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In an era of rapid technological advancement for the construction industry, one piece of technology rises above the rest in status and notoriety: artificial intelligence.
Its omnipresence in the larger business conversation has not escaped construction. While industry professionals took a cautious stance toward the technology after its widespread release in late 2022, contractors are now increasingly turning to AI to solve business problems, largely through chat-like interfaces that deliver hard-to-find project specifications with just a few keystrokes.
For example, Balfour Beatty, based in London, is in the process developing StoaOnea large language model generative AI assistant that will help employees mine what Kasey Bevans, Balfour Beatty’s US chief information officer, calls “billions of unexplained data points.”
“To our teammates, it will feel like StoaOne is talking to them, providing instant insights and project information as they procure, plan and execute their projects,” Bevans said in an email to Construction Dive.
Swedish contractor Skanska is also working its very own AI helper: Sidekicka generative AI chatbot based on the same technology as ChatGPT, which will help company employees learn about the company’s collective expertise on projects and issues. The company told Construction Dive that Sidekick had seen more than 2,500 interactions in the 30 days leading up to Dec. 16, when Skanska pulled the data.

Suffolk Construction uses Boston Dynamics’ Spot, a customizable quadrupedal robot that specializes in capturing data while walking.
Permission granted by Suffolk Construction
Using AI in this way addresses one of construction’s oldest and most fundamental challenges, namely gathering and making sense of information from hundreds and even thousands of project stakeholders in an industry more fragmented than unified. The result has been an AI arms race among contractors to develop tools (or assemble them off the shelf) to make sense of myriad data sources in seconds.
“Data is everywhere and it’s unstructured, and the challenge I’ve had over the last four or five years is finding the right meta-tagging schemes or structures to make it useful for everyone,” said Mike Zeppieri, VP . of emerging technology at Skanska USA. “What AI has allowed us to do is not have to worry as much, as long as we integrate it into a data model.”
Top to bottom and bottom to top
However, as AI democratizes access to project information and the knowledge gap closes, contractors are also eager to adopt it faster and better than their peers.
While most see it as a tool to help their business, contractors also experience underlying and underlying pressure to adapt or fall behind, whether from higher-ups in the home office or the telegraphed sense of urgency from teams on the field.

Skanska is using AI to build its projects faster and better.
Permission granted by Skanska
Small contractors in particular have reached a tipping point in their businesses where it’s important to keep up with technology adoption.
“It’s time to grow up or consider an exit very soon,” said Chad Prinkey, CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting, a Baltimore-based strategy consulting firm. Prinkey added that for a company to make these leaps, it needs financial strength.
“If you’d rather save yourself the hassle of growth, consider selling as close as possible. Small business prices will decline as the sophistication gap between them and their buyers widens,” Prinkey said.
In this sense, technology leaders can be squeezed from the top down, but also from the bottom up, where if they don’t implement AI as a business, their boots on the ground can go out and acquire it themselves. For example, while Gilbane prides itself on being a technology-forward contractor, its field staff has been clamoring for even faster adoption.
“We [started] hear a lot of feedback and a lot of noise from our field crews, saying, ‘Why don’t we do this?'” said Rawle Sawh, Providence, Rhode Island-based director of operations technology for Gilbane Building Co. “‘A competitor of ours is doing this. Why don’t we do it?'”.
More technology, more money
Contractors around the world are already experimenting with AI as a means to improve their businesses through outsourcing.
Gilbane, for example, used the chat offering from New York City-based Trunk Tools track nearly 21,000 documents in their joint venture’s $456 million renovation of the Baird Center, a Milwaukee convention venue.
“How important is AI to business as we move forward?” reflected Lindsay Marshall, director of data and analytics at Gilbane. “We recognize the power and importance of staying ahead of the value that AI can deliver.”
As the value of AI grows, so does the cash outlay by contractors looking to leverage it better, faster, and smarter.
Jim Barrett, chief innovation officer at New York City-based Turner Construction, said the company has at least tripled or quadrupled its investment in AI over the past two years.
Barrett said that while the company already has in-house AI staff, the next steps would be to implement other large language models, such as Google Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude. another conversational LLM backed by Google and Amazon, and integrate them into the company’s internal systems.
“We’re moving very quickly, and the challenge is to keep up with the pace of improvement in AI solutions,” Barrett said.
Gilbane’s philosophy on using AI is similar. Sawh said if the teams can demonstrate the need for a solution as well as a return on investment for the builder, Gilbane is likely to do it.
“Let’s just say, where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Sawh said.
No risk, no chance
While contractors say AI offers a number of benefits, the advance comes with an implicit problem: Builders who lag behind in adopting the technology also risk losing a competitive edge in the marketplace, say the experts
Turner’s Barrett echoed a popular refrain: that AI won’t take a worker’s job, but the person using it. The same, he said, is true of businesses, as a builder that uses AI will disrupt the business of a builder that doesn’t.
“What I see in our industry and other industries is caution, almost fear, imagining all these scenarios of things that could go wrong,” Barrett said. “If you want zero risk, you also have zero chance.”
Balfour Beatty’s Bevans agreed.
“We also know that embracing new technologies and implementing them into our operations sets us apart so that we can significantly change the construction industry,” Bevans said.
Gilbane’s Sawh takes a more measured approach. Despite the company’s continued adoption of AI, the technology’s status as a make-or-break tool is still undecided, he says.
“I don’t necessarily know if it would sink the ship,” he said of not adopting AI broadly across the business to maintain a competitive position in the market. At the same time, it also aims to give its field teams the tools they need to get the job done.
“We want to be able to support them, and that’s the only way we can do that, by staying ahead of the curve,” Sawh said.