Artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting every industry today. While the construction industry as a whole has historically been cautious about adopting new technologies, many are realizing that when it comes to AI, avoiding it is not an option.
However, the AI revolution need not cause anxiety. At its core, artificial intelligence (AI) is simply a technology that uses patterns and large amounts of data to learn tasks and make decisions for itself, similar to how humans learn from experience. However, while current AI tools are good for solving routine problems or simple tasks, we are far from a world where AI is at the forefront of decision-making for construction projects. Instead, AI tools allow construction teams to do what they already do, faster and more efficiently.
In an industry where precision is essential, some construction professionals are understandably nervous about relying too heavily on AI. But leveraging AI in construction today doesn’t mean handing your project over to an automated system out of your control. Instead, AI tools come to the platforms you already use, helping you spend less time on chores and better use your project data.
The AI works in the background, with most of the functionality behind the scenes, meaning you don’t need to understand the nuts and bolts of how it works to use it. What are the benefits of adding AI-based capabilities to a construction project management platform?
- Spend less time on tedious tasks
Administrative tasks such as keying information forms, managing documents and searching for information often consume many hours each week for construction professionals. AI tools can help reduce the time spent on tedious and repetitive tasks, such as extracting the necessary data from drawings and aggregating information from multiple versions of documents. For example, instead of reading half a dozen daily reports from subcontractors, let AI read them for you and surface any potential issues, trends, and red flags in a fraction of the time. - Collect more data more efficiently
Getting the information you need from a workplace is often fraught with complications. Daily reports, point cloud scans, and safety inspections take time and human effort to complete and submit. AI tools help reduce barriers to reporting information from the workplace. For example, instead of filling out a form, a foreman could verbally dictate to their devices what happened that day, and AI can capture, organize and quantify their report so it’s actionable for back-office teams. - Get more value out of the data you have
More data isn’t useful unless you can understand it quickly. That means you need technology to centralize, aggregate, and distill information in real time. AI can do this, providing predictive guidance and identifying trends and patterns in data to inform functions that normally require manual work, such as cost projections and risk identification. For example, financial data such as change orders, budget codes, and labor hours can be synthesized in the context of a specific project to estimate financial and schedule risks.
At Trimble, our vision for an AI-powered future of construction is focused on empowering professionals to be more effective by capturing robust, actionable project data more easily and quickly filtering it to find what they need. Our focus on the field means we innovate ways to make accurate, real-time data flow from workplaces, from images to point clouds to timesheets. Flowing from the edge, this data drives downstream processes and informs project decision-making, and with AI, both collection and understanding will be simpler and faster.
While human oversight is still necessary, AI tools can help you surface the data you need much more quickly and efficiently so you can spend more time on what really matters: moving your projects toward completion.
See how Trimble is bringing the potential of AI to life ProjectSight.
