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Whether the idea of robots fills you with fear or comfort, the proverbial AI genie is out of the bubble. The performance gains brought by artificial intelligence are no longer hypothetical — it’s here, and smart construction companies can’t afford to ignore the technology.
The good news is that today, contractors and subcontractors of all types and sizes can benefit from robotic processes and systems. And you should want to.
Automation improves back-office performance, reduces the number of mundane business tasks your team must deal with, helps provide prescriptive insights, and can assist in and evaluate onsite project management.
It sounds complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Construction companies around the globe are taking advantage of analytics platforms to increase profit and efficiency in their businesses. And automation — based on robotic processes — is an integral part.
Transformation Through Tech
As technology transforms every facet of the business environment, one of the most feared and misunderstood concepts is robotics and automation. Today’s marketplace is witnessing an explosion of robotic products and services, but looking over the past decades we can see the evolution of robotics has been consistent and much smoother than one might expect.
If there’s any industry that could use a robotic revolution, it’s construction. Plagued with inefficiencies, it’s one essential sector that still requires a lot of manual processes — and we’re just talking about the back office! It’s high time construction managers adopt many of the AI solutions that led to success for today’s greatest innovators, like Apple, Google, and Amazon.
Those companies radically transformed their industries with forwarding-thinking solutions and strategies that put faith in the power of a computer revolution.
Let’s explore some ways that automation will soon be taking over our lives — in a good way!
- Streamlining Processes: Many of the largest construction companies still manage highly complex budgets and estimates in PDF and Excel. Workflow automation and moving to the cloud will vastly improve the way contractors organize and sort the reams of papers and files flowing through their offices. This technology streamlines processes and procedures and drives an immediate ROI on the technology by attacking the “low hanging fruit.”
- Enhanced Employee Experience: Knowledge workers often find themselves making a repeatable series of decisions that are simply faster and easier to be performed through AI. One of the cornerstones of automation is automating relatively predictable decisions through what’s called cognitive process automation. A ‘bot’ is taught how to perform a series of tasks, leaving employees free to pursue other important work. This also helps solve issues of skill gaps and regional inequality, as AI is used to also enhance employee performance.
- Producing Intelligent Insight: Prescriptive analytics supported by advanced robotic systems to answer the fundamental business question, “What should we do?” Automated platforms scan millions of decision variables, constraints, and trade-offs to provide advice for the next best step. This offers ‘what-if’ insights into different scenarios and helps you make better decisions. For example, such analysis can provide the actions recommended to optimize a build’s outcome.
- Improved Company-wide Performance: Construction projects are vast, and there is a deeply interconnected web of teams involved — inside and outside of the company, in the office and in the field. This inevitably leads to silos and broken-down communication, which can be brought back together through AI-based automation and cloud systems. As with other things, robotic process automation helps make the complex simpler: connecting field info to the office in real-time, and unifying business data across teams to create a single source of truth.
Construction is vital. The things we build are at the heart of everything we do, where we live and how we travel. As the industry continues to evolve and tackle the challenges of the future, robots are essential to improving processes and providing the analytics needed for financial transparency, safe worksites and quality excellence.
The construction industry is currently significantly behind other industries in adopting robots, but in the immediate future, it will become the driving force behind more compliant, profitable, and stable construction business practices.
A positive robotic future is here and there’s nothing to fear.
Interesting in learning more? Contact us here to schedule a demo and find out how Briq can help you make smarter decisions, improve performance, and better collaborate.
