Beyond the Hype: 3 Ways to Avoid AI Pitfalls & Leverage its True Potential

Artificial intelligence (AI) the newest darling of the tech world, offers new avenues in construction to ease pain points and find solutions that save time and create efficiencies. But could AI also introduce counterproductivity to the jobsite? Before outsourcing their daily duties to AI, construction professionals should explore the potential pitfalls -- as well as the benefits.

If AI displaces hands-on learning, botches communications, or sends jobsite leaders down time-consuming rabbit holes, it can create rework, sow confusion, and generate costs that outweigh the benefits.

This article explores the preparation and considerations needed as project leaders incorporate AI into operations. It is true that AI can drive efficiencies in clash detection, enhance communications, and help ease labor shortages. But it should be seen as a tool for enhancing -- not replacing -- the fundamentals of collaboration and human judgment that drive jobsite productivity.  

AI for Clash Detection

AI promises a day when it can evaluate images captured by cameras mounted to people, drones, or robots. By bringing automation to project monitoring, AI can verify systems installations and BIM compliance, saving the time that people currently put into clash detection and progress checks.

When anomalies appear, AI could determine whether the situation requires further evaluation. By alerting builders to mistakes before they’re repeated floor after floor, AI promises to lessen the risks to time, budget, and safety associated with rework.

However, clash detection calls for keen judgment regarding whether a deviation deserves more time and attention. AI might not recognize that an incorrect installation, such as misplaced ductwork running solo through a ceiling, can stay intact, while another system that’s off by a fraction requires corrective action.

AI’s knowledge is also limited to the data fed into its model. PMs and other project leaders have a broader perspective. They know about future installations or smaller details that BIM doesn’t show. Their knowledge of every possible factor gives them a richer toolbox to apply in the search for an optimal solution.

Ideally, AI integrated with BIM can identify discrepancies between models and reality. Instead of issuing definitive declarations, it can analyze imagery and issue alerts about potential problems for humans, leveraging their spectrum of resources and knowledge, to inspect and resolve.

As AI standardizes visualization into a stream of timely information, project leaders can incorporate adjustments into their everyday routines, preventing small errors from snowballing into big problems. By retaining the corrective aspects of the job, they can also continue to make the jobsite a place for learning by doing.

AI can also bring value-add to visualization by raising real-time alerts that prompt real-time action. Programming AI reality captures to spot apparent hazards brings a new set of eyes to the constant vigilance needed for safety.

AI to Enhance Communications

AI can improve the RFI process, perhaps prompting senders to attachments and offer possible solutions, which can elicit faster, more detailed responses.

AI can also save time by writing the emails and texts that consume large amounts of a PM’s day, but it raises the question: What if the recipient is also using AI to respond?

In those cases, the nuances of human interaction become muddled. Digital “authors” don’t talk in terms that resonate with recipients, creating missed opportunities for the cogent, creative, and articulate responses and dialog that propel a project forward.

AI and the Labor Shortage

In an industry plagued by labor shortages, AI offers support for the workers of today and tomorrow. AI is giving robots the brains to team up with humans for safer, more precise work in some repetitive tasks, such as bricklaying.

Plus, experienced workers preparing to leave construction -- which they are doing in unsustainable numbers -- could train AI in what they know. All that historical knowledge could then be passed on to new generations, ready for application on the jobsite.

However, some of the promised benefits of AI could actually result in a higher stress, less productive work environment. In construction offices, AI is taking over menial tasks and manual data entry, in the hope that it will drive people to concentrate on higher-order tasks. 

But to be effective at higher-order work, humans need breaks. Intense concentration on complex puzzles for eight hours a day leads to burnout – another unintended drag that can negate AI’s productivity benefits.

AI for Maximizing Human Productivity

To avoid the downsides and effectively leverage AI as a problem-solving tool, the tasks ahead include:

• Standardizing use of AI to enhance clash detection and resolution.
• Investigating ways to involve experienced workers in AI training for knowledge transfer.
• Developing AI prompts for construction-specific tasks, such as RFI submissions and daily logs.
• Monitoring developments in AI-assisted field work, such as augmented glasses and bricklaying robots.

Before AI becomes entrenched in construction with its pitfalls intact, construction professionals have the opportunity to explore AI applications that enhance human expertise and drive jobsite productivity upward.

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