How do you see in the ideal world, right, how the system should be right. Is EPD as a kind of stamp, right? Leave it to people to just claim and defend it if there’s an issue or go through kind of the processes of approval, making sure that everything is published is kind of valid and well audited it in advance, right? Yeah, I don’t know whether I explained. 

Leise Sandeman  

You’ve explained it perfectly. So I personally and we at Pathways are huge believers in third party verification. That does not mean that how verification works today is perfect. By any means, right? What it often includes is creating an enormous matrix. And then what we’ve found sometimes, at least, this also depends from verify to verify is that the corrections you get are more like you spelled something wrong rather than actually driving into the underlying assumptions of how it was built.  

But that’s something we also work with program operators, which are kind of the overseers of the verifiers on to make more efficient. So the advantage of that system is that you continuously have the trust in the environmental product declaration. I like to make this parallel that an EPD is like the environmental nutrition label, but instead of calories and carbohydrates, it’s chemicals and carbon. Right.  

And if you couldn’t trust when you turn around the number of calories, like the value of that would fall really quickly. So that’s certainly kind of the systems we’re pushing towards. We’re trying to automate a lot of this in pathways. So, you could even imagine saying a trained AI agent on top of all this data that a verifier can ask questions, say, where did this come from? And then it pulls up the answer. Instead of, I mean, it must also just be very boring to be a verifier, going through someone else’s Excel model, and a big matrix. I mean, these are people who are passionate about sustainability. I don’t I don’t imagine it’s kind of a fun job for them 

Pouria Ghods  

Fun job for them exactly. Yeah, I think that there is a great place for AI, right? So, to feel that gap and kind of audit automatically and also maybe a random check, a spot check, right? Different kind of auditing system. I mean, I’m borrowing that auditing thing from finance for, right? So that, yeah, human beings’ involvement would be less and make it faster, easier goes through that validation and still trusts, the trusts, you know, they are not compromising on the trust, right? It is still the reliable EPD that everybody can trust. So, and then that helps actually even on the adoption of the EPD, right? Using more of it, right? Or see it more, EPD basically usages. 

Leise Sandeman  

Pouria one question to you, because you obviously also sit at the intersection of this is we know sustainability is never the only priority, right? Our customers are producers, they’re incredibly busy. A lot of what we do is we make it just easier for them. We save them time and cost and that really is the value. But I guess from your perspective, how are you seeing the tradeoff of sustainability and, you know, other priorities, especially in Canada, but also wider North America? 

Pouria Ghods  

No, actually that’s a very good question. As a matter of fact, I had a similar question to you but let me give you my view and then I’ll turn it around to you. Yeah, honestly, it is what we learn in North America at least, right? So especially this fast-forwarding, fast, fast-spacing environment or fast-spacing world, right?  

Especially with AI tools or advancement, we see that people are less patient, right? So, or less… Yeah, they want everything to be eventually automated, but yeah, so that they don’t need to put extra FTE or extra hours, extra billable hours, right? So yeah, this world, especially with the new generation even, right? It’s going to be worse, right? The expectation is going to be very, very high.  

So, anything that’s going to be perhaps on the sustainability side or green or even innovation, to be honest, its user experience, right, or user friendliness, right, or make it not extra burden, right, or extra clickable. Make it significantly important. It’s becoming significantly important, even more important, right?  

These days, people don’t want to drive, right? So, if I just want to just take a car and just self-driving car, right? Those kind of mentality, we see that more often even coming to concrete industry. And from our side, anything, right? So, they are okay, I mean, with the cost, right? So additional technology costs. But what they are perhaps more hesitant about is more human or human efforts, right? 

So human efforts translate to cost. And nowadays, you know, cost of human, we know that this in North America is significantly part of the operational cost, right? So the FD human. And for that reason, anything that you think of from innovation or sustainability point of view, is seeing it or build it actually through a technology lens to make it have really minimum human touch, right?  

So that would be a significant barrier or maybe a catalyst, right it depends on how we look at it for adoption right to go over the kind of change management all those things otherwise you know like it’s going to be very costly and also difficult to go to expect people  learning new tools, like do the change management, get used to it.  

So yeah, from our point of view something that perhaps, is very, very user friendly or with minimum human interaction would be the future. Next five years definitely, that would be the expectation of the market. So, I mean, with that, I will turn it over, right? So yeah, what is your view on sustainability and cost, right? So how can we get to the basic reward that in sustainability especially, right?  

Sustainability is not going to be at extra cost right like a bottom like the bottom line is still going to be the same bottom line so that they see something that is not going to be at their own cost right or there is a ROI or return on the investment.  

Is there any solution right so especially in the area you’re working on I’m curious EPD that make it yeah, bring them some saving or basically kind of extra revenue differentiation anything that they can benefit so that they do not see it as an extra cost, right? 

But yeah, it’s just the breakeven concept, that’s what we learn, right, is acceptable. That is a good thing with this industry. What extra cost justification without knowing how, what would ROI be, return for on the commercial side, right? Yeah, just curious to see what your view on that is. 

Leise Sandeman  

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I completely agree with your analysis. And that’s a lot of what like what you just said before, in terms of the importance. And that’s exactly how we build pathways, which is, it basically requires you go from spending maybe somewhere between 20 and 40 hours, and something that can drag out over four to six months to being down to, you know, one, two weeks with one hour of effort.  And, and that time saving being probably the biggest differentiator in terms of in terms of our customers.  

I mean, the reality is we are in an incredibly I mean, concrete specifically is slim margins, high competition. Anyone who is in this space knows that which means you justify all of your investments. Absolutely. And, and that in some ways is kind of a premise for this. We are seeing a few different ways that we are helping our customers use this to actually, like the producers use this to communicate with our customers.  

The first is once you’re set up on something like Pathways, you can generate a new EPD for every single mix you do, which means you’re able to actually integrate this into your sales workflow, even on projects where you might not have been asked for this information. And that is enabling our customers to use this much more actively as a unique selling point.  

Or have conversations about comparisons in terms of different mixes and that way show that they can be a thought partner to a GC or a developer who might be thinking about this. Again, because it is such a competitive market, it does not have to be that sustainability is even top three concerns for the GC. It could be that it is number five. But being able to provide this information in a thoughtful and very easy way is becoming very valuable.  

The second part, of course, is the very practical one, which is what is the cost of losing a project because you don’t have this information, right? That is most likely going to be more than a couple of thousand dollars, which normally is what the price is of setting up a platform like Pathways on a Plat. So even as we think about that risk of losing business is often where, you know, maybe more conservative producers who’ve been holding back are starting to make that investment. Because even if you just lose one project, that is something that impacts your business significantly. 

Pouria Ghods  

Absolutely. So, in a way, you can translate it to loss of opportunities. So, if they don’t adopt EPD, I think the biggest value proposition here, loss of opportunity, so that they cannot be in project, they’re going to have more lost project, and they’re not going to be competitive enough in a more fast-evolving market. That was an interesting kind of summary. So that is cool, the marketing tag. 

Great, also maybe just, I will shift the gear a little bit toward the understanding a little bit better, right? So yeah, like the technology side, right? Tech side, right? I know that the backbone of your solution is AI and technology like a software solution, right? Or digital. I’m just curious to see based on your observation, what kind of gaps you have been seeing or exist to your opinion, right, at the moment in the, on the tech stack of this industry, right? You briefly touch on that, right? But I just want to, if possible, you expand on that, right?  

So, what kind of gap you are seeing in the tech stack of ready-mix producers, right? Operation or day-to-day operation that kind of inhibiting factor, right? Prohibiting maybe them basically as a barrier, right? So, to basically adopt EPD or as a whole, right? So, like a sustainable, any other sustainability solution, right? So, what about EPD perhaps is more relevant to this conversation? Yeah, just curious, right? So, what kind of gaps already exist?  

Leise Sandeman  

So, I’m going to start out with a hot take, which is it’s not always. So, this really varies depending on the size of operations, right? If you are managing one, two, three to five plants, the reality is you can do that with almost perfect efficiency, just based on some GMs with great experience.  

One of our philosophies of Pathways is we use AI because it allows us to, for example, ingest data that isn’t neatly kept, right? So, it allows us to ingest PDFs, which is almost like using modern technology to not annoy you in your day-to-day operations. Most of our customers we chat with on the phone. Why? Because they are working their sites and phones are the fastest way, right?  

They don’t jump on a Zoom or a Google Meet call or a Teams call, right? That’s just like adding additional friction. So, I think there’s something here about a philosophy of how do we use really modern tech to meet producers where they are without them having to become IT experts.  

Pouria Ghods  

Yep, absolutely.  

Leise Sandeman  

And that’s been a really kind of important philosophy of ours. That said, we all know that as soon as you start looking at bigger operations, you might have a fleet you need to manage. I mean, a lot of the work you’re doing on smart mix, right? Mix optimization is incredibly complex. It’s one of the best uses of AI.  

And in some ways, I think of Pathways as something that really neatly integrates with an advanced data stack. But our data collection philosophy is that might be someone who texts us the key piece of information, and we have the text integrated into our platform. So, it just pulls from there, right? High and low tech at the same time. 

Pouria Ghods  

Absolutely. I know that that’s very, very interesting observation, right? So, we have similar cases, right, in maybe a smart mix, test data, right? Break test data, they call it break test data, right? So, they are receiving that on a very kind of regular basis, right, from test lab contractor even, right? So, providing the complete test result, but what we’ve seen, learned that, yeah, even they don’t have time or basically there’s no easy way for them to translate or transfer those PDF data into the system so that the system and that’s most important part of our basic system, to see the test data to do the optimization based on the performance. 

And what we did in order to make the job easier, right, we asked them just auto forward, right, any email, right, put the rules, any email that has a test data attachment forward, and we will basically do the kind of AI-based OCR kind of, and just transfer them seamlessly to the system, right, just another example you mentioned.  

We tried to offer solution, but at the same time, we do not expect…with expectation that the industry still is behind in terms of the tech adoption or tech savviness, all those things. And we tried basically at the same time using technology to bridge that gap, to make it easier so that they can communicate with email, even with the system, just forward the email or auto-forward the email. And we will take care of the rest so that you do not need to basically do the manual entry or just another example that. 

Leise Sandeman  

I love that. No, I love that. Because I am also like, I mean, both you and me, Pouria go into worlds where tech is being kept as the Holy Grail. I am like, we live in a material world. Most of this is about moving one material from one place to another place, whether it be the inputs that are procured, how you manage your inventory, right? These are like real things, right? And then you can use technology to make that easier. But I think too often it’s being made too elitist, whereas in our experience, you know, as long as you have the information, we can take it in whichever way and technology should be there to make life easier not harder. 

Pouria Ghods  

Exactly. That’s super important. That’s good, actually a good point you raise here. Yeah, that was very perhaps insightful. So yeah, and also perhaps for other people who are listening, right? So that’s kind of a good way of saying how we are thinking, right? Giatec and Pathways, they both make their life easier, not necessarily the other way around, right? That’s perhaps one of the key messages from this conversation.  

Okay, maybe for the sake of time, I will ask you maybe one or two more questions if I may, and then you can perhaps open it for any other comments you may have or question. Yeah, just maybe, I think we talked about the barriers to adoption a little bit, right? Maybe just a little bit, since we already started, right, as a good segue.  

Let’s talk about the culture, right? So how do you see the culture of the customer, internal culture, organization culture, right? I mean the way they run the business. As you mentioned, each of them is different, depending on the small, medium, or big sizes, right? They have different kind of internal culture or internal buy-in events, right? And also, different stakeholders, right? Within the organization from batch versus dispatch, executive leadership, QC team, right? GM, right? So yeah, there are lots of stakeholders. They have different kinds of responsibility, and they are wearing different hats. 

How do you see, how important basically is the culture of the team itself, the overall culture of that organization when it comes to pushing sustainable solutions or innovation, right? So yeah, do you see any relationship, right? So that sustainability, I know that is fragmented, it is a market geographical kind of region by region or even within the city to city. There is a trend, right? Based on regulation or expectation of the market and construction as a whole, the construction trade is very local, right? Even North America from state to state, from city to city, you see the different trade even, right? So, one city uses more concrete. 

The other one maybe more steel a structure, right? Even to that extent. But within that kind of like a scatter or fragmentation that we see, is this still a one-to-one relationship with the culture of the organization within that concept to the adoption of sustainability? Or if you see that it is more driven by policies or regional things than basically the culture of the organization? I don’t know whether I clarified that right.  

Leise Sandeman  

You did. I get totally what you’re talking about here. And I am sure you have it when you talk about SmartMix and using new technologies, which is like how willing are people to learn new things, to use new things. I mean, I think culture drives everything. That’s what we find across our customer base, across our own team. 

Pouria Ghods  

Yeah, interesting, that is interesting. 

Leise Sandeman  

I think the most important cultural factor we are finding that can really drive this is the amount of such a buzzword, like empowerment, right? We do not have limits to the number of users who can be on our platform. And in organizations where the philosophy is, hey, everyone should be able to get access to these things, you might get someone who you didn’t expect, who is suddenly playing in our scenario planner and finding out that there is a, you know, a different cement that actually also comes in that has a much lower emission footprint, it might not be the person you expected it to do it. 

Pouria Ghods  

Yeah, that’s true.  

Leise Sandeman  

So, there’s a little bit of like, if you don’t allow people to get that data, to get their hands on it, it’s very hard for them to do it in the first place. 

Pouria Ghods  

Yeah, no, that’s very interesting actually. Yeah, that was our observation, definitely, right? So, the adoption of technology at least as a direct relationship, right? It is very direct actually with the culture of the organization. But I was not that much, it was not visible to me that even sustainability, because I was thinking more like in New York, for example, right, compared to Texas, right, driven by local regulation, policy, how much the provincial, like state government or like they’re pushing. But interesting is still the culture is the number one, right? So that’s a very interesting point.  

Leise Sandeman  

Is that also what you are finding with your customer? 

Pouria Ghods  

Absolutely for us it is the direct one, right? So, it doesn’t matter where they are located. Yeah, some company innovators, whether more culture of adoption of new even like experimental risk taker kind of and enable people to try things fail and they are not much kind of strict policy, right? So very kind of strict on the budget, right? To give a little bit of innovation, people try new things and also part of their professional development, right? So, culture that lets people try a new technology at least for a year, right, or two. 

And that way they believe that they can basically evolve faster, right? So, this is a kind of culture we see that they’re more open to adoption, but there are other cultures that they want to wait, to see maybe 50 % of the market using that is 100 % guaranteed. ROI is guaranteed as a direct line and safe and then the job is quite often lagging.  

But definitely for us, finding there are like a few people that have right culture at least or advocate. That makes it significantly different, right? So, if those people don’t exist in the, even in organization that are open minded, they just want to explore or also understanding that, you know, the technology is not perfect, right? They need to be a little bit patient, right? So, to make it, to show them the ROI or benefit, that those type of kind of customer are kind of ahead of the curve, right, in terms of adoption. 

Okay, but what interesting EPD, sustainability, I didn’t expect. That this is important, that much important, right? I thought maybe it’s a second, third one, but that sees that is one of the important factors.  

Awesome, so maybe last question, right? So yeah, just what does success look like, right? So, in your opinion, right, in five years, right, especially from EPD point of view, right? So yeah, what would be perhaps, things that you want to say that wow, in five years, such good basic progress, right? As a whole, right? Industry got to maybe 90% of the mix season, has EPD or EPDs in the real time, whatever it is, right? So, in the EPD world, right? Maybe you just limit it, make it easier. What would be your basically ideal world in five years, right? So yeah, you expect, or you wish to that in the world. 

Leise Sandeman  

Yeah, and, and to be fair, I think my wish on this is also how I what I think is most likely. So, you know, so I’m originally from Denmark and, and legos, so which means I love Lego analogies, right. And I like to say buildings and infrastructure; it’s just like Lego. It is just the sum of the bricks. And, and the only way we can decarbonize our heavy industry, our built world is brick by brick. 

So, this is not just concrete, this is all material, right? Whether you would be making a sink for the bathroom, paint for the wall, the steel beams, or the concrete. And I absolutely think that in five years, EPDs is the same as having your safety sheet and your delivery note. This is just the core basic information about a product. And what will that really look like?  

That will be enabled by solutions like frankly, what we’re building at Pathways, but also other players who are making it much easier to create this because if it’s as painful as it is, for most concrete producers today, then of course no one is going to get it. Whereas if it’s integrated into your existing data system, and you do not have to do anything, but push one button, then it’s very easy. And I think maybe I mean, one thought I would want to give to any producer listening to this is, it does not have to be hard. Right? 

Like, we really stand by the promise of this takes an hour of your time. And then you’re set up. And, and sometimes that means we say, we are checking in with you 15 minutes every day this week.  And we are making you open your data system, and they’re just exporting from it. But then it’s done. It’s all built in, right? Because there’s nothing worse than a process that drags out. I think that’s the kind of key pieces that are going to enable what I think is going to be an enormous shift in the next five years. 

Pouria Ghods  

Awesome, very realistic actually. Thanks for not making it imaginary, right? So yeah, just the realistic, right? So yeah, expectation and I think it’s achievable, right? So yeah, it’s achievable. It’s just enablement piece if you enable the industry to basically do it much, much easier, faster at lowest cost in a way, because yeah, if a human is less involved and everything is available in the same place. Yeah, that would be perhaps very, very realistic expectation or goal to have in five years. Absolutely.  

Okay. So yeah, with that, just want to make sure maybe we can have, we have one or one minute to wrap up. Do you have any other comments or thoughts or ideas to share or any questions even for me? Right. So, anything just, yeah, before we wrap up as from our point of view, it’s been a very productive conversation and also yeah, I really learned and I hope our people who are listening, people who are listening to this podcast, you know, benefit from this insight sharing from your side, absolutely. But anything that you feel that you know, missing or you are going to add, yeah, please. 

Leise Sandeman  

So, I guess one fact that I just recently learned and which I guess I think was really interesting was that NRMCA has verified more EPDs in May this year than they did all of 2024. 

Pouria Ghods 

Wow, in one month.  

Yes, in one month, when we talk about, you know, things are changing or kind of we’re seeing movement, what all we are seeing is kind of expansion and growth. And the risk here for producers who don’t have this information available is that they end up lagging behind. And that’s probably kind of what one of the places where we, where we pay attention right now, is to make sure everyone gets on board or on this wave and are able to use the information.  

And then I think I mean, I, I love the work you guys do on SmartMix and integrating all this because it is complex, right? And it takes, I like to say we are in the business of we’re not in the business of inventing the silver bullet, right? That is the people who are doing kind of chemical innovations on how to reduce clinker usage, right? We are in the slivers of silver. 

Right? Pouria is cutting out small slivers of silver. And so, are we Pathways? But together, all those small slivers of silver can become the bullet. 

Pouria Ghods  

Absolutely. That is a good analogy actually that you used to explain what we are doing at Giatec and Pathways. Great insight. And also, thanks for sharing that stats from NRMC. That’s been very interesting and also promising. Acceleration hockey stick pass. And perhaps that’s a great opportunity for your organization and other organizations focusing on that. So yeah, to basically take advantage of this adoption curve, which is great. 

Awesome. So yeah, with that, I just want to thank you for your time today. It was a great conversation and then hopefully there will be another occasion. We will basically have a similar conversation on this topic or another one, right? So, for me, it’s been a great pleasure actually speaking to you today. 

Leise Sandeman  

Pouria, always a pleasure and really appreciate it. And we will speak soon. 

Pouria Ghods  

Likewise, thank you very much. Have a wonderful day.