October 31, 2024
Quantity Surveying

The Power of AI in quantity surveying

Jeremy Harris

AI technology offers an opportunity for quantity surveying practices to be modernised, unlocking the potential for enhanced project efficiencies.

However, it is important to be mindful of the risks involved with AI, particularly the criticality in ensuring technology is robust enough to achieve desired outcomes and safe to avoid cyber bugs and hacks when working with sensitive information.

How AI will be able to assist Quantity Surveyors

Cost estimate efficiencies

As the AI database management evolves, the ability to manage historical project data will enable efficiencies in benchmarking analysis of projects.

Through machine learning models, patterns and factors can be identified that could measure risk and impact costs, which would help inform the QS of items to consider at early-stage estimates based on similar historical projects.

Construction documentation analysis

As technology advances, we are now seeing more opportunities to integrate AI into review of construction documentation. It is already possible to compare PDF documents to highlight changes and there is potential for further advancement as technology progresses.

Measuring efficiencies

As the industry evolves and utilises AI more effectively in day-to-day operations, we will start to see more repetitive functions being able to be managed through AI processes.

We have already seen limited success with AI being able to count repetitive symbols which is useful to count common items, such as light fittings. However, to date, if the symbol is not exactly the same, it is not counted.

Cost management

Technology within the accountancy profession is already utilising AI to collect data from an invoice that is emailed to an account monitored by the programme, and then either records this information automatically in the accountancy software or flags it for a person to manually enter. This kind of AI technology has the potential to reduce manual data entry by automatically populating reoccurring information such as payment claims.

BIM integration

AI can be integrated by the design team with Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems to enhance collaboration and coordination among project stakeholders. For example, automated clash detection using AI can identify potential design conflicts early in the project lifecycle.

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We put the question to you, do you believe that aspects of AI will become commonplace in quantity surveying practices worldwide over the next 10 years?

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This article is brought to you by WT New Zealand, www.wtpartnership.co.nz, we hope you enjoyed reading this as part of our Progressing Construction article series.

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