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Experts in the construction industry have echoed for years that for artificial intelligence, data quality is king. Doug Harrison, vice president of corporate operations for Suffolk Construction, is one such voice.
Harrison has spent the better part of a decade with Suffolk, where he started as a project engineer in 2018. Now, Harrison is heavily involved in how the company incorporates AI into its workflows, a process that aims to take scattered data and present it in a way that builders and executives can understand.
“This is such a fragmented and disjointed business and environment that we work in here in construction, and the world of AI is really bringing it together,” Harrison told Construction Dive.
To that end, Suffolk has done just that established its Jobsite of the Future program, which incorporates AI engineers with project teams to help solve key problems and create new technology tools for successful construction.
Here, Harrison talks to Construction Dive about how Suffolk is adding AI to its workflows, how it’s standardizing technology in its business, and what it considers when looking to buy a technology solution versus when to build the technology itself.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: What initiatives has Suffolk started to incorporate AI into its construction process?
DOUGH HARRISON: It starts with our Future Workplace, which is an initiative to integrate AI into our project teams.
Pair an AI engineer with a project team in a specific industry, because most of our industries have differences in how we deliver. Many of the underlying building principles remain the same, but there are unique aspects of mission-critical work versus health care versus higher education, for example.
Doug Harrison
Permission granted by Suffolk Construction
Linking an AI engineer to our project teams is really two-pronged.
It gives our project teams more of your typical licenses (Claude, ChatGPT) like you see across the industry right now. Our question is: how do you achieve day-to-day efficiency and how do you train those people who are in the projects to actually use it? We want them to use it to ingest documentation and make comparisons for change order reviews, RFI creation, etc. That’s part of their role.
The biggest piece that we believe will create transformative change in the industry is the development we are working on for tools and applications that go hand in hand with our project teams.
How do you plan to implement technology in your teams?
The biggest thing we realized is that you really need a consistent technology deployed to capture the data first.
Is it incredibly important that before you say this is a necessary tool, you have the back-end infrastructure set up to say what data we’re going to pull from it? Will this be a source of truth for us to manage our projects regionally?
Because all of that data flows, not just to our project executives, but that same data goes into our dashboards that our COOs and our CEOs and ultimately our presidents use to manage their portfolio.
You want to think about consistent data collection and technology deployment in the same light.
This is what has allowed us to be successful in standardizing the tools in our portfolio.
What about standardizing these technology tools?
It must prove long-term value. It must change the process we run today for the better.
Right now, we’re working on finding the right partner and platform for shopping and delivery, for example.
Yes, all of these applications are looking for ways to incorporate AI into their solutions, but some have better workflows for the way our business operates. Finding this match helps us manage procurement and delivery.
So there’s a great piece of functionality, right? You need to get field users to test the technology. You need to make sure you get the results you want and that the usability is blessed by these project teams. This is where you want that early adoption.
How you standardize it and then roll it out is really a training strategy, and how you make sure you have the right and robust training for those specific people and those specific platforms.
Today’s contractors are wondering whether it is better to build or buy their technology solutions. What is Suffolk’s position on the build and buy calculation?
It is a constant debate before moving forward with any prototype solution.
I think the relationship with Suffolk Technologies in the BOOST program it gives us the opportunity to see the full view of the landscape and how it is shaping up.
The biggest thing we look at is that if it’s on the cutting edge of a platform we’re currently using or there’s something out there to test, we’re not going to build that app unless it’s something that’s really custom for the way we work. We understand that for standard applications, we will not build or exceed some of the models out there.
We are not a software company. We are a construction company at the end of the day and what we want is to offer best-in-class value to our customers and our business partners. And ultimately, we want it to be the most productive solution possible for our team members to scale and grow in the organization.
