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Tim Gaylord is being cautious when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Gaylord, corporate chief innovation officer at Redwood City, Calif.-based DPR Construction, is keeping an eye on AI and other new technologies that can help the builder in his day-to-day operations.
Here, Gaylord talks to Construction Dive about what he believes are the most critical technologies in the workplace, finding solutions for back-office functions and solving a company’s problems, not their symptoms, with innovation.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Immersion in CONSTRUCTION: What are the most critical technologies in the workplace today?
TIM GAYLORD: I’m looking at a lot of these through the new and emerging side. A lot of what we’re seeing is automated progress tracking.
Project teams want to automatically track and prevent critical path delays by comparing the project’s as-built progress against, in our case, their Oracle P6 schedule on a trade-by-trade or per-area basis.
This is really a great way to keep the score right by tracking work on the site based on models. So I see it more and more critically.
Another critical piece of technology for us at DPR is recruitment. I think it is necessary to improve the recruitment of the sector.

Tim Gaylord
Permission granted by DPR Construction
Procurement delays are a recurring problem that all of our teams face. The dynamic nature of processes such as supply chain issues, schedule changes, and changes in specification requirements cause delays in material arriving on site. Most currently track this in Microsoft Excel, work management platforms like Smartsheet, or some version thereof.
With this comes high risk, human error or simply outdated information. The impact of scheduled delays is quite high. Materials, depending on the project, could account for 50% of the project cost. Acquisition is a thing of multiple processes, iterations and multiple updates with many external influences.
We are trying to combat this with solutions that can create a procurement plan by linking all these procurement activities to the project calendar and integrating procurement workflows and relevant data with the most recent project calendar.
We’ve realized that you don’t have to build everything at home. There are great services that, with the right apps, we can partner with to help us grow. In this case, we’re working with ConstructivIQ not just as a vendor, but as a partner, providing feedback on how the tool is being used and how it could be further developed.
What are some of the hottest new technologies on the market today?
How can I talk about AI without talking about AI?
This is the hottest. We’ve been involved in AI for a while and we’re looking at various AI tools that we want to try, but there’s not really a solution that we’re aware of that’s ready to scale across our business. But, this is aligned with our normal innovation process, and my team is the one looking at them.
I think there is a lot of potential, but also a lot of risk. We want to see the opportunities, to know whether our new ways increase efficiency or reduce risk, but we are doing it very carefully.
We believe that for the next few years, if not longer, AI will primarily be something that helps us aggregate information and make predictions, but humans will still need to review and evaluate that data, manage it, and make the final decisions.
Some other cool and interesting articles are around robotics, and I think AI also aligns well with our explorations of robotic tools.
Many of them are trying to incorporate AI, or could incorporate AI, to improve as they work. Vitally, they likely generate a lot of data, which also helps improve emerging AI.
We’re seeing a shift in realizing, “Hey, we’re not trying to replace workers’ jobs.” We are trying to improve them. We’re trying to get people and our workers out of harm’s way using robotic tools. So this is where our team is exploring a little bit.
What technology do you want to learn more about?
What we want to know more about is how we can leverage the tools to help us identify what the real challenge or the real problem is, or work with one of our working groups and understand the real root cause challenge, not the symptoms.
I think a lot of people identify the symptoms and we want to identify the challenges: what is the current state, what is the future state. This is how we focus our attention.