Sikich Technology Team Attends the Association of General Contractors 2024 Annual Convention

The 2024 AGC Annual Convention was held the week of March 18 and was attended by Sikich Technology team members Mike Loumeau, Sales Manager and Tim Tucker, Partner. Mike and Tim specialize in solving complex business problems in the construction industries by leveraging Microsoft-based solutions. This year’s AGC Convention had a heavy focus on emerging AI industry solutions, so this was an opportunity to stay updated on current use-cases, trends, and emerging products.

Sikich attended four sessions on AI, all of which were packed, some standing room only. Here are a few ways that construction companies are starting to leverage AI technology.

Takeoffs

For years, estimators have been clicking on floorplans to define rooms, areas, boundaries, naming, and then color-coding them in order to calculate square feet/yards, linear feet, number of electrical outlets, toilets, etc.  Emerging technology solutions such as Togal.AI speed up this process by performing the tedious work, so that an estimator can validate. Couple this technology via existing APIs to a modern, powerful ERP like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and you can more efficiently generate job quotes using the current pricing for materials and labor from the ERP’s item master. Because Business Central can maintain substitute products, several cost scenarios can be generated based on supply chain availability, volume pricing, or simply Owner product preference.

Contracts

Several products in the marketplace leverage AI to assist with summarizing contracts and specifications with the goal of identifying conflicts within the contract text, providing financial clarity, and flagging risks. Workflows can also be built to route documents for review, approval, and archival.

Contracts Connected and Microsoft 365 with Copilot are two examples of products that leverage AI this way, which would be optimal for the construction industry. Companies could then couple Copilot with Microsoft PowerAutomate to easily create workflow to notify or assign work to others inside or outside of the organization.

Job Site Meetings

Toolbox talks, daily safety meetings, and stand-ups—there are a lot of different types of job site meetings.  Creative contractors have learned to leverage tools like Microsoft Teams with Copilot to transcribe and summarize the meeting using the app on their Smartphone. More progressive companies are even using the cameras to record a video of the meeting to evidence that it happened.

While leveraging these technologies saves everyone time, contractors should remember to train their workers on the potential liability issues that come with them. Remember, any saved or shared picture, video, or transcription is discoverable in a litigation scenario, so if job site issue is documented using one of these tools, evidence of the correction should similarly be captured.

Using AI With Structured Business Data

Apart from takeoff automations, most of the AI attention in the construction industry seems to be focused on using large language model and generative text functionalities. However, progressive companies should start thinking about how they can use AI in conjunction with structured business data to streamline processes and help answer business questions.

Structured data is the type of information in ERP, CRM, service, and scheduling systems. Whether the business applications are unified from a common software vendor or integrated as best of breed solutions, it’s important to choose systems that are open for integrations and data extraction for consolidation with unstructured data to create modern data lakes. Combining structured data from business systems with unstructured data such as documents and spreadsheets along with external data facilitates leveraging AI technologies that can use it all for predictive, trend, or correlation analysis.

The most important example is the ability for AI to help solve questions related to profitability that would normally take people days or months to produce after combing through all the data. Better still, if the core business applications are built by companies like Microsoft that are investing in embedding secure AI technologies within their ERP, CRM, and Field Service applications, front-line employees become more productive, because it assists with training and everyday tasks, while protecting sensitive data that shouldn’t be shared with public AI solutions.

AI technologies have actually been embedded in the top technology business solutions for some time. While generative AI technologies are getting all the attention, the real benefit to a business is to leverage the latest GPT technologies along with AI-enabled business and analytics applications with the underlying data. Sikich is committed to bringing these solutions to the construction industries to help business increase margin and improve efficiencies. Contact us today to learn how leveraging AI technologies can and will benefit your construction business.