Steve Taylor

Pilot first. Flying school, charters out of Kalgoorlie, Australia, then eight and a half years as a Boeing 747 pilot for Qantas.

Then companies. My first at twenty: a windsurfing shop in Melbourne. After leaving Qantas to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams, in 1999 I founded Mobile Messenger, built it, relocated it to the US, and sold it to Silver Lake Partners in 2007. Living in Las Vegas, I flipped 400 homes. That's where I learned what a build actually costs when the communication breaks.

Yellowstone Club, 2011. I built the first contemporary home in the Club, and the builder I did it with became my business partner.

Earth Elements, 2013. Ben Jones and I realised the area needed a better supply provider. We opened in a thousand square feet, one division, selling some stone. Today Earth Elements runs nine divisions, including our own slab factory, from three showrooms, the main one over 40,000 square feet, with a warehouse in Florida serving our Caribbean operations.

efficiently, 2015. QuickBooks wasn't going to run Earth Elements, so I founded efficiently to build what would. I stood up a global development team and we built the Earth Elements ERP first, still in production. Then Efficiently Design, for the interior design side of a project, item schedules, plans, selections. And for the last three years, the efficiently system: an agentic construction system for designers, general contractors, architects, owners and owner's reps.

I'm obsessed with efficiency. From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, I'm a process nut, and I believe process and structure have been the key to every business I've built.

For the last decade that obsession has had one target: the construction industry. Watching it from the supply side has been an education. Through Earth Elements, with showrooms in Big Sky, Park City and Jackson Hole, we work with some of the top developers, interior designers, architects, owners and owner's reps in the country. I've seen how the best in this industry build, and I've seen what buries them: construction administration. The emails, the chasing, the filing, the retelling of things that were already said. An industry full of people who are brilliant at building, spending most of their day not building.

Embedding artificial intelligence into construction systems changes that. Not a chatbot bolted onto software, but a system where the administration is carried by intelligence, so the people who build can concentrate on building beautiful product and delivering amazing homes for their clients. That's the objective for all of us in this industry. It's the transformation I've spent the last three years building toward, and honestly, it's all I care about.

A final word. There's a lot of hype about AI being transformative. I've worked with it closely, all day, every day, for three years, and we've embedded it deep in our own company's systems. So I can tell you this with certainty: it is transformative. Not incrementally. It will change the way we operate as businesses, as an industry, and as people. The companies that understand that early will look back on how they used to work and wonder how they ever did it.