When René Morkos was 22 he spent a year in Afghanistan, working as an engineering project manager at the height of the so-called war on terror. Witnessing death on a regular basis forced him to consider his own mortality and place in the world.
“The thing that I realized was if you’re here for such a short period of time it really changes what you think is valuable,” he says. “The ability to create a positive impact around me was, was really, really super important.”The premise behind Alice Technologies is simple, artificial intelligence-powered modeling software could help the construction industry save time and money.
“Our technology reduces the cost of construction, labor and equipment cost by about 13% and then durations by 17%,” Morkos says. In a multi-trillion dollar global industry such savings would be significant. The construction industry is in the early stages of a digital trans-formation, Morkos says, the potential for “the world’s first construction optioneering platform” is huge.
Morkos likes to relax by mountaineering. He climbed North America’s tallest peak, the 20,000-foot Denali in Alaska, earlier this year.There’s a lot of ways to build a project. Do you build it with one crane or two cranes? Ten steelworkers or 15 steelworkers? Do you want fast drying concrete or regular concrete? Do you want to do 10 hours a day or do you want to do six days a week at eight hours? What we enable you to do, for once, is to simulate those options. You don’t have to rethink anything.