@Benjamin Regnier, AIA
Your comment is super insightful and definitely got me thinking. Walk us through how you see a better way. If you could redesign this model from scratch, what would it look like?
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Thesla Collier
HNTB, AIA TAP Leadership
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-17-2026 04:28 PM
From: Benjamin Regnier, AIA
Subject: Would the biggest Software Cost danger yet to come with the rise of "microtransaction architecture"?
One of the things that's been reverberating in my head since the national conference is the question of whether efficiency is useful if the majority of the savings is recaptured by the software vendor. Innovations are not useful if they just act as a proxy for the tech industry to recapture our design fees.
One "feature" of tokenized costs - and this is not just AI tools but is now true in many Autodesk products - is that efficiency of use matters in a way that it doesn't with traditional software purchase. AI makes this distinction even more clear because there can be very different token consumptions between users with similar results. Efficiency has never really been part of the design ethos - we work and rework until we get what we want - so I can't imagine "intelligent use" of our authoring software is going to be easy to teach to architects.
If you have to pay by the hour to open it, do you own your building model? If you have to pay a fee for every page do read, do you own your drawings?
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Benjamin Regnier AIA
Gensler
Encinitas CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-19-2026 07:24 PM
From: Kimon Onuma, FAIA
Subject: Would the biggest Software Cost danger yet to come with the rise of "microtransaction architecture"?
Yes, Thesla! This is a brilliant point and a massive blind spot for the AEC industry.
There are already companies addressing this exact threat. At the SCALE 23x open-source conference, I interviewed Matt Small from Revenium.ai , an AI economic control platform, and the t-shirt he gave me to wear literally said: "My agents make more money than yours"
Matt warned that big token providers actually want maximum consumption because "tokens are the fuel, not the fire," with the fire being the actual business outcome.
In the AEC world, we currently suffer from a "Context Deficit." We flatten our rich building logic into dead PDFs and disconnected "spaghetti data" at handover. When we eventually apply AI to operate these buildings, the AI has to burn massive amounts of computational energy, and expensive tokens, just guessing and hallucinating to figure out what is going on. So it is on us as an industry to not waste that intelligence.
We are essentially paying tech companies a microtransaction tax every time their AI tries to decode our own messy data.
The only way to control these costs is to organize our data using open semantic standards and decentralize to the edge so we aren't forced to rent our intelligence back from corporate "AI Landlords".
Here is the LinkedIn post and the full interview with Matt. I am also writing a full, in-depth article about this exact danger-and how we can own our architecture of intelligence rather than rent it, which will be posted in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
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Kimon Onuma FAIA
Onuma, Inc.
Pasadena CA
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