AI for the Construction Industry
How to build for an AI-powered future.
The Path #33
Written by Nate Buchanan, COO & CO-Founder, Pathfindr
Construction is a fascinating industry, and one that has been fundamental to human happiness and economic progress since the beginning of civilization. From humble dwellings to megamansions, to monumental structures like the Great Pyramid or Eiffel Tower, or grand buildings like the Empire State Building or Burj Khalifa, construction provides us with places to live, work, relax and celebrate.
It’s also one of the most resistant to change - not for a lack of initiative among the leaders involved, but rather because it’s incredibly complex and involves a wide range of disciplines including design, engineering, and building as well as back-end operations such as project planning and management, accounting and finance, safety and compliance. Any time you’re putting a building up, peoples’ lives are at stake and “getting it right” is incredibly important. Accordingly, deploying an unpredictable technology like AI to streamline construction processes may seem ill-advised…at first glance. In reality, there are many ways that AI solutions can help construction companies and their suppliers to reduce cost, increase revenue, and improve employee experience. Here are a few examples.
Tender Responses - like many industries, builders often need to respond to tenders in order to capture new work. This process can be incredibly time-consuming and manually intensive, requiring teams of people to spend days on end (weeks in some cases) reading through questions and cutting and pasting snippets of previous tender responses into a new format. Because upwards of 80% of questions can be common across tenders (“Please provide an overview of your company”, “What credentials and certifications to you have”, “What is your safety record” etc) AI can be used to mine previous responses for similar questions and generate a response to a new tender’s question automatically. You could even give priority to responses generated using content from a tender that was part of a successful bid as opposed to one that was unsuccessful.
Contract Review - for complex projects or particularly sensitive content, it’s always best to leave contract creation or review to legal professionals. However, there are ways for them to use AI to make their job easier. One is to keep a list of common red lines that your team often flags in new contracts - things that you see in there that you don’t like, or things that you want to see (but don’t). It’s relatively simple to build an agent that will read through a new contract and flag things for you to review and/or change later.
Design Document Creation or Review - most construction projects require a wide range of designs, from concept drawings to blueprints to interiors. Creating or reviewing these, ensuring that they are feasible/buildable or compliant, and agreeing with the designer on changes to the document are very time-consuming and can cause significant delays to a project. Using computer vision, AI can make it easier to flag discrepancies and potential issues, helping to speed up this process and eliminating a potential bottleneck.
Project Management - dependencies on subcontractors during a construction project can be a massive headache for project managers. AI can sort through a wide range of data inputs and prioritise activities, make predictions about potential delays, and suggest ways to stay on schedule.
Compliance - a wide range of compliance issues can arise during construction. Everything from building codes to health and safety regulations can cause potential delays or, even more concerning, serious issues that can result in terminating a project. AI can help by reviewing construction codes to ensure compliance, using big data to predict safety issues based on external factors like weather, or analyzing input from sensors to identify potentially unsafe situations.
Are you a leader in a construction company or a subcontracting organization that would like to use AI to streamline your work, but you don’t know where to start? Register here to join our next workshop. You’ll get practical tips on how to use AI to make a major impact right away. And if you haven’t already, hit the subscribe button below for access to cutting-edge AI insights every Friday.
Until next week!