Top 3 Biggest Impacts of AI on the Construction Industry

On January 12, 2023, I used ChatGPT for the first time. Within 5 minutes, I was convinced that this technology would revolutionize everything. Nearly two years later, I remain convinced that AI will transform the construction industry. However, not in the ways I initially thought.  

The Workforce Dilemma
The greatest impact is a second-order effect. AI will address the existential crisis of our industry – the decline of the construction workforce. However, not by replacing humans in construction, but rather, attracting more people to the industry.  

Research shows that AI still struggles with complex and unpredictable environments, real-time decision-making, physical interaction and dexterity, and understanding and interpreting human behavior. This list should be included in the job description for anybody on a construction site.  

Construction is still about humans working together to assemble highly complex physical things that require critical thinking and common-sense skills. It needs People Skills to work through the constant challenges.  

AI thrives in the digital world, not the analog world. As AI continues its assault on computer-centric careers, we will see a growing interest in human-centric careers like construction. We already are. This WSJ article highlights this trend.   

 Knowledgebase 

My L&D peer group agitates over a universal struggle – How can we build and maintain a comprehensive knowledgebase that captures the highly dynamic nature of construction? How can we transfer this knowledge from one team and one generation to the next?  

Construction companies capture knowledge in so many disparate platforms, and on so many different projects. Asking people to manually capture what they learned on a project in a database and then find what they need when necessary is unsustainable. I know, we’ve tried and failed.  

Enter AI. It is perfectly tuned to ingest mountains of data from a myriad of platforms and serve up an answer within milliseconds. AI will make sense of the entire corpus of a company’s knowledge.  

 Safety  

Many construction firms ask their workers to start their day thinking about how to perform their work safely. Humans are tuned to anticipate safety hazards that have ailed us since the dawn of time, things like gravity and fire. Hazards like electricity, pressure, chemicals, and radiation are relatively new to humankind. Our ability to anticipate these hazards is difficult. In addition, ingesting all the daily variables on a project site (weather, work location specifics, other trades activities, deliveries, etc.) and assessing how those may impact safety is nearly impossible.  

AI is the perfect safety companion. It can ingest the project scope, the schedule, real-time weather, other trade activities, etc, and prompt the foreman to think about critical factors hiding in the periphery. While I am unsure when this will emerge, I am confident it will.