3 Ways AI Helps Project Managers Work Smarter

December 13, 2024

Rachel Webster

AI is a hot topic, but it's not just a buzzword. If you're wondering how you can might use AI to drive efficiency in your constuction projects, read on to see just how practical it can be!

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making a significant impact in every industry today, from manufacturing to financial services. Historically, construction has been a cautious adopter of new technologies, but when it comes to the rapid emergence of AI, construction project managers can’t sit on the sidelines.

That’s because construction project managers are uniquely positioned to benefit from AI. As a project manager (PM), you experience the stress of pulling out and synthesizing data while working across stakeholder groups. Sometimes, finding what you need in an unstructured dataset can take hours—valuable time that AI can help you get back.

While AI sounds intimidating, it’s simply a technology that uses patterns and large amounts of data to learn tasks and make decisions on its own—similar to how humans learn from experience. AI tools are good at performing simple tasks, extracting data, and solving routine problems, making them valuable for construction PMs.

Bringing next-level efficiency to construction

AI is coming to project management platforms you already use, helping you spend less time on menial tasks and maximize your use of project data. Think of AI-powered project management as having a virtual junior assistant to help you get your job done faster and more efficiently.

Let’s look at some benefits and examples of adding AI-powered capabilities to a construction project management platform like ProjectSight:

Spend less time on tedious tasks.

Administrative tasks like rekeying information forms, managing documents and searching for information often account for many hours of non-productive work each week for construction professionals.

AI tools can help reduce the time spent on tedious and repetitive tasks such as extracting data from drawings and aggregating information from multiple document versions. Instead of reading half a dozen daily reports from subcontractors, AI could read them for you and surface any potential issues, trends and red flags in a fraction of the time.

ProjectSight includes AI-driven tools for automated drawing management.

Gather more data, more easily.

Getting the information you need from a job site is often fraught with complications.

Daily reports, point cloud scans and safety inspections all require human time and effort to complete and submit. AI tools are helping to lower the barriers to reporting information from the job site.

For example, instead of filling out a form, a foreman could verbally dictate what happened onsite that day to a mobile device, and AI can capture, organize and quantify that report into an actionable document for back-office teams.

By increasing the speed and ease of daily reports, project managers gain a more complete understanding of what’s happening on a project.

Extract more value from the data you have.

More data is only helpful when you can understand and extract value from it. That means you need technology in place to centralize, aggregate and distill information in real time.

AI can identify trends and patterns in data to surface potential financial or schedule risks. It can also use historical data to offer predictive guidance and cost projections as projects unfold.

Imagine a world where financial data such as change orders, job costs and labor hours can be synthesized through AI to help you identify cost overages or where a daily report can automatically flag an RFI or change order without a human needing to pull out that information.

Trimble’s vision for AI in construction

At Trimble, our vision of an AI-equipped future of construction goes beyond ProjectSight and focuses on empowering all of our solutions to be more effective by capturing robust, actionable project data more easily—and quickly filtering it to find what they need.

AI functionality now works in the background within the Trimble products you already know and use, meaning you don’t have to understand the nuts and bolts of how it works.

Our focus on the field means we innovate ways for accurate, real-time job site data to stream in, from images to point clouds or reports. Flowing from the edge, that data powers downstream processes and informs project decision-making—and with AI, both gathering it and understanding it will become simpler and faster.

We’re here to help you adopt these emerging technologies with ease. Our vision of AI-powered connected construction means bringing together people, machines, technology, data and workflows to detect complex issues faster, automate tedious and keep your projects moving forward—on time and on budget.

While human oversight is still necessary, AI tools can help you surface the data you need much faster and more efficiently so you can spend more time on what really matters: moving your projects toward completion.