How a site conversation could change construction
Take a second to imagine the conversations on a construction site. The surprise? Those conversations could transform the construction sector and increase site margins.
Red Marble AI has been awarded a Victorian Government Technology Adoption and Innovation program grant. This grant will help fund our Construction Language Research Project.
Our first step was to hire Natural Language Processing specialist Haowen Tang. Haowen holds a Masters of Science (Computer Science) from University of Melbourne, specialising in Natural Language Processing. We’re also extending our collaboration with Melbourne Laureate Professor Tim Baldwin and University of Melbourne, world experts in this field, as we grow our team and extend our capability.
About the project
The Construction Language Research Project aims at understanding everyday site language within construction projects. It also looks at developing a construction language model that will support using data to unlock value and increase project margins.
Algorithms which understand the meaning behind language spoken or written within various project documents have huge potential to transform the construction sector. We believe using the data from those conversations will change the way the construction industry works.
Would you like to learn more about this project? Or understand the potential and opportunities that using artificial intelligence to leverage human language could have in your project? We would love to hear from you.
Construction in 2025: The AI Revolution is here
The AI revolution is here and the race is on to become the dominant force of construction in the future.
Today while the construction industry is awash with funding and fuelled by government spending, ultra-tight margins, difficulties retaining staff and cost overruns make it increasingly hard to be profitable.
Our whitepaper looks to the future, not the big blue sky wholesale change 50 years from now, but moreso how the first steps to solve these problems and revolutionise the industry are already underway.
In fact, many of the fundamental tools that will begin this wholesale change are here. In other sectors, data and AI have changed how industries operate and established a blueprint for industry takeover.
It is now up to the industry to take up the baton and run with it.
In our interviews with industry leaders, we are seeing pockets of excellence are already emerging. AI is being used effectively to drive improvements in several business areas. Data-centric technologies such as drones, Building Information Management (BIM), Internet of Things (IoT), and digital twins are supporting that.
Our Construction in 2025 whitepaper provides insights and the beginnings of a blueprint for change. Our 7 Steps to introducing AI are a guide to how construction industry leaders can get started.
We outline:
- Turbulent times: Construction’s big AI opportunity
- Getting race ready: Transformation lessons from industry titans
- Pockets of success: the sparks of an AI revolution
- A Blueprint for the industry: AI predictions for 2025
- 7 Steps to Introducing an AI experiment
One thing is clear: the prize for the firms who get this right is huge. Increased margin and profits, improved staff retention and emergence as a dominant player. And that’s just the beginning of what’s possible.
The race is on! Enjoy our analysis, and let us know if you've implemented any of these technologies in the past 12 months.
What the construction industry can learn from Amazon
At Red Marble, we often explore what we can learn from other projects and other experts in our field. We also apply this at an industry level - what can one industry learn from another.
We work a lot in the construction sector, using artificial intelligence to make commercial construction projects more profitable. Given continually tight margins in that sector, what can we learn from other industries and other companies to help improve these?
For answers, we look to one of the world’s biggest successes, which is likely already part of your daily life. You may receive a package in the mail from Amazon.com, subscribe to Amazon Prime to watch a favourite TV series or download a book on your Kindle. You may also use Amazon Web Services as part of your business.
But Amazon is not just convenient, it is one of the most influential companies in the world valued at over US$1.4 trillion.
It dominates in every business it operates in; last year alone it shipped more than 2 billion packages around the world.
It is a true leader.
By contrast, commercial construction is at the start of its journey of transformation through technology. With lengthy and large projects, many different stakeholders, huge project teams, complex supply chains and tight margins, there is a lot it can learn from the tech giant.
The Bezos Mandate
First let’s take a minute to look at the Bezos Mandate, a now famous email that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sent to the company’s development teams when the retailer had hit a wall in 2002.
In simple terms the email outlined a new, mandatory way of working, where all technical systems would communicate with each other via defined interfaces. This meant that data could be shared across all parts of Amazon in a consistent way.
Anyone who didn’t follow the mandate, would be fired.
This approach set up the company to have a deep understanding of each and every customer, enabling them to launch new and innovative products which both used that data, and enhanced the data further to help other parts of the business.
The construction industry is on the precipice of this revolution.
Data is abundant on work sites, but manual, paper based systems, information silos and slow adoption of technology is holding back progress.
So how can a construction firm think like Amazon, and learn from one of the fastest growing companies in the world?
And how would a new way of thinking transform the way the construction industry works?
1. Treat Data As an Asset
The crux of the Bezos Mandate was to treat data as a long-term asset.
In construction, data is entered into and stored in multiple different systems. Information is often shared between the site, managers and head office using reports and spreadsheets, taking effort to create and losing opportunities to optimise which across many projects can cost millions of dollars in lost productivity.
Imagine if Amazon took over a construction site. It’s natural obsession with data would quickly emerge.
It would mandate the way that data is used on its projects, how data from 3rd party systems is leveraged and aggregated and who has access to the data to make informed decisions.
All internal and external systems would communicate in standard ways via APIs with data stored in a common platform and a consistent way. Artificial Intelligence would be used to convert this data into predictions, insights and choices to increase productivity on worksites.
A data centric construction firm would be better at estimating jobs, win more bids, manage their risks better and ultimately deliver projects with higher margins.
2. Complete customer focus
Along with data, Amazon is also obsessed with its customers. It is so good at what it does and uses data to know its customer so completely, it has re-defined most user’s expectations. Coupled with its unparalleled data capability, this gives Amazon an incredible insight into its customer behaviour, needs and preferences.
Construction’s equivalent of the customer might be the work package. Amazon might identify the few hundred standard work packages that most projects consist of, and religiously collect and optimise data across each of them. Their knowledge of the estimates and metrics for each would continually improve leading to clearer estimates, better management of risks, more effective safety controls, and improvements across the supply chain.
3. Embrace a consistent operating model
Consistency is extremely important to the Amazon model.
Again, if we were to imagine Amazon taking over construction, one of the first changes would be to ensure consistent operating procedures across every project. Today in construction, joint ventures, or partnerships using different systems, different technology and different management styles, there is no consistent approach to completion of every work task
The key learning here would be to take a company and project wide approach, implementing a playbook to get consistency in the technology and the methods used across all projects.
4. Leveraging the Network Effect
In companies like Amazon, as you add more customers, you get more data and more information which allows you to provide a better overall service - this is called the Network Effect.
A construction company that leverages data, religiously collects data about each work package and executes consistent project operating models and processes will be able to optimise those processes, improve the productivity and profitability and reduce risk and re-work.
The future of construction
Amazon started collecting its data 20 years ago, and in that time, it’s growth has exploded across multiple industries.
Construction is an industry about to undergo rapid digital change.
The companies which are beginning to collect their data and embrace consistent operating models, like Amazon, will not just be at the forefront, but will exponentially improve ahead of competitors.
Perhaps 20 years from now, we will look back and see the split between these technology-fuelled giants of the new construction industry, and the pen and paper models that have been relegated to history.