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- Five Things to Make AI Do This Week (and May the 4th Be with You!)
Five Things to Make AI Do This Week (and May the 4th Be with You!)
Charlie Cichetti
May 03, 2026
Smart strategies. Sharp stories. Sustainability that sticks.
📬 Intro: The Route Planner
I asked AI to plan our route through Disney last month. Not the fastest path to Space Mountain but the route that let our whole group make it through a full day in the Florida heat, with cooling stops for the more sensitive members of our party.
It had read the fan forums and knew real wait times. It mapped shade and AC break spots for the day, set alarms for the Lightning Lane drops, and pinned dining that worked for everyone’s allergies.
I was present for the vacation instead of managing it.
The question worth asking now is what to make it do for YOU by Friday.
🌍 Field Notes: Five Moves You Can Run by Friday
🗒️ The Searchable Memory
Bots barging into client meetings is unprofessional. Plaud’s NotePin S clips on a shirt or wraps a wrist for 20 hours, and the desktop app captures remote calls without a bot ever joining. Their unlimited annual plan is some of the best money you can spend.
Auto-Pipe the summaries into a folder your Claude can read, then ask “what did the structural engineer say about the lateral system on the Boulder project” and get the answer with a timestamp (or have it put all your follow up emails into your draft folder!).
Have Claude write a script that pulls your action items from each summary into a Slack channel canvas that only you can see. A personal to-do list, populated for you. Don’t ask for a link to learn this, just ask your Claude instance how to do all of it!
Action items in Slack and follow-ups complete faster than making avocado toast!
🛠️ The Personal Automation Layer
Two moves. First, ask Claude for a small Python script that renames a year of project files into your firm’s convention. Paste it into your terminal and run it once.
Second, Claude for Excel now lives inside the spreadsheet as an add-in. Describe a problem in plain English: “look up the project number, return the LEED v5 prereq deadline, format red if past.” Claude writes the formula or edits the cells with citations to its sources.
📚 The Trusted Lookup
Drop in the LEED v5 reference guide, an ASHRAE chapter, or a city’s energy code to a Claude Project and ask questions. Claude returns cited page numbers you can verify. No more flipping through a PDF for forty minutes to find one threshold!
Then put your phone to work. ChatGPT and Claude both read photos. Snap a damper, a relay, a manufacturer label, and get the model number and comparable products in ten seconds.
Forty minutes flipping through a PDF, gone.
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🏛 Built to Last
The firms doing this well pick one workflow per quarter and embed it. They also notice what the recovered hours are making possible.
By role:
📋 LEED consultants: Drop your reference library into a Claude Project. Stop hunting credit thresholds.
🛠️ Building operators: Plaud, searchable summaries, automatic Slack to-do.
🏗 Project architects: Cyclops from Foster & Partners for environmental analysis at SD’s.
🏢 Principals: Macros and scripts you never asked IT to build.
🧠 TL;DR
Five moves to run this week: discreet voice capture, file scripts, Claude inside Excel, cited code lookups, photo IDs. Pick one. Spend the hours on people.
💬 Quote of the Week
“People do business with people they like and trust. The hours AI gives back belong on the site visit, the client call, the conversation where you read the room. AI can draft the email. It cannot rebuild trust after a hard meeting.”
— Charlie Cichetti, CEO of Skema and LEED Fellow
🧱RETROFIT THIS
🔧TOOLS DOWN
You stopped flipping through a PDF.
You stopped writing the macro from scratch.
You stopped forgetting what the engineer said in March.
You stopped Googling the relay number.
Hours back, for the parts only you can do:
The client meeting. The site walk. The judgment call.
Limited Sponsorship Opportunities Available
Green Building Matters Podcast is now exploring a select number of brand partnerships with organizations aligned with the future of sustainable building.
Reach the professionals shaping the industry—and do it with intention.
✍️ Brian Bollinger, our Head Writer, helps sustainability professionals connect performance, workflow, and real-world results.
🌍️ Charlie Cichetti, our Fearless Leader is the CEO of Skema and a LEED Fellow. He has guided more than 150,000 professionals as building practice continues to evolve.
Let’s Green Up together.
👉 [Explore Sustainability Credentials at GBES.com]
👉 [See what Skema’s building for architects]
👉 [Book a Waste2Zero audit before your next LEED Renewal]
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