Turner Construction Co. announced on November 4 that it will give all of its employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot. The contractor also said it has developed hundreds of custom AI tools, all created by employees through hackathons and AI-assisted “vibe coding,” such as the company’s recent AI Summit in Nashville.
“We’ve always been focused on democratizing innovation and democratizing AI,” says James Barrett, vice president and chief innovation officer at Turner. “How do you put the tools in the hands of the people closest to the work, who know best the problems to solve and the things that need improvement and the opportunities to deliver value to customers?”
Barrett says that as Turner has been introducing ChatGPT to employees, the innovation group has also been training them, eventually teaching them how to build their own AI agents. These agents have the full range of construction activities from field operations, project engineering, supervision, project management, procurement, estimating, finance, legal and safety.
“The great thing about Turner’s business deal and business environment is that we have our own library of AI agents. We’re up to 400 active agents,” he notes.
Barrett says agents Turner has developed, using its own project data and other sources, include Safety Scout, an agent that identifies workplace hazards from photos to support employee safety training. Schedule Insight Agent: Can automate critical path analysis, reducing hours of manual work. Curtain-Wall Evaluation Suite helps teams compare facade options early on to consider buildability, while the Building Decarbonization Policy Explorer maps regional sustainability requirements for early planning.
Barrett says that Turner’s AI users have unlocked more than 70,000 hours of capacity annually and an average of 9,000 AI interactions per day, with users reporting four to five hours of weekly time savings and measurable gains in quality, creativity and trust. He points out that ChatGPT is not Turner’s only business partner. Claude and Google Gemini have also become Turner employee workflows.
“Making AI and everything that comes from it accessible to the average person with virtually no training is a radically different equation than anything we’ve seen before,” says Barrett. “BIM, itself, will be disrupted.”
It enables the launch of $10 billion space networks
Spacial, an AI-powered platform that automates residential engineering and permitting, announced on Oct. 28 a $10 million seed round led by TLV Partners, with participation from Mango Capital, Re Angels and HTV.
The investment will be used to accelerate AI development and expand its sales and customer teams in order to scale adoption among architects, builders and design professionals.
Maket raises seed funding
Montreal-based Maket announced on Oct. 29 that it secured $2.4 million in seed funding to upgrade its AI-powered architectural design platform.
Maket’s AI-powered platform is designed to accelerate the early stages of design planning so architects can iterate ideas faster and get plans approved by clients. The platform also has a homeowner version for residential owners to test different designs for new construction or remodeling.
The seed round was led by Montreal-based venture capital firm Amiral Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, BY Venture Partners, Hidden Layers and Spatial Capital. Maket announced that it is preparing to release version 2.0 of its platform in the first quarter of 2026, which will include a new blueprint generator with more flexibility for tuning and visual renderings.
