AI in construction

0:00 I experimented with the same task using AI and it turned hours of work into minutes. The way we work is fundamentally changing and the reality is most people are ignoring it. People are still spending their weekends manually typing out progress reports, copying site diaries into cost trackers, and noting down and coding delivery dockets. Not because people want to or they enjoy this, because they don't know there's another way. With the development of large language models and other artificial intelligence tools, we can now build complete schedules, find errors in our estimates, automate progress reporting, and review contracts all in a couple of minutes.

0:48 And to do this, you don't need to be able to code or have a computer science degree. I have no idea if we're about to see artificial super intelligence, and we're all on the verge of losing our jobs. But I do know with the current technology, the current capabilities, we can already do some very impressive things. The people who master these skills and learn how to use these AI tools are going to do more and better work, get promoted faster, earn higher salaries, and manage their businesses more efficiently.

1:10 My name is Tim and I've spent the last 10 years working in the construction industry across a range of renewable energy, civil construction, and oil and gas projects. And I've recently left my corporate job to go allin on AI in construction. So this video isn't hype from Software Bros. It's all about the practical application of artificial intelligence to construction project management. In this video, we're going to be covering what AI actually is and how it's likely to change the construction industry, the fundamentals of large language models, technology and prompt engineering, automations for repetitive tasks, managing your construction data properly, AI risks and how to avoid them.

1:54 And then I'm going to finish with giving you a specific road map for how you can master these AI skills. My goal is to give you a road map for how to learn the skills that will be the new way of working in construction project management. 800 million jobs are expected to be automated by artificial intelligence by 2030. But as we all know, the construction industry is slow to change. Billiondoll contractors still manually scan in all their invoices, use paperbased checklists, and run everything in Microsoft Excel.

2:40 There's been software out there for literally decades that would make all these tasks a hundred times easier. But the reality is in the minds of these contractors, these systems work. So why change them? Chat, GBT, and other large language models are amazing technologies. and seeing how easily they can perform writing tasks that used to be reserved for the most educated in society. It's a natural question to ask what's coming next and how's it going to change the construction industry.

3:05 Well, I want to start with a disappointing disclaimer. I nor anybody else can tell you exactly what's going to happen. We are terrible at predicting the future. In the year 2000, everybody thought that by 2025, we'd have personal robots in every home, flying cars in commercial use, and fully autonomous cities. However, we're stuck still trying to connect our printers to the Wi-Fi network. If there's one consensus between all the top AI experts is nobody knows exactly how the future's going to unfold.

3:52 So yes, take everything I'm going to say with a grain of salt, but I've spent over a decade working in the construction industry, and I'm currently working on an AI powered construction estimating and contract management software. On top of this, I'm being super careful with this analysis not to base it on technological advancements that haven't yet happened. I'm very much basing it on the current capabilities of these large language models and other AI systems. So, here's how I believe AI is going to change the construction industry and just as importantly, what's not going to change.

4:16 So, in this video, we're going to be covering what actually AI is, where the technology is likely moving, some important realities of the construction sector, they're going to shape how it's impacted by AI, where I believe the short to medium-term impacts are going to be, and the major roadblocks to an AI run construction industry. But first up, let's get started by setting the scene. Let's give you an overview of what actually is artificial intelligence. Put simply, artificial intelligence is just technology that