What SMPS PRC 2026 Actually Said About Where We Are as AEC Marketers

Two weeks out from SMPS PRC in Seattle, I've been sitting with what I actually took away from three days of sessions, conversations, and hallway moments. The distance helps. What felt urgent in the moment has settled into something more useful—a clearer picture of where this industry actually is, not where the highlight reel says it is.

PRC draws 500-plus AEC marketing, BD, and communications professionals from across the Pacific region. It's one of the better reads on the collective mood of the profession. And the mood this year was different. Not the anxious "AI is coming" energy of the last two conferences I've attended. Something more like reckoning. The conversation has shifted from should we to how do we—and the answers people are landing on are more honest and interesting. Here's what stuck out to me.

The Ground Has Shifted

Benjamin Sawa, FSMPS, CPSM, PMP doesn't sugarcoat things. The SMPS Board President took the stage at the opening keynote and did something most conference openers don't—he told the room the playbook they've been running for the last 20 years is obsolete.

He framed it around four structural forces hitting the AEC industry simultaneously. The talent war isn't easing—there simply aren't enough engineers, scientists, and construction professionals to meet demand, and the "missing middle" of future firm leaders is a real and growing problem. Regulatory and economic volatility has become a permanent condition, not a cycle. Private equity has quietly recapitalized the industry—over 50% of ENR's top 100 firms are now PE-backed, a number that was essentially zero a decade ago. And AI is threatening to dismantle the billable hour model that the entire industry is built on.

That last one landed differently than the others and is something I’ve thought about for quite awhile. The logic is straightforward but the implications are significant: if a task that used to take 100 hours now takes one, you can't bill for 100 hours. The firms that figure out how to price value instead of time will pull ahead. The firms that don't will be in serious trouble.

What Sawa said next was the part worth remembering. Amid all of it, he made the case that marketers and business developers are the most qualified people in AEC firms to lead through this moment. Not because it's flattering, but because understanding clients, strategy, and relationships is exactly what navigating structural disruption requires.

"The seat at the table that felt elusive for years? It's available now. The question is whether the profession is ready to take it.”

The Starting Line Keeps Resetting

Danica Nelson, CPSM, Proposal Marketing Coordinator at WGM Group, opened her session—Sprint to the Podium: Winning RFPs with AI Workflows—with something the room needed to hear: you are not behind.

It's a harder argument to make than it sounds. AI tools are updating every three to four weeks. Models that felt cutting-edge six months ago have been lapped. Custom GPTs built last year need to be rebuilt. Her own presentation had to be revised mid-draft because the tools she planned to demo had already changed. The starting line, as she put it, keeps resetting—which means everyone is at the starting line, all the time.

The practical unlock she offered wasn't about prompts. It was about Knowledge Environments—persistent workspaces where AI already knows your firm's voice, your project history, your staff credentials, and your style guide before you type a single word. Claude Projects, ChatGPT Projects, Gemini Gems, Copilot Agents—every major platform has a version of this. Most people in the room hadn't built one. That gap, she said, is where the time savings live.

She did a quick poll early in the session. Nearly every hand in the room went up for having used an AI tool at work. A fraction stayed up when she asked who had built a persistent knowledge environment. The difference between those two groups isn't AI literacy—it's the difference between experimenting and optimizing.

The workflow she walked through—RFP intake, client intelligence, annotated outline—wasn't about replacing the proposal team. It was about inverting the ratio. Right now, most proposal effort goes into production: formatting, assembling boilerplate, chasing SMEs, reformatting resumes. Strategy, the work that actually wins pursuits, gets whatever time is left. AI flips that. Production becomes fast. Strategy gets the time it deserves. It's the same shift we're building toward at Joist AI, purpose-built for AEC firms that want to stop spending their best people on first drafts and start spending them on wins

But she was clear about what AI can't do. "It can draft the words. It can't do the work that made those words worth believing."

Every metric, every project reference, every staff credential still needs a human eye. The nuanced knowledge of a client relationship, the judgment call on a win theme, the credibility that comes from 20 years in a market, none of that lives in a knowledge environment. That's still yours.

Which raises the real question Sawa's remarks planted: if AI is returning hours to the profession, what are we doing with them?

The Long Game Is Still Human

The Friday morning session Mastering Business Development Strategies and Planning brought together three seasoned AEC BD leaders: Tracy Jenkins, CPSM, of 3QC; Saundra Price of W.E. O'Neill Construction; and Jesse Urquidi of Cordoba. If you weren't in the room, that's the panel you wish you'd been in.

Jenkins opened with a simple question about where marketers were:

• Green means operating with strategic intent including being proactive, disciplined, connecting dots before the RFP drops.
• Yellow means reactive, training toward something better.
• Red means burnout by constantly being in pursuit panic, dropping the relationship work that actually builds a pipeline.
  

Her poll of the room landed almost entirely in yellow, which tracks.

The session wasn't about AI, but it was fundamentally about the same problem Danica raised from a different angle. The busywork of BD: the emails, the scheduling, the pipeline admin, and the chasing, crowds out the human work that actually moves the needle. Eight touchpoints to close a significant contract. A sales cycle that can run two to four years. Relationships that have to be maintained whether or not there's an active pursuit on the table.

Her argument was straightforward: if you're not blocking time for the human work, the calendar fills itself with everything else. Mondays at 9AM with the team. Quarterly reporting and projects that require your attention. Two client or teaming partner meetings per month, minimum, as a non-negotiable metric. Not because those numbers are magic, but because without structure, the long game gets sacrificed to the immediate.

The AI angle surfaced organically toward the end of the session. Jenkins mentioned using AI to crawl datasets, summarize board meetings, and build prospecting lists that would have taken days manually. Jesse Urquidi shared how he used ChatGPT to map every school bond in Los Angeles County in under two hours. Nobody in the room treated this as remarkable, which itself was remarkable. The tools have become assumed. The question has moved on.

What the session kept coming back to was the same thing Danica's did: efficiency isn't the point. The point is what you do with it. Time reclaimed from administrative work is only valuable if it gets invested in something a machine can't replicate like a relationship, a strategic read, a trusted advisor moment that compounds over years.

What I Actually Think

The through-line across three days in Seattle wasn't AI. It was time and what we choose to do with it.

Every session I attended circled back to the same tension: the profession is getting more capacity, and it doesn't quite know what to do with that yet. The tools are moving faster than the strategy. The efficiency is arriving before the intention.

Sawa framed the opportunity. Danica showed the mechanics. Tracy Jenkins, Saundra Price, and Jesse Urquidi made the case for what fills the space AI clears. The slow, compounding, irreplaceable human work of building relationships, developing judgment, and showing up consistently over years.

That's not a technology story. It's a professional identity story. And I think it's the more interesting one.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the technology story too, that’s why I’m at Joist AI, but the firms that figure this out first won't be the ones with the best AI stack. They'll be the ones that got clear on what they're actually for and used the time AI returned to get better at it.

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