Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on Construction Management

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

You often come across this term while surfing the internet. As the name sounds, it means creating intelligence artificially. Artificial Intelligence is basically a branch of computer science that deals with creating human intelligence in computers so that they act the same as humans. Consider a system based on human intelligence that is free of human errors and fatigue. This science involves generating algorithms and programs based on human intelligence and incorporating the same into computers.

A computer or a system with human Intelligence can do wonders. Humans can intelligently interpret small data at a time, while Computers can process massive amounts of data but without any self-intelligence. Scientists have a solution to this. Getting together a computer with human Intelligence. Too much is going on these days on AI, and the impacts of AI on every industry are tremendous.

What If We Can See or Predict The Future More Accurately

As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. We have to accept that we humans are not so good at learning from the past. We make repetitive mistakes over and over again, but not the AI. AI is always in the continuous process of learning from the past, adjusting its algorithms, and making better decisions in the future. Using the data from multiple projects and processing the patterns of past projects, AI helps in predicting near-accurate guesses of the future. This technology can change the construction world for the better which has never been done in the past.

How AI Can Play Its Part In Construction

The Construction industry is massive and therefore has a huge implementation of AI. We have seen the human population is continuously growing on this planet, and in the future, the construction industry is only meant to increase. Without the implementation of AI, the industry cannot be revolutionized.

AI can help during the construction process in many ways. AI can help attain the best planning for the project. Creating the best model at the start of construction work can help better conceptualize the design work. The planning and execution work can be improved, and the controlling and monitoring work can be streamlined. Based on the collection of data, a better strategy can be adopted. Stakeholders’ management and risk management can be optimized in a better way.

AI is continuously evolving itself in the construction industry and its impacts in the near future are likely to grow. Following are the few major impacts of AI on the construction industry

AI Is Making Construction Smart

You can consider AI as a smart personal assistant that you’ve got. A Project Manager of a complex project or a Program Manager is very busy dealing with multiple tasks at a time. Sometimes, the human mind is occupied with too many things, and there are significant chances of mistakes. Many things can skip from the mind, but not now. The AI will help remind the Project Manager of any critical task that needs immediate attention or a task with heavy weightage after processing the bulk of raw data in seconds.

Help in Better Construction Planning

Today we, the schedulers, have the best project planning software like Primavera P6. With the implementation of industry-standard methods like Critical Path Method (CPM) Scheduling, we can streamline the Project Plan, however, the human factor of negligence is still there. We often misjudge how to assign proper resources to an activity, improperly access the cost, and worst is that sometimes we forget to include some WBS into the project schedule. AI helps us to eliminate these errors and negligence, hence resulting in better project Planning.

Help in Risk Management

The AI-based system can efficiently process the data, access the high-risk factors involved in the project, prioritize them, and then create an alarm for the management team’s attention. Budget deficits can be controlled, and design faults can be avoided.

Improved Work Efficiency

AI process data of all the workers, their current location, the amount of work done in a day, the amount of work pending for the next day, etc. The performance can be improved by proper checks and balances. Project Crashing and Fast Tracking can be better implemented with the help of AI. Workers can be easily assigned to specified jobs, and critical tasks can be managed efficiently.

Construction Safety

Human life has no monetary value. We have seen many incidents wherein workers have lost their lives due to human error. AI helps in reducing these human errors by calculating the best working practices and by automating the work.

Future Development

The future belongs to AI. The impacts of AI will be tremendous, as the world has never seen before. Countries that are investing in AI will lead forward, while countries afraid of AI will lag behind. Companies are spending billions of $ to improve their AI to lead in this world of information and technology.

Summary

AI has a marvelous advantage; however, there are a few problems as well. With AI automating work, people may lose their jobs. There may be some accidents, risks, and losses as the AI progresses to become better, as still it is not developed fully. One of the optimistic approaches is that with the automation of repetitive work done by AI, humans need to find more meaningful work.