This audio is automatically generated. Please let us know if you have any comments.
ConTech Conversations features monthly discussions with construction professionals who are using technology to improve the way their companies do business. Click here for past conversations.
Aaron Anderson stays based on artificial intelligence.
Concord, Calif.-based builder Swinerton’s chief innovation officer Anderson spoke with Construction Dive about the technology and more at the ENR FutureTech conference in San Diego last month.
In his role at Swinerton, he has developed technology for Swinerton’s Perq parking structures, which offer customers a pre-engineered, pre-engineered garage, according to the company’s website. He also contributed to the growth of the company’s solid wood, concrete and drywall divisions.
Here, Anderson talks to Construction Dive about some key insights into the current capabilities of generative AI, while looking ahead to what might come next for the technology.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Immersion in CONSTRUCTION: What were you hoping to learn at FutureTech?
AARON ANDERSON: It’s always important to understand how others use the tools out there. Being at a company like Swinerton, these tools and more established startups and technologies find us, and we hear about them.
There are three key areas that I am looking at that will greatly impact our business.
One of them is AI tools and how people find something beyond the basic applications of big language models, how they actually use them for the building process and in some of these special use cases in the construction
Aaron Anderson
Permission granted by Swinerton
Then there’s robotics and how people are finding ways to incorporate them into their business models.
The other side is generally how people use technology to change the business model to provide new services. It’s about new ways of working with clients, but also about new ways of taking that core competence around construction and turning it into other businesses.
Are you working on any projects right now in these three focus areas?
We are working on a number of things with AI. We’re a Microsoft shop, so we have access to a lot of these things, the OpenAI tools that are already hitting Microsoft.
The truth is, they’ve been doing a lot of cool things for a while now in terms of recommendations and design ideas and all that. But none of this really gives us an edge.
When we’re looking for an edge, we’re looking at things like project management processes, or we’re really looking to dig deeper into the ways we would process things like pitches or RFIs, and the way we communicate about what’s going on with changes in design
Also, we are looking at how we turn our client’s requests and work and expectations into daily reminders, how to track and stay on top of the expectations we set for projects.
What is it like to be a Microsoft Store?
We use Teams tools, we use Outlook. As a Microsoft partner, we also have access to the things in Copilot that have changed. They called it Bing Chat and some of these tools like this.
These Copilot tools can work in a bunch of different applications. They can work on their Power Automate platforms, they can work on their Excel platforms, they can work on their Word and PowerPoint platforms. But we’ve really struggled to find a way to make a significant impact on that outside of our marketing and knowledge management.
It will have an impact on the review of large and complicated documents. And then, manage it and turn it into actionable steps.
I think it’s going to be about things like the scope of the construction documents, how to define all the work that comes up, and then being able to make sure that you can systematically go through that.
In the long run, I think there is an opportunity to take all these documents that are in digital format, but not digital ideas. They are not uniquely ordered in rows and can be searched, grouped and managed, digitally. There’s an opportunity to turn them into things that can be managed digitally and turn them into things that you can get to sort and filter and group and combine the specific requirements of a project or those specific work areas.
What do you think about AI as a solution for the construction industry?
AI is great for things where there is a high level of uncertainty. What AI tools, right now, are really pushing construction people to do is catch up to put the systems in place to have answers to these finite solutions.
But sometimes they are big and they are really complicated solutions. AI alone will not solve construction problems. But, faster and more available computing could be.
There are so many different systems at play that if you could observe and train with them, that would be great. But we’re constantly coming across new things, new ideas, new ways of building, and these tools should be able to train with all this historical data, and they’re just not available.
We’ve already seen that big language models are great at things like marketing, but they’re still physics-aware.
I think the biggest thing that it presents an immediate opportunity for is the fact that at every stage of the build, we send everything in PDF. It would be very useful to have these things with a more proper digital connection with unique identifiers connecting these things from space to space. And I think right off the bat, AI tools give us the opportunity to do that.
