AI and bots are already changing our profession and this trend will continue. At the current stage AI is accelerating the development lifecycle across the board. For example, programmers can ask chat GPT to write snippets of code and pump out simple working scripts in a matter of hours rather than days. In the future we will see agile software projects with timelines and scope that would sound completely insane by todays standard.
The construction industry already has bots that can do most of the rough work for laying drywall and humans are only needed for the finishing work saving a ton of time (especially with labor shortages in drywall craft labor). Caterpillar already has equipment that can do rough sitework and leveling without a single person. Shindler has "RISE" bots that can automatically crawl up an elevator shaft to complete most of the work previously done by humans at a much higher level of quality which saves time. We also already have bots with AI enabled cameras that can crawl a job site and generate field reports, NCRs, and digital as built BIM models. The same cameras can be attached to existing field inspectors so they essentially just walk the site periodically and data is automatically gathered. Most of the AI trends I have seen in construction project controls rely on BIM as their data backbone. We will still need humans in the loop for a while and learning how to use BIM to manage construction will be come extremely important as it will be the only way to check the bot AI's assumptions. Ultimately, AI will create higher quality projects and I think that will make the project controls a bigger focus. I believe owners and boards will want a human to tell them they validated the AI's predictions for a long time after all of cost engineering is fully automated by AI; this is basically what happened to the finance industry 10 years ago.
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Douglas Cullison
Risk Manager
Jacobs Engineering
Honolulu HI
(808) 375-1414
douglas.cullison@jacobs.com------------------------------