After a long period of relative indifference by the construction industry, it appears that the industry has finally started to emerge from the Tech Adoption Curve's "innovator/early adoption" stage. At the annual AGC Tech Conference in Chicago this past month, attended by more than 300 people, mostly general contractors, it was clear that AI is, if nothing else, on everyone's minds.
For starters, AGC held an AI boot camp preceding the conference, and one of the four concurrent tracks was on AI. In speaking with attendees and based on some impromptu polls at a few of the sessions, a good 40% have some experience with Open AI's ChatGPT and other large language models.
Among the 29 vendors participating in the event, a good 50% have either an AI component or one under development. One product introduced at the event is a fully AI-based product custom-designed to help write complex proposals.
One of the reasons more people are now actively using or trying out ChatGPT, Claude or others is the reduced concern over data confidentiality. When first released, any data fed into ChatGPT was processed in the cloud, making it possibly accessible to the public and for ongoing use in training the model. ChatGPT now has settings that control the privacy of the data. With upcoming new generations of laptops, personal computers and devices with onboard AI chips, this concern will be reduced even further.
Another emerging trend is for organizations to build their own models, whether local or on the cloud. We noticed many contractors plug into the Microsoft 365 platform for productivity applications like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Teams. Those users can access Microsoft CoPilot, which uses OpenAI as its underlying model engine.
In short, the construction industry is no longer ignoring AI as a fad, but still closely watching it evolve and trying to determine precisely where, when and how to engage with possible applications. Many at the conference expressed the usual roadblocks to any technology, let alone AI, being a hurdle. Construction folks are inherently resistant to change. They often don't see where they have time to try something new. And before trying, they want to see the benefits clearly.