What is the next breakthrough in construction technology?

In a BBC article published in May, an associate partner at consultancy firm McKinsey argued the way things are built has not changed much in “100 years”.

Some inside the industry have pushed back against the idea that technology in construction has plateaued over the last 100 years.

“There’s a perception that as an industry, we’re not innovative – but we are innovative, and you can see that innovation through the way we build things, the things we put inside buildings and the materials that we use,” said Prakash Senghani, Co-Founder and CEO of Navatech.

Since the industrial revolution, – the invention of motorised machinery and transportation – construction times have sped up and while bearing some of the physical burden from workers.

In the late 1950s computer-aided design (CAD) was developed which replaced manual with digital design. Both CAD and eventually Building Information Modeling (BIM) helped to improve efficiency across the industry, with the latter giving people the tools to construct buildings in a virtual environment.

David Philp, chairman of CIOB’s Digital and Innovation Advisory Panel, said: “I think that undoubtedly the shift from industrialised to modern method of construction, taking higher risk activities away from the job site is fantastic.”

“The Building Safety Act has shown us also the need for good quality information that’s going to support safety use cases.

“But as I think we’re now moving into industry 4.0, we’ve kind of seen some of that now with BIM, but we’re starting to move into the world of autonomous machines.”

Recent developments in construction technology have been targeted at increasing not just the scope and efficiency of projects but also improving health and safety for workers.

In September, Winvic became the first contractor in the UK to use technology that operates tower cranes from a ground control system.

The aim of the “The Skyline Cockpit” is to improve the safety and wellbeing of crane operators, while routine analytics reports available through its cloud portal aim to analyse for efficiencies.

AI in construction

One advancement that has been the source of interest in the industry are developments in artificial intelligence.

Senghani, trained as a civil engineer, starting his career working as a contractor with Balfour Beatty, but became quickly interested in how digital tools can make the industry more efficient, and safer. 

This interest turned into a career, coming up with the idea to use conversational AI to help manage safety on-site, to communicate things to and from the workforce.

Senghani co-founded Navatech in 2022 after founding construction safety management platform Saifety.ai in 2020.

“Part of the issue that we have with construction technology is a lot of it is focused on the white collar workers – guys are sitting in the office helping them to write more efficient reports, do more efficient things inside the office.

“Not much technology is looking at how we can impact workers on-site to do things more safe, more efficiently, more productive and all of those things – if we make a small change there, you don’t have a big change at an industry level,” he added.

One of Senghani’s recent contributions to the AI space was training Navatech’s AI on Ferrovial’s data and then making it available to the users through the WhatsApp interface to improve the engagement with health and safety data. 

He continued: “We managed to improve the levels of engagement with the health and safety information by something like 250 per cent.”

AI use cases

Senghani also expressed excitement over the varied use cases outside of Navatech’s current remit: “Using artificial intelligence to help you iterate through hundreds and thousands of different design solutions – you basically feed in parameters, the algorithms run and then give you every single permutation of that design.

“And then lots of use cases during the construction phase – with machine learning, you’ve got cameras or drones, analysing at things, picking up things, and then analysing those and judging on what kind of progress has been made and comparing the progress to the three-dimensional model.”

However, he noted some of the challenges and limitations of AI, namely large models such as OpenAi becoming prone to hallucinations, but argued that small models that are used throughout the industry limit hallucinations through a narrow range of data.

Senghani also suggested that a challenge he’s come across is concerns within organisations over where the data is going and being kept.

However, he remains excited over the future of the technology.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface. I think there’s going to be use cases of this technology we’ve not even thought of yet,” he said. 

The SME question

A hurdle for the adoption of AI technology, however, might be the cost for small to medium businesses with mounting costly overheads.

A recent survey of SME’s by the Federation of Master Builders’ (FMB) found that 65 per cent of members indicated that rising costs led to higher prices for their services, and of those 54 per cent reported lower-than-expected business profits or financial losses.

Senghani said: “I think the cost of AI is going to come down significantly, but there is a perception of technology within construction that implementing technology is expensive. 

“So there might be an upfront cost, but if you look at that holistically, there are benefits to deploying the right technology early. 

“And you might lose out because your competition is going to be that much more efficient.”

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