Is AI Headed For the Construction Industry?

AI is the topic of conversation seemingly everywhere. No matter the industry there is a focus on AI and what it can do to revolutionize the job market and business in general. When it comes to construction there is a lot of talk about where the future lies when it comes to labor. Seemingly every year the average age of a construction worker goes up by 1, the younger generation hasn’t filled the positions that are being opened up by those moving up and out of the construction industry. There are many variables when it comes to the labor force in construction, but in this article we’ll just focus on the AI portion.

AI or artificial intelligence is a computer program that has the ability to perform task on its own, once given a prompt. Many of you are probably familiar with the site openai.com which has the chatbot “Chat GPT”. There are many different versions of AI now with image generators, video generators, and more. The potential for these programs to help create documents, make logos, and perform other task that used to require a human hours to do is going to be a game changer. While the majority of jobs that are being threatened right now are in offices and Hollywood, there are people in the construction industry that should be on notice. One of the things that AI is going to have an immediate impact on is the creating and proofing of documents. AI has the ability to quote jobs, create contracts, do cost analysis, and more. Now are they perfectly accurate, NO, so don’t go to chat gpt and have it quote your next job without looking it over.

They are efficient and that’s where I believe we will see the first adoption. Even if they’re wrong initially, by tweaking the prompt the AI will learn and can spit out multiple versions in 2 minutes while a person would require hours of work. The office work of a construction industry will be disrupted as the kinks get straightened out with these ai tools. But what does it mean for the labor force?

There have been videos circling around the internet of the group called Boston Dynamics and there ai robots. They first got some attention when they came out with their robot dogs that can perform task without anybody having control over it. There were then used in an episode of the dystopian Netflix series “Black Mirror”. A couple years ago another video surfaced of an ai robot performing some construction task moving wood around and nailing boards together. Another ai bot I’ve seen was removing shingles from a roof and putting on new shingles. There is a move to create robots to complete these task the construction workers perform, but I believe we are much further away from there being a massive take over of the robots.

My reasoning behind this is that there are so many variables in a construction site. While the robot can figure out how something should go together and may even be able to recognize when something is wrong, the fact that one miscalculation at any point in the entire process of building a house, and the robot will be off. Even if the robot is not responsible for the one small miscalculation it will not as easily recognize the issue. For example, if a room is suppose to be 10’x10′ but it was actually built 2″ shorter. When it comes to finishing the room and the blueprints say 10×10, but the baseboards have to be 2″ shorter because the room wasn’t built correctly will the robot know to cut those shorter or are they going to force the baseboards into place. Will the robots when doing a remodel be able to remember to close the door behind them on the way in and out to avoid wasting the customer’s a/c? There are some common sense human things that I don’t believe an ai robot will be able to accomplish.

The second reason I don’t believe the jobs are at risk is the expense. While labor is one of the top expenses for most construction companies, robots are not going to be cheap. They will also still require an operator/ supervisor. This supervisor is also not going to be cheap because that person will need to have high level computer intellect. The company will also need to have more than one robot, because no matter how strong they are, lifting a large beam will still require multiple sets of hands, whether human or machine. So you’re looking at multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars for probably a robot, then multiplying that by the number of robots you need to perform these task, then multiple supervisors to handle these robots that will need to be compensated well. On top of all that when something happens and the software messes up, hardware breaks, or one of them walks off a 5 story building and breaks into a thousand pieces on the ground repairs will need to be made. This means additional cost that never stop coming in. Also the only portion of the business that these robots are replacing are the labor cost, so they have to be less than that portion for the business side of this to make sense. Material cost will not change, permits and other licenses will still need to be paid for.

I don’t believe we will see a large transition of labor in the construction industry anytime soon. In fact I believe construction jobs will be very popular in the future. Those that can build things and customize will have job security. AI is a tool and like any other tool when used correctly can help make the job easier, but I don’t see it as a “I-Robot” or “Wall-e” in real life.

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