Construction AI 2024 Research

How can construction AI help on my construction project?

Finding information on a construction project can be compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Project Managers and Civil Engineers in can end up spending hours of their time chasing up colleagues, reading through documents and scratching their head trying to find key data and information.

Construction documents can be 1000’s of pages long, comprising tables, design calculations and drawings and it’s not uncommon for live projects to have multiple different versions of the same document in circulation at the same time, making things even more confusing. 

This maze of different construction information and document versions can make it easy for wrong or outdated information being used in the design or construction phase. In most cases this error is detected before it’s too late and the project is redesigned. However usually significant damage is already done to the project in the form of additional cost or delay to the project.

How can AI software like Civils.ai help on my construction project?

Civils.ai is a tool which helps construction Project Managers understand all the documents on a construction project and tell them exactly what the status of their project is at any moment in time, by syncing an AI agent with their project’s document management system.

In this article we cover four key features which Civils.ai offers and which differentiates it from other AI tools which are well known and popular amongst Civil Engineers, namely ChatGPT and ChatPDF, which both took the world by storm in 2023.

How can AI understand construction documents?

Apps like Civils.ai use a method known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (otherwise known as RAG), this method converts all the text, charts and figures in a document into a numerical representation of the information, stored in a vector database or knowledge graph.

The biggest and most noticeable difference will be the ability of Civils.ai to read information from documents which other solutions can’t. This is because we developed Civils.ai originally to read information from geotechnical reports including handwritten information and complex tables. This means that Civils.ai is able to understand the structure of construction documents well and find key information from tables and charts which will be lost when uploading information on other tools.

An example below is a warning message from ChatGPT when I try to upload a scanned poor quality PDF which is readable by Civils.ai. If you are using this tool on a project information like this is really important and you can’t be losing it from the search.

How can I integrate AI into my workflows and understand our files?

Another key feature which  becomes apparent when using Civils.ai is that it is capable  understand multiple documents at once and filter out and parse the latest key information you need.  This is different to alternative AI tools such as ChatGPT or ChatPDF which offers a similar option to upload documents and retrieve information, however this is limited to a maximum of 20 files in the case of ChatGPT and 1 file in the case of ChatPDF.

How can AI search across all my construction data?

Civils.ai provides references with any answer provided by the AI allowing you to cross check yourself the accuracy and reliability of the answer, avoiding the pitfalls of blindly trusting software outputs. Civils.ai goes further than this by opening the document at the page used to answer the question and highlighting the exact text which was cited. By default ‘answer references’ will be provided which are those used directly in the answer but on top of this by pressing the ‘view all references’ button all references to the search term will be revealed, allowing the tool to act as a ‘control-f’ across all the project documents.

Can I safely used ChatGPT and other AI apps on my construction project?

Another super key part on construction is privacy and working in compliance with NDA’s. At Civils.ai we can work in compliance with your project NDA’s and have two options there, including running our software on your own cloud so you can control exactly where the data goes.

Want to learn more about Civils.ai and construction AI?