Could AI drive a new wave of jobs in construction?

The Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) has said Artificial Intelligence has the potential to create new jobs and attract new people into construction.

The CIOB’s Digital and Innovation Advisory Panel recently published a playbook on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in construction and how best to implement it.

Issues raised include: AI’s effectiveness, ethics, cyber security and data protection.

The CIOB claims AI could ​​revolutionise working processes for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

David Philp, chairman of CIOB’s Digital and Innovation Advisory Panel, and one of the playbook’s authors, said: “I think we’ll see much more levelling up from the SMEs.”

He argues AI could be a necessary tool to help SMEs compete on a more even playing field with larger construction companies.

“They’re speedboats, very agile and can harness technologies often a lot faster and the bigger players, we really just need much more resilient infrastructure,” Philp added.

Philp notes that SME implementation can be inexpensive and should be ‘appropriate and proportionate’.

“It should be motivated by the use case, working out first what you want to use it for, what your pain points within the business are.

“Once you’ve answered that, then look at the tool set,” Philp added.

The playbook states, ‘technologies can assist with surveying and monitoring to identify potential safety hazards, progress, quality issues and deviations from method statements or specifications’, in ways that ‘far surpass human capabilities in speed and efficiency.’

The rise of AI integration in some sectors has stoked fear about its impact on the job market.

CIOB’s playbook addresses these fears head-on, outlining concerns and misunderstandings around the topic.

A report released by the House of Lords in February 2024 revealed construction and extraction roles are least likely to be threatened by AI.

In fact, Philp believes AI could be a big driver for job creation.

Philp said: “I think it’s going to attract more young people into the construction sector who will see it as being much more digitised, and more advanced, where they would have gone into something like biosciences with manufacturing.

“You get a lot of job sites now with drones flying about capturing data, and surveying equipment to all stations are all robotic.

“I think that’s cool and I think it’s going to help us to attract new, skilled entrants especially young people and create new job roles.”

The playbook predicts a transition from operators to supervisors, where professionals will check and validate AI’s work.

The role of AI, Philp argues, is to boost efficiency and enhance the industry’s current capabilities — in his words, ‘support us as a new colleague.’

Philp also sees AI as a potential tool in addressing climate pressures.

“The planetary crisis is a ‘hyper-object’, something so big most people can’t understand it,” he said.

“Massive decisions have to be made and it’s going to force us to make better use of the data and technologies where you can actually start to make big fundamental shifts.”

Nevertheless, Philp notes that the technology needs to be implemented with care.

He said: “When we talk about errors, they’re often caused by a variety of factors: insufficient training of data or incorrect assumptions made by the model; it comes back to the quality of data and generally not the tool itself.

“It’s about taking the time to be mindful — we saw with other things like building information modelling, we had to be mindful about information security, it’s no different with AI.”

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