In offsite construction, companies must carefully balance the risks of upfront costs against the potential rewards of increased productivity when implementing digital technologies.

With AI gaining traction across various industries, the sector faces a critical decision: whether to embrace this emerging technology.

Sam Ward, Technology for Innovation Operations Leader at Laing O’Rourke, explores the challenges and risks companies encounter when adopting digital technologies, highlighting the factors that influence successful integration.

Construction as an industry is challenged on margins, because the margins are slim in construction.

At best, everyone is fighting for revenue, so they’re all fighting for opportunities to make their part of the supply chain worthwhile. If that’s design, you want more design effort, if it’s construction, you want more construction effort.

The problem we have is not necessarily the complexity in construction, because a cruise ship or a nuclear submarine is very complicated to build, they’re made up of thousands, if not millions, of components just the same as a building is.

The problem with the construction sector is the whole plethora of stakeholders that you have along the process, along with complicated contractual terms.

By the time many contractors are involved we’re already at RIBA Stage 3 so the vast majority of the design effort is complete, we’re left picking up the small amount of influence we have at that stage to try to implement innovative ideas in an industry where people are incentivised to de-risk and often pre-prescribed price and programme.

All that does is breed an environment where innovation is a challenge to adopt because everyone is focused on just getting through today and tomorrow, without necessarily being able to flex and do things slightly differently or in a new way.

Embracing AI

On top of digital, there’s an element of AI that’s coming into our sector, which we are probably behind the curve in terms of an industry.

AI is proliferating in lots of different places in other industries and it’s having a huge impact, but I don’t know how it fits into the big picture just yet.

As an entity, AI relies on being fed good information from multiple sources. Without that information you aren’t able to use the language models that sit over the top, that give you the personal experience of being able to ask questions of the AI machine, to give you an answer.

Investment in AI infrastructure is one of the biggest problems for construction, for all the reasons mentioned. If you needed to create the infrastructure, whether that’s sensors or data structures, data warehouses, processes, or people, that all costs money in an industry which is pressured in terms of what is available.

Construction often relies on huge swathes of development happening in other industries before we adopt it, and then the problem we have with that is we’re trying to sometimes fit a square peg in a round hole.

I’m excited about AI, but I don’t quite know where it fits in yet.

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