AI Won't Replace Construction Engineers. But It Will Change Their Jobs.

Morning. Palantir’s moving into construction, Procore’s in your smart glasses, and personal agents are booking flights on their own. It’s easy to feel like the robots are coming for the site office. They’re not, but the job is changing. Today we look at where the line sits between what AI does and what you sign off on.

IN TODAY'S ISSUE

Today's read: 5 minutes

📢 Procore launces voice first AI mobile app for the field and is partnering with Meta’s smart glasses

Why it matters: Procore’s new feature allows voice powered answers, crews can ask questions about project drawings, specs, RFIs and more and receive cited answers with session history and context saved on their devices.

The story here is how AI is changing the user interface. New technology has always had an adoption challenge: training people on new interfaces or workflows. But with AI the interface, being voice, chat or video, can stay the same while the underlying application changes. Instead of learning how to navigate every new tool, users will interact in ways they already understand meaning there’s less friction for adoption.

🚨 Anthropic announces Claude Duet, a new personal agent

Why it matters: If you’ve been staying across the latest AI news (hint: keep reading us!) you would’ve heard about Meta Muse and Instinct. It’s a new type of AI called ‘personal agents’ which pursue goals autonomously.

This means you can say “plan my trip to Australia” and it would research flights, check your calendar for conflicts, remember you hate layovers and book accommodations near the conference venue you mention last month only pining you for approval or when decisions require input. While not in construction yet, it’s only a matter of time before Procore, Autodesk and others introduce their own agents.

🤖 Palantir enters construction promising to drive autonomy into core operations

Why it matters: Headlines like these often feel scary. AI is coming and replacing me but honestly, what does it actually mean? When you read the press release they’re helping companies build a data model and use AI on top of it. It does takeoffs, reads a project spec, identifies high risk scope items and similar. Stuff I don’t want to do anyway.

The reality is that we need AI. Look around, there’s less of us coming in than going out. It isn’t really going to replace us but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to learn it. You can’t be the bloke or lass drawing by hand when CAD’s just come out.

I didn’t know this when I started, but in many parts of the US you can’t legally sign or submit technical drawings or reports for public projects unless you’re a licensed Professional Engineer. It’s a risk thing whereby you have to prove technical competence. I don’t want to drive over a poorly designed bridge.

What this means with AI is that it’s likely going to take a long time until we see AI completing and delivering full designs. As engineers, we still need to review and investigate any design it creates to sign it off and defend it if we are ever sued. AI doesn’t hold this risk, legally we do and that influences how AI systems are defined in construction.

For us, we are seeing these three worlds emerge when working with AI:

Here AI does part of the work but can’t finalize a decision without an engineers approval.

In this scenario AI is more autonomous. It can make and execute a decision but we still supervise, monitoring outcomes, auditing and intervening as needed.

A good example is Waymo where the car self drives but there’s a remote team that can take control.

This is the point where we start getting scared about our jobs. Here a system is fully autonomous and completes tasks automatically. AI isn’t really there yet for a full design or even to manage my inbox but honestly, I don’t think I want it here.

The value of this framework is to understand where we are moving towards. Each level of control is a tradeoff between factors such as safety, speed, risk and learning. With that we can gauge which parts of our work can be delegated to AI, and where we still need to be accountable for the result.

We dive into this in more details including how to identify tasks that can be automated, assisted or should stay with the engineer. Keep reading here.

This Wall Street Journal headline caught our eye. As the first AI native generation, Gen Z’s skills are in demand and it’s rocketing people’s careers. But where do you start?

One way is to ask your wider team for their best prompts. Chuck it in an excel spreadsheet with a column on where it is best used and who made it. Share that in an email across the organization. It’s helpful but also puts you in front of the right people.

Well that was a lot. Our takeaway isn’t AI’s taking our jobs, it’s that the person who knows which parts to hand off and when to dive in, is the one who stays valuable.

As always, hit reply if you have a question or want to chat. We reply to each one.

Till next week,
Sid & Bhragan