The AIA Conference on Architecture & Design returned to San Diego this June, drawing thousands of architects, engineers, and building product professionals to the San Diego Convention Center from June 10 through 13. For the Anguleris team, it came on the heels of NeoCon in Chicago, close to our base in Elgin, Illinois. Two major industry events in quick succession, and a lot to show at both.
BIMsmith
The BIMsmith booth focused on what the platform does best: helping architects and specifiers work more efficiently through building product research and Revit specification. The booth drew steady traffic across the show, and by the final day the team had connected with a wide cross-section of the industry, from architecture students exploring the expo floor to seasoned professionals looking for smarter tools in their specification workflow.
The BIMsmith Happy Hour on the evening of day two brought partners, manufacturer clients, and architects together at the booth. It was a moment of connection after a full day on the floor, and a chance for everyone to loosen up.
Swatchbox
The AIA Sample Gallery drew architects looking to engage with building materials beyond the brochure. Powered by Swatchbox, the gallery brought together samples from leading manufacturers and gave specifiers room to browse, compare, and discover at their own pace.
It was also a chance to talk more about Swatchbox's Second Life Samples program, a circular sampling initiative that collects unwanted materials from design firms and processes them for reuse on the Swatchbox platform. In a convention where sustainability ran as a consistent thread through keynotes and sessions alike, it was a natural part of the conversation.
Introducing Gaudi
The biggest news of the week arrived on day two with Anguleris announcing the launch of Gaudi, a new AI-powered product intelligence platform built specifically for the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.
Named in honor of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, and launched in the centenary year of his death, Gaudi addresses a problem that every architect will be familiar with. Building product data is fragmented, inconsistent, and increasingly unreliable as AI becomes the default starting point for research. Architects currently track down product information across PDFs, manufacturer websites, search engines, and sales contacts, piecing together what they need before they can specify with any confidence. Gaudi brings that process into a single conversational interface trained on verified AEC domain expertise.
Ask it something like "Give me options to achieve a 2-hour UL fire rating for this wall assembly," and it returns categorized product results with confidence indicators so specifiers can read the reliability of each answer at a glance. Every response is cited and sourced.
"Architects stake their professional liability on the product data they specify. That is a standard no existing AI tool has been engineered to meet," said Benjamin Glunz, CEO and Founder of Anguleris. "Gaudi is built for this from the ground up. We show our work on every answer, we cite every source, and we refuse to bluff."
That last line resonated in a room full of people who have watched general-purpose AI tools produce confident, unverifiable answers about building products. Gaudi's reliability comes from purpose-built integrations with manufacturers and industry data partners, drawing on a narrow, verified database rather than the broad sweep of a general-purpose language model.
Building professionals can try Gaudi for free at gaudi.io. Manufacturers interested in integrating their product data into the platform can request a demo at join.gaudi.io.
Looking Back at the Week
Coming off NeoCon and straight into AIA, the team had plenty of ground to cover and covered it well. Two brands held their own on the expo floor while a third made its public debut. Gaudi is out in the world now, the Sample Gallery reminded people why materials still matter in person, and the LEGO tray at the Gaudi booth probably sparked more conversations than anyone expected.
Comments