Just a few years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) still seemed futuristic to many. Now, it is a part of everyday life. Over the course of an afternoon, for example, Alexa or Siri may use natural language processing and machine learning to respond to your questions, and you might interact with a chatbot using Open AI on a vendor’s website while your preferred search engine uses AI to generate and place targeted ads to appeal to your specific interests. In the evening, an entertainment streaming service will use machine learning to recommend a movie you might enjoy, based on your viewing habits, as you experiment with a more active way you can use AI—trying out generative AI like ChatGPT to create content for a document.

We may no longer think about the ways AI factors into our daily routine, but how many of us have integrated its power into our professional lives? This article considers the way AI technology and tools are being used by firms in the construction and mechanical insulation industries to manage their internal operations and projects more easily, efficiently, and cost effectively.

Tools to Grow Business

From website builders that can design and organize web pages, using generative AI to develop content to attract and engage customers, to customer relationship management software that ties together website data, browsing history, and buying trend analysis, using predictive analytics and other AI tools to identify customers and market their products and services, those in construction and mechanical insulation are engaging AI technology to grow their business.

“In terms of adding value, being able to present real-world performance data for mechanical insulation systems your company has installed to address similar requirements strengthens a bid.”

Early in the business cycle, AI can be useful in the bidding process. As the expression goes, knowledge is power. The more historic data you have, the more accurately you can bid projects, and the more value you can add at the design stage to help your customers meet their goals. If you maintain data on your competition, and details on jobs won and lost, AI can identify trends in approach, content, and costing that have proven successful for you in the past. On the flip side, AI can identify trending areas of weakness, allowing you to continuously improve your bids, increasing competitiveness. AI’s feedback can inform your bid-no bid decisions, helping you spend your resources on projects with the greatest likelihood of high return on investment.

AI tools can analyze your data on past projects and identify conditions that resulted in deviations from benchmarks set—from effects of extreme weather and supply chain disruptions to performance of subcontractors/partners and more—allowing you to identify, plan for, and mitigate applicable risks from the outset. Just as important, it can flag issues that may constitute unacceptable risk if not addressed and clarified or corrected by the customer before contract award.

In terms of adding value, being able to present real-world performance data for mechanical insulation systems your company has installed to address similar requirements strengthens a bid. Drawing from experiences where you provided a customized solution—designing and installing built-in access points for future equipment maintenance, reducing the need to remove large portions of insulation to reach valves, for example—allows these solutions to go from one-offs designed for a single customer facility to recommendations with long-term benefits for other customers who might never have thought of the requirement until it was too late. At many construction firms, individual Project Managers or Foremen know about these individual solutions, but the institutional memory stops with them. If your company has an AI-powered and up-to-date project content repository, anyone bidding a job will be able to query relevant solution elements.

The bid process itself can be simplified and made more efficient, so that you can bid more jobs with the same level of effort. Today’s AI-enabled software can “scrub” a Request for Proposals (RFP) and build a compliant response outline. While cutting and pasting old content into new bids is (as when done with specifications) fraught with the potential for introducing errors, inconsistencies, and outdated products/techniques, someone with knowledge of the requirements and best practices can easily create a bid tailored to the specific customer objectives working from an AI-generated outline, using information from the corporate content repository. The time saved on the front end can be better spent assessing risk, seeing if there are points that need to be clarified prior to submitting the bid, researching the competition, developing a truly customer-specific solution, or working on other bids to bring in more business.

Project Management

Once a contract is awarded, AI can be useful in all phases of project management, from planning and coordinating work amongst the different trades, to assisting with resource allocation—both personnel and materials—as well as monitoring schedule and budget risks, ensuring personnel safety, through quality assurance, to efficient project closeout.

Using trend analysis of historic data, AI can assist with assessment of time, labor, materials, and equipment necessary to complete each project task or phase. Among the benefits of this approach are cost efficiency and waste reduction. In a recent Industry Dive webinar, “AI’s Impact on Technology for Civil & Infrastructure Construction Professionals,” Rajitha Chaparala, Vice President, Product, Data and AI at Procore Technologies, elaborated on how AI can be used to identify and address risks: “AI platforms can allow you to see trends that become future problems… If five projects have the same material procurement problem, then the sixth project will probably have the same problem. So that’s easy to extrapolate from the information that you have and then figure out how you can go mitigate those risks on the project.”

Throughout project performance, progress on the jobsite can be tracked in real time, using AI-enabled sensors, cameras, and monitoring and reporting technology. Project Foremen also can update status using voice-recognition apps, literally dictating notes into their phones while in the field. The real-time availability of this data—and the quality, as personnel can be trained on how to provide it in a standardized form that AI tools can recognize—is a game changer. Factors that may affect schedule, quality, or budget can be identified and addressed early—ideally before any schedule slippage or other negative result occurs.

Procore’s Chaparala described a scenario using an AI-enabled construction project management system that can facilitate project monitoring much as we imagined using Alexa or Siri in the introduction to this article.

“The next step is really helping people understand what generative AI can do in their lives, day to day… You need to know the right way to ask questions. You need to know what it’s good at, and that’s what will set you up for success…

Use it in your day-to-day life so you understand what it’s good at and what it’s not, and then combine that with that data maturity and having good data, and then your teams will know the right questions to ask to get the answers. For example, asking specific questions. Rather than saying, ‘what submittals are open?’ you can say ‘what submittals are open today that may impact my schedule?’ It gives you a much more focused answer… We need to focus on where the task that needs to be done tomorrow [is].”

Just as the technology facilitated bidding, planning, and resource coordination, AI tools can provide up-to-the-minute reporting on task, project, and budget status; and they can assist in project close-out.

Safety

The impact of all the applications and benefits described to this point fall by the wayside if there is a catastrophic accident on your jobsite. Worker safety is a common challenge on construction projects, and this is another area where AI can assist. Analysis of historic safety data can reveal trends, and predictive analytics can help focus a company on risks particular to your projects and personnel. From there, you can target training to prevent an occurrence or recurrence of accidents or near misses.

Applying AI with real-time access to data gathered just as the project status data described, means the feedback need not be only retrospective. In the same Industry Dive webinar on AI’s impact referenced earlier, Procore Technologies’ Makenna Ryan, Solutions Engineer, Civil and Infrastructure, gave an example of how collecting and analyzing data from the field can provide “better insight and understanding into the behavioral data of my operational teams or my craft teams.” He explained, “If we start to see a number of non lost-time safety observations around… missing gloves, or missing PPE [personal protective equipment], or hand awareness, or something like that… that can provide insight to my safety team to be able to say, ‘look, we need to be focusing on hand safety in the next few weeks, because clearly the data is showing me that we are slipping in this one area.’ Instead of blanket safety information that becomes noise to the teams, we’re giving relevant information that actually tracks to behaviors… at the region, at the project, at the site.”

AI is already being used on many jobsites to gather the kind of information Ryan alluded to, automating observations that used to require human involvement. AI-powered tools like the high-resolution cameras and sensors described earlier can monitor sites 24/7, extending the reach of safety personnel who can only be in one place at a time. These tools can identify safety hazards like scaffolding that is not secured properly, workers not wearing PPE or using a ladder improperly, and the like. Risks can be mitigated or eliminated before they become accident data. And if potentially hazardous behavior is consistently exhibited by employees of one of your partners or suppliers, this data can become valuable feedback for vetting companies to include on future projects.

Conclusion

When you think of all the ways other industries and businesses use AI to help them grow or run more efficiently—often using your data—it is time to consider how you can leverage the technology for your own benefit. And as the number of companies in the construction and mechanical insulation industries using these tools grows, not exploring how you might use them could be unnecessarily ceding ground to competitors.