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Jesse Velay-Vitow is a deployment specialist and Jonas Lang is the chief technology officer at the artificial intelligence firm Palantir. The opinions are the authors’ own.
For three decades, the construction industry has been told that the answer to its operational fragmentation is other software. The result has been a jumble of disconnected systems, a back office buried in reconciliation, and a field crew that has been largely disengaged. More recently, the solution presented is artificial intelligence; creating the problem of AI pending
We came to a different conclusion: the problem is not the tools. The problem is that no tool understands the business like the people who run it. What construction needs is an ontology.
Ontology: What it is and why it matters
An ontology is a digital model of how your business actually works: the nouns and verbs specific to your business and the relationships between them. a job a foreman A delivery of material. equipment
Each of these exists in your business, trapped in different systems, seen through different lenses by different departments, and reconciled only when something breaks.
Semantics is only half the power. The true value comes from the kinetics (the verbs) of the ontology. Acquire a material, assign a crew, execute a change order, validate a legal claim. Decisions made in one business process inform others. They are captured and composed.
When we design an ontology, we capture the complete view of the business. How to send a piece of equipment, to the mechanic, to the project manager. The ontology becomes the shared source of truth from which everyone operates, while letting each function see its own piece of reality.
4 things that ontology must do
Working with our construction partners like McCarthy Building Cos., Thomas Cavanagh and Lennar, we’ve learned what works. The ontology must do four things, or it is not worth building.
It has to be company-wide. If the field runs on one system and the back office runs on another, you’ve built a new silo on top of the old one. The ontology must span the entire business, from the time a bid is priced to the close of the job.
Must work for blue collar workers. The most important users in construction are those with mud in their boots. If the foreman doesn’t use it, nothing else matters. We design from the field in, not the executive suite out.
It has to work like an Iron Man suit. The goal is not to replace the experienced operator. It is to remove the administrative burden and give them more awareness, speed and leverage.
He must reinstate the business. By codifying how a construction company operates, the ontology allows functions that have been disconnected for decades to function holistically again. Each piece of information is entered once and is then available to the entire company.
The ontology of construction in practice
The basic objects we model with our construction partners are simple: jobs, activities, labor, equipment, materials, and contracts. The benefit of an ontology comes from connecting this data from disparate source systems into a complete, living model of your business.
Time cards For many companies, time cards travel from a piece of paper or an app, through approvals, to ERP, and finally to payroll. Under the best of circumstances, this can take days. If there are exceptions, the burden on payroll teams can be immense. With the ontology, the time card is the same object from field capture to approval, job cost visibility, and payroll. Adjustments can occur on the same day, not the next pay period.
equipment The team is the classic example of a single object seen through many different lenses. The field wants the right machine available when needed. The maintenance department wants all units to have their scheduled service. Dispatch wants the right asset in the right job at the right time. With the ontology, they operate from an equipment record that shows location, work assignment, cost, service status, and future demand.
contracts A typical project contract is hundreds of pages long and contains dozens of obligations, notice windows, change order procedures, weather provisions and insurance requirements. With contractual clauses and AI agents in the ontology and linked to events happening in the field, the document becomes a living stamp of approval for day-to-day operations. Deadlines may appear before they are lost. Notice requirements can be activated automatically.
acquisition A job is generated through hundreds of vendors and thousands of invoices. At most back offices, anything below a threshold is paid because the cost of validation outweighs the risk. Anything above that consumes hours of manual effort and documentation. With AI agents and these documents all located in the same ontology, validation can occur automatically. Designed to ensure you pay exactly what you got, at the price you agreed to.
Each company’s ontology will look different. That’s the point.
The basic objects described are bones. The way your company operates is the meat on those bones, and it’s not the same as your competitor’s.
A heavy civil contractor doesn’t work like a mechanical submersible, which doesn’t work like a vertical builder. Ontology should bend to business, not the other way around.
Without an ontology, AI is loose cannon with a nice vocabulary and no foundations. With one, it’s a tool that knows your business, respects your rules, strengthens your security architecture, adapts to your workforce, and makes your people faster.
