Building Qiddiya City: How Copilot keeps a 360 km² build on track
About 45 kilometers from Riyadh, Qiddiya City is rising fast: a 360 square kilometer destination for entertainment, sports, and culture. The plan includes theme parks, shopping districts, a Formula 1 racetrack, museums, and housing for 500,000 residents across 20 neighborhoods. With 700 companies and 22,000 workers involved, the volume of decisions, documents, and dependencies is massive. Microsoft 365 Copilot is helping Qiddiya Investment Company (QIC) keep control of the moving parts.
From scattered systems to straight answers
"We're building multiple assets, like stadiums, sports tracks, hotels," says Abdulrahman AlAli, chief technology officer at QIC. Data flows from different contractor tools into a Microsoft Power BI dashboard, where teams can see project status and cash flow in one place. Copilot then lets staff ask direct questions-no SQL required-and pull the right detail from a mountain of data.
That speed matters when each asset contains dozens of buildings, and every building carries a 20- to 30-character ID. "We found that the naming of assets-the buildings, the roads, the streets-is different between the two teams," AlAli says. "It's a nightmare" to match records across 20 systems written in different languages. "So, we're using Copilot to summarize the differences and give us the best options to unify the design standards for our city."
Managing a megaproject's workflow
At Qiddiya, a 200-person planning team and a 100-person execution team operate on separate stacks. Copilot sits above these systems as a connective layer: it compares schemas, flags inconsistencies, and proposes a common standard. This turns a months-long data harmonization exercise into a tractable, ongoing process.
On daily operations, Copilot plugs into the Power BI dashboard to answer questions that save hours of digging. Need a status on a contractor package or a draw request? Ask in plain language and get back the numbers, the exceptions, and the notes that explain them.
Scaling Copilot across teams
QIC's real estate development and construction teams have used Copilot with Power BI for about a year. The wider workforce adopted it more recently for core productivity: email, meetings, and reports. The usage is already meaningful.
- ~250,000 Copilot-generated email messages and chat interactions per month
- 50,000+ meetings summarized
- 13,000+ documents created from corporate data in four months
Beyond speed, Copilot supports research across tech embedded in each asset-theme parks, museums, stadiums-to study visitor behavior and customer sentiment. That insight loops back into design and operations.
Cash flow clarity: certificates, snags, and exceptions
"You can imagine the number of invoices and payment certificates we get every day. Thousands of payment certificates," AlAli says. A dashboard can show what's late, but it won't explain why. Copilot closes the gap.
With a prompt like "Give me invoices more than 60 days late with no engineer comments," Copilot separates true delays from justified holds due to snags. The result might look like: 600 invoices are overdue; 10% have documented issues that must be resolved first. "That's very, very helpful," AlAli says. It directs attention where it matters and clears noise from the review cycle.
What owners and contractors can apply now
- Establish a single source of truth: centralize schedules, costs, and approvals in a BI layer fed by all contractor tools.
- Standardize asset IDs early: use Copilot to compare naming schemas and propose a unified convention before construction data multiplies.
- Start with high-friction questions: late-pay analysis, change-order impact, RFIs without responses, and look-ahead risks by discipline.
- Keep humans in the loop: let Copilot surface patterns; keep commercial and engineering owners finalizing actions.
- Measure what matters: track response time to exceptions, approval cycle time, and variance-to-forecast to prove ROI.
- Plan the rollout: "If you spend time in planning and designing the implementation, you would get the best out of it," AlAli says.
Why this approach scales
Megaprojects generate more data than any team can sift through manually. Copilot turns that bulk into answers-pulling context from comments, certificates, and change logs that a dashboard alone may miss. The lesson is simple: pair a well-governed data model with natural-language querying, and teams spend time deciding, not searching.
As AlAli puts it: "I'm a big believer that technology is an unfair advantage for companies that use it."
Resources
Upskill your team
If you're building AI fluency for project controls, commercial, or operations teams, explore practical training: AI Productivity Courses, AI Research Courses, and AI Design Courses.
Your membership also unlocks:
