By Ian Warner, Director of Industry Workforce Development and Innovation, Trimble
Interest in artificial intelligence has been spreading like wildfire over the past few years. AI is not a new term for Trimble, which has been capturing and leveraging construction data for decades. From hardware to software, the field to the office or among stakeholders, harnessing and making meaning out of data is the crux of Trimble’s business. Generative AI is simply a new set of tools that provide a richer narrative around data, making it more insightful and actionable.
As a company that helps connect stakeholders across the entire construction lifecycle—design, construction and operations/ maintenance—AI has been woven in and leveraged across a number of Trimble solutions to help contractors do more with less, while also giving them greater decision-making power and the ability to focus on other key challenges.
While the use cases for AI are diverse and ever-changing, below are a few key areas where Trimble has doubled down on AI, with the goal of making contractors’ jobs less cumbersome and repetitive, safer and more capable of being upskilled—efforts which will only continue to grow in the coming years.
Automating Repetitive, Mundane Work
One of AI’s top benefits in construction is assisting with the automation of data entry, thereby removing (or at least reducing) the many manual, tedious tasks that occur across a project’s lifecycle.
On the design side, generative AI is being used to help design teams automate modeling work—resulting in faster, less labor-intensive workflows. One recently released 3D-modeling tool—Diffusion from Trimble SketchUp— lets users create images from an active model through a simple text prompt.
Diffusion can help inspire designers during the earliest stages of design, allowing them to explore ideas and iterate on them rapidly, to later stages of design, helping them produce gorgeous renders in significantly less time..jpg?ver=aZm9kQS1YKPyolkukdk3ag%3d%3d)
SketchUp also recently released Scan-to-Design, which captures and interprets scans of interior spaces or exterior building data and transforms it into clean, organized 3D geometry, creating an immediate starting point for conceptual design. AI is used to help convert the raw scan data into usable 3D models, providing architects with a starting point for creating beautiful conceptual designs that can easily be shared with clients for immediate feedback.
Many contractors are also using Trimble’s Automatic Invoicing feature, which leverages AI within the company’s two enterprise resource planning systems—Vista and Spectrum—allowing accounting teams to automatically turn paper and PDF invoices into validated, unapproved invoice entries for faster, more accurate workflows that save contractors valuable time, effort and money.
Trimble is also looking into using generative AI to help search and summarize documents, given that over 80% of construction data is unstructured and in the form of a document, such as a PDF. This can help streamline a tedious and time-consuming task, making it more manageable and efficient for contractors.
Throughout these tasks, AI is streamlining some of the more mundane yet important aspects of design and construction work, empowering construction professionals to focus on the more critical aspects of their jobs that require human judgment. In the process, it’s helping to streamline project planning, offer alternative design possibilities and provide data-driven insights for better resource allocation.
However, it’s important to note that AI in construction has limitations. Its effectiveness depends on the quality and relevance of its training data. Human expertise remains crucial for interpreting AI outputs, ensuring regulatory compliance, and making final decisions that consider the full context of a project. The key is to leverage AI as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, the invaluable experience and intuition of construction professionals.
Improves Safety and Accelerates Skill Adoption
Another key area for AI lies in its ability to help train workers and get them up to speed, as well as help them make safer decisions.
Craft professionals are increasingly using AI-powered augmented reality systems like Trimble Connect AR to overlay design plans, specifications or instructional steps as a guide to tasks or to verify as-built conditions. There are also many examples of steel detailers using AI to help overlay fabrication 2D details onto 3D models for use in the fabrication and installation process, as well as to evaluate each detailer’s design history to document best practices and shorten the decision-making process.
The construction industry is also exploring the use of AI-enabled computer vision and sensors to automatically update schedules and budgets, as well as catch potential safety issues based on field data collection, which could help streamline processes, minimize rework and boost efficiency.
Other research and development efforts are looking into attaching cameras to construction equipment to leverage computer vision to detect if workers are wearing proper safety equipment like hard hats and alert supervisors of any noncompliance issues in real time, thereby reducing safety risks.
Leveraging AI and predictive modeling to not just track activities but recommend improvements is essential to getting the next generation worker up to speed quickly, while also making them safer in the process.
Construction has a lot to gain from incorporating AI into workflows, which can help with everything from reducing mundane tasks to maximizing productivity and efficiency, to enhancing skills adoption and improving safety. The future is here, and Trimble is committed to helping the industry embrace these solutions now and in the years to come