Lendlease: The future of property and construction

Accenture: Lendlease is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and absolute zero emissions by 2040. What's the role of digital technologies in achieving this?

WR: Sustainability is run on spreadsheets and reports. If you look at regulatory requirements, it's oriented around collecting data and reporting in a backward-looking way. People in sustainability know what the right answers are and what we should be doing at construction sites—for example, moving away from diesel—but what we need to do is more complex. For example, we must change the materials we use and make sure that our suppliers are meeting those objectives as well. Our construction projects are incredibly complex, and we can’t become more sustainable without more automation, analytics, and machine learning to give us the insights we need. Digital twin technology will be key to extracting value from analytics and machine learning. It can help us model a complex system, whether that’s a building or a jet aircraft engine. By generating that model and software using real data, you can begin to understand its behavior, look at processes and build something before you build it. You can test hypotheses on fuel efficiency or other elements. Digital twins allow us to explore millions of different alternative scenarios and make better decisions about what we should do in the physical world. Until you do this, you can't deal with the complexity of everything that goes into sustainability. 

Accenture: Everyone's talking about metaverse. But businesses are struggling to understand how to apply it to business scenarios. Is the metaverse applicable to your industry?

WR: The idea that we're going to live more and more in the digital world is how I think about the metaverse. We're pretty far away from what that will be like. For example, are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) really going to have the same value as a physical Van Gogh? I think they will, eventually. Things will have value when there’s a uniqueness to it because that's what people want. We’re in the early days of the metaverse, which provides an umbrella term for the blockchain, NFTs, AR/VR and the future of social. A key question is, do we want to live in the metaverse or not? I actually like the physical world a lot. The hardest thing in the world is not the digital part—it’s making the digital and physical work together. The people who figure that out are going to be the next generation of winners. If you look at Tesla, they did a nice job of bringing the physical and digital together in a totally new way to make a product that people want.