From our vantage point of serving hundreds of clients and thousands of end users across the architectural, engineering, commercial real estate, and environmental consulting industries, Quire gains invaluable first-hand insights on the technical report function. As we head into 2025, we forecast that the following three trends will greatly impact project-driven companies and how they approach technical report management (TRM).
Macroeconomic Conditions Will Fuel Higher Report Volumes
Report activity on the Quire TRM platform reached an all-time-high this year, and we expect that growth trajectory to continue into 2025. In October alone, Quire users generated more than 25,000 technical report deliverables, representing a monthly all-time-high and an implied run rate of over 300,000 reports annually. Favorable macroeconomic conditions helped drive this surge in volume in 2024 and will continue to positively impact technical report activity in the coming year.
The initial round of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve have already spurred more technical report work in the latter half of 2024. And if rates decline further as expected, lower financing costs will further catalyze report volume as demand for many types of projects increases, particularly due diligence-related reporting for commercial real estate transactions.
As a Deloitte annual survey report indicated, commercial real estate owners and investors have hope that looser monetary policy will improve the industry outlook, with nearly 9 of 10 respondents expecting revenue increases vs the declines of the last couple of years. Lower borrowing costs are also expected to initiate more activity within the commercial real estate, development and construction industries, increasing the need for more technical reports.
A second macroeconomic driver of technical report activity is the significant government funding of major infrastructure projects, led by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act. Major investments in roads, bridges, and other projects will benefit civil and environmental engineering firms in particular. Since much of the available funding has yet to be released, these businesses should see strong demand for their services as more money flows in throughout 2025, driving up deliverable volume.
The specter of uncertainty surrounding the presidential election has lifted to some degree, and that should also bode well for project-driven companies in 2025. While we now know who will occupy the Oval Office as well as the balance of power in Congress, it remains to be seen how this shift will translate to specific policy changes. However, Quire is already seeing optimism among clients across many industries, as they anticipate any changes will be mostly positive for their businesses and as they gear up to handle an increase in technical report volume.
AI Will Transform Report Generation in Unexpected Ways
While conventional wisdom focuses on AI’s role in content generation, we believe its most transformative impact on Technical Report Management (TRM) will emerge in less obvious but more powerful ways. At Quire, we see AI’s greatest potential not in replacing expertise or human-written content, but in transforming how organizations manage and leverage their knowledge assets.
For industries like architecture, engineering, commercial real estate, and environmental consulting, technical reports are vital expressions of specialized knowledge and professional judgment. The surprising applications of AI include:
- Intelligent analysis of past deliverables to extract valuable insights across project portfolios
- Enhanced template management to ensure consistency and quality across organizations
- Advanced search capabilities that help teams leverage institutional knowledge more effectively
- Automated quality control and compliance checking
Through these other applications, AI will serve as a force multiplier for expertise, reducing routine workload and helping new report writers become productive more quickly. This allows professionals to focus more time on the complex analysis and interpretation that truly drives value for clients.
Project-Driven Companies Will Rethink The Report Function
Growth-minded, multidisciplinary businesses recognize that in order to scale, they need to view the report generation and delivery function as a critical business process, on par with project management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM). These functions are central to your business, so you wouldn’t attempt to manage them with general-purpose office software, and certainly not manually; the risks are just too great.
For the same reason, a project-driven company that derives some or even much of its revenue from technical report deliverables should never manage these fee-generating products using manual processes or applications that were never meant for this purpose. Even companies that are highly decentralized (whether regionally or by service line) appreciate that it’s inefficient and insufficient to develop and deliver reports that represent a significant revenue stream using multiple, disparate systems and general-purpose tools.
Instead, forward-thinking organizations are elevating technical report management to a mission-critical business process that requires a purpose-built, enterprise-wide solution. This approach enables them to streamline the process for efficiency, standardize it for quality and consistency, and institutionalize their knowledge across the business. These competitive advantages are critical at a time when talent is hard to attract and retain while demand for technical reports is skyrocketing. In the AEC industry alone nearly 40% of the talent is expected to turn over in the next 6-7 years, creating a massive talent drain.
As the TRM approach demonstrates measurable advantages for these organizations—from significant time savings to productivity gains, quality enhancements, and profitability improvement—they’re adopting it more aggressively to multiply those benefits across more deliverables. Quire clients are now using our TRM platform for 80 different report types, and they’re building and managing 6,000+ templates to develop those reports efficiently and consistently.
Turn to Quire TRM to Transform Your Reporting in 2025
As industry-leading organizations look ahead to the promise of the coming year, many will have an incredible competitive weapon on their side: the Quire Technical Report Management™ (TRM) platform.
Quire TRM streamlines, automates, and accelerates technical report development and delivery end-to-end. This innovative platform transforms the technical report function, enabling project-driven companies to improve report throughput, efficiency, and quality while driving down their cost-per-deliverable.
Our Q3 MarketWatch report underscored the power of Quire TRM to revolutionize the technical report function, as our clients achieved these standout results:
- 10.9% increase in report development efficiency year-over-year
- 9.9% reduction in average editing time
- 21.9% increase in productivity, as measured by average number of reports per user per month
Take a self-guided tour or schedule a live demo of the Quire TRM platform. You’ll discover how the right purpose-built technology can transform your technical report function, improving efficiency, throughput, and quality while reducing costs.
