Jacobs Engineering CEO details move into big data, AI with recent acquisitions

Jacobs Engineering CEO Steven Demetriou joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's purchase of mobility analytics leader StreetLight, the company's recent acquisitions, social equity and environmental solutions, and applications for AI and data.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Jacobs Engineering said today, it will acquire mobility analytics players Streetlight Data for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2012, Streetlight is a big data platform that helps cities unlock mobility insights from location data pulled from smartphone apps. Joining us now in a Yahoo Finance exclusive is Jacobs Engineering CEO, Steve Demetriou. Steve, nice to see you again. It's been a little bit. Congrats on this acquisition. Why are you making this deal?

STEVEN DEMETRIOU: OK, overall, there's a growing need, no matter what the industry is, for localized and data solutions that track the movement of people, goods, and services. And, you know, whether it's climate response or cyber issues or social equity or whatever, that's the importance around the world. And so the acquisition of Streetlight data gives us a tremendous edge on providing those solutions.

BRIAN SOZZI: You know, just tracking, you've been acquiring companies and starting to, I would say, pivot Jacobs more into the data space. Why is that so important, looking out over the next few years?

STEVEN DEMETRIOU: Four years ago, we started this transformation. We've deployed over $7 billion of capital. The first few years were around building our domain of important markets around water, environmental, cyber, and national security and others. But the last couple of years, we've been focused on now bringing innovative data solutions to all of those markets.

And we started with the Buffalo Group, the Black Links, and now the Streetlight acquisition. We've actually been entering into venture capital where we've been putting seed investments, companies like Hawkeye 360 or Microgrid Labs, and forming partnerships, and then even broader, more recently, big data partnerships with the likes of Palantir and others. And putting all that together, we've really built up this unique data solutions platform.

JARED BLIKRE: And can we just take a step back here? Streetlight seems like a really interesting company. When we talk about connected cities, I think most people don't really have a handle, including me, on just how drastically things could change and improve over the next 5 to 10 years. What specifically is the technology they're using? What are they monitoring? And what is the net effect of all of this going to be for the average consumer?

STEVEN DEMETRIOU: If you just start with, you know, the mission that both of our companies have around climate response and ESG, social equity, and look at, say, the climate crisis that we're facing-- you just mentioned cities. Cities put out about 65% of the greenhouse gas emissions that are creating that crisis. Transportation, in particular, is around 30% of those emissions. Streetlight brings innovative solutions where they're able to aggregate data from multimodal sources.

And it's millions of mobile devices. It's connected vehicles. It's IoT sensors and geospatial acquisition. And then they've been able to combine that with a real unique set of algorithms and machine learning process technology that enables to take all that data, contextualize it, and bring it into an area where it provides clients meaningful data to then plan and invest and develop solutions around those areas that I talked about.

JARED BLIKRE: And all of this is incredibly complex, the company centered around artificial intelligence, as you've been talking about. But I'm just wondering and still kind of getting big picture here, when we talk about artificial intelligence and all the investment that's necessary, and you take a look at, for instance, the modern car, you take a look at a Model Y and the incredible engineering that goes into autonomous driving, what's the net effect here for consumers?

I'm trying to get it-- how are people going to-- how are people's lives going to be impacted here? Are they going to be driving less? Are the vehicles going to be such vastly different machines, and that's what achieves your ESG goals? I'm just trying to understand exactly how the consumer is going to be benefiting from this in five, 10 years.

STEVEN DEMETRIOU: Yeah, this is huge for the consumer, for humanity overall. I mean, when you think of traffic congestion and major cities, Streetlight has already entered into arrangements with, you know, several of the Department of Transportation, working on traffic congestion solutions, in some cases, moving people out of cars into public transportation, also connecting people across communities, social equity, bringing infrastructure to entire communities, rather than what's been a problem in the past, just some of the focused higher economic cities. And so it's a variety of opportunities to really improve human life, quality of life, and really address the major challenges that are facing cities and communities around the world.

BRIAN SOZZI: Steve, the last time we spoke I believe was about one year ago today. And there was no infrastructure plan just yet. Now it has been passed. Have you seen an uptick in your backlog because of this new plan?

STEVEN DEMETRIOU: You know, the key is the pipeline because as we mentioned several times in various media recently that this is going to phase in over the course of this year, and then really start to ramp up in 2023 and beyond. And we have seen a pickup in pipeline as we look at the next several quarters of this year and even as we're entering into 2023. So we're obviously excited about the overall infrastructure bill, the IIJA, and we are starting to see the pipeline improve.

BRIAN SOZZI: Well, congrats again on the deal. Jacobs Engineering CEO Steve Demetriou, always good to see you. We'll talk to you soon.