Digital twins – they’re expensive, right? 

As part of our commitment to learning from experts across the built environment, we’re delighted to share a guest blog from Stewart Bailey, founder and CEO at Virtual Viewing. Digital twins can sometimes feel like a complex or abstract concept for many clients, but in this piece Stewart aims to  cut through the jargon, explain how audiences really engage with new technology, and show why starting with a demonstration matters far more than starting with theory. 

If I don’t set the scene correctly, then without doubt the question I am asked most frequently is: “Aren’t digital twins just really expensive?” quickly followed by, “it all sounds very technical.” And those are just the easy ones! Once the real techies get started, talking to clients about digital twins can be challenging.  

That’s why, whenever myself or one of my colleagues from Virtual Viewing are talking about our solutions, we start with a demonstration of exactly how easy a digital twin can be to use – covering as many WIIFM’s (What’s In It For Me) as possible. 

There are two key takeaways from those opening paragraphs… 

First, we get into the demonstration as soon as possible – that’s why people are there. Personally, I’ve always preferred the ‘don’t tell me, show me’ approach, and it’s helped me out many, many times in my career. Whenever I’m trying to understand the technicalities of specialist topics – something that’s second nature to the practiced wizard but complete gobbledegook to a mere mortal – being able to see it in action can impart knowledge in seconds. 

After all, a picture paints a thousand words.  

In fact, we consume between 80-90% of our sensory input through vision, so showing how easy something is, is way better than talking about how easy it is – particularly for visual learners.  

Secondly, let’s talk WIIFM. Over the years, I’ve deliberately accumulated a little bit of knowledge about a large number of things – as well as a lot of expertise on my own specialist topics – and have learnt that it’s vital to talk in a language your audience will understand and care about. This is particularly true in the case of something potentially so esoteric as a digital twin. After all, if you don’t make it relevant to them, why should they care? Telling an engineer you have a super piece of tech you want to show them won’t hold their attention for long, but saying you’d like to share something that could help them do more with less effort, will probably pique their interest.  

So, coming back to where I started and the question, ‘digital twins, but aren’t they expensive?’ To an asset/portfolio manager I usually reply: “They’re not as expensive as you think and they could save you hundreds of thousands. Shall I show you how?”  

Or, to a building manager with a constrained service charge I might explain: “You’ll be able to save so much time for your engineers and can expect to have complete return on investment within 18 months. On top of that, you’ll usually save the equivalent of 1.4 FTEs every year, forever. And to top it off, you’ll have a much happier engineering team.”  

Yes, it might sound quite ‘salesy’, but if we don’t address these early fears head on, they only fester. 

Speaking of fear, it’s something the team at Virtual Viewing is all-too-aware-of when it comes to ‘pitching’ to engineers – they are concerned the software will make them redundant. This couldn’t be further from the truth, we exist to help them – and we’re always keen to share our growing library of case studies explaining how engineers are getting more done with less effort, discovering data they thought they’d lost forever, and keeping their buildings running smoother for longer. 

Once a digital twin has been in place for more than 12 months, it’s usually the site engineers that are getting the most benefit, day in day out.  

It’s only by seeing a digital twin through the eyes of the user, that the benefits become virtually endless: better risk assessments, faster response times to system failures, data driven predictive maintenance (AI required!), a data room for final transaction and technical due diligence. And that’s on top of clear and easy-to-use maintenance and ‘how to’ manuals, help guides, training videos, carbon monitoring, tenant energy dashboards, fit-out specifications and much more.  

I see my role within our industry as promoting the why rather than the technology that underpins the solution. Look at it this way, most of us don’t buy a microwave because of the ‘whizz-bang’ technology but because it allows us to heat things up faster than the alternatives. We just want the ‘WIIFM’ to be answered – and I spend a lot of my time helping others recognise their own WIIFMs. 

In fact, we have clients that have digital twins but don’t even know it. What they think they have is a suite of apps that solve some very real problems for them. The technology sits in the background and it’s the solutions that are upfront. We even call our digital twins MiHub (short for Management Information HUB) because, at their core, every manager wants information. 

Digital twins are set to revolutionise our industry, and by 2035 every new build in Europe will have one – you read it here first! 

Connect with Stewart on LinkedIn