Of late i keep hearing AI in pretty much every conversation, professional or otherwise.
The Media is going non stop about nVIDIA, ChatGPT and even Gemini, though for all wrong reasons.
I was just wondering what this could mean for construction and here are my thoughts.
Every construction project involves multiple stakeholders (asset owner, approval authorities, project managers, architects, engineers, contractors, sub-contractors, and material suppliers) all from varying disciplines who get together contributing work related deliverables during the project life cycle.
Owners deploy a team of professionals who work with all stakeholders to ensure smooth progress of the project.
This model of working produces Information silos.
The reason is simple. Individual stakeholders use point solutions addressing their specific needs and produce output in their own formats creating information silos.
This has two consequences
Low productivity : The coordination team collates all the information, analyse and resolve conflicts. Despite their best effort, this leads to situations where teams work with incomplete information. This results in errors and necessitates rework leading to cost escalation and schedule delay. The cost of these reworks is ultimately borne by the owner.
Lost insights : Every project produces a lot of data most of which is never fully analysed as they are scattered, unstructured and inaccessible for analysis. This represents a missed opportunity for learnings and developing insights which can be fully leveraged in the future projects the owner might undertake.
Here are a few pointers
13% of construction team’s working hours spent looking for data.
90% of the data generated is unstructured and not easy to access
95% of all data captured goes unused in the industry
Now one of the strength of AI is its ability to collate and analyse vast unstructured data which is otherwise humanely not possible.
Here are a few use cases that can be addressed by building a construction specific model that can access the vast data.
Help with estimating construction time, cost, and materials,
Assisting in tasks like MEP system coordination, clash detection etc.
Help in making better decisions about hiring subcontractors and vendors.
Reviewing past data, analyze and synthesize the findings to assist planning & operations
Reduce wait time by providing answers to field staff queries.