Dive Brief:
- Find out the best use cases, but don’t try to put artificial intelligence where it doesn’t belong, a technology expert from McCarthy and other panelists told listeners last week during a BuiltWorlds Webinar.
- The panel, “Emerging Disruptors in Construction: What, How, Why and Opportunities,” focused on the technologies that are currently, or will soon have an impact on the construction industry, and how builders can prepare. there
- Alex Belkofer, senior director of McCarthy’s VDC, based in St. Louis, urged listeners not to “boil the ocean” with AI, but to find niches for technology that they know will fit their desired workflows.
Diving knowledge:
Belkofer told the audience that McCarthy intended to draw a distinction between standardization and optimization.
“I think AI is really going to help us in the optimization lane,” Belkofer said. “There are tangible use cases for AI right now, but I don’t think you can boil the ocean with AI. you [have] to make it very targeted.”
In addition, Belkofer said McCarthy is focusing its AI efforts on specific data sets that can drive gains in preconstruction, asset generation or programming.
To that end, Belkofer took a phrase he heard at a conference and adopted it himself: The team is “putting AI in a box,” he said.
“If we’re just trying to apply AI to our entire business or to large data sets, I think it’s going to take a while for that to really gain traction,” Belkofer said.
People first
And amid all the talk of modernizing and streamlining work, it’s important not to forget a key part of the construction process: the people themselves, according to panelist Daniel Dart, general partner at the New York City venture capital firm Rock Yard Ventures.
Part of what makes humans exceptional, according to Dart, is our “irrationality,” where something may not make sense, but works just the same, when it comes to creativity and art. With AI, Dart says people risk losing that advantage.
“I think that’s what’s going to get lost with AI. I think sometimes it’s going to be too logical, too rational, and the kinds of things that I think are really beautiful and special,” Dart said.
The positives and the drawbacks
Conversation about the potential benefits and risks of AI has been a common refrain in construction recently. At the ENR FutureTech conference in June, Jad Chalhoub, director of business analytics at San Jose, Calif.-based Rosendin, he compared technology to a drunken Albert Einsteinbrilliantly disseminating complex information that may or may not be accurate.
Other contractors are also leveraging different AI tools to meet their needs: Balfour Beatty’s legal department uses Document Crunch to evaluate and score their construction contracts. Gilbane, based in Providence, Rhode Island, used chat and specialized software from Trunk Tools to manage nearly 21,000 documents while built the $456 million Baird Center in Milwaukee.
Builders, including DPR, are too monitoring the technologybut like Belkofer, use caution.
“We are developing applications based on generative AI designed to revolutionize the way questions about projects, data and documents are approached,” Hrishi Maha, DPR’s AI and data leader, said in the first Market Conditions Report quarter of 2024 of the company. “Our goal is to significantly improve the speed and efficiency of information retrieval and analysis.”
