I’ve been through a couple of similar technology revolutions, and to be honest, I got them both wrong. The first was the internet — which I greatly underestimated. And the other is BIM (Building Information Modelling), which has made a lot of progress and is more widely used, yet hasn't achieved the industry transformation that we all were predicting.

So, will AI be any different?

I don’t know yet, but YourQS aren’t sitting on the sidelines. We have a couple of AI use cases in the R&D pipeline and will be seeing what we can achieve. What muddies the waters is there is a lot of “jumping on the AI bandwagon” — software systems claiming AI capability for technologies that have existed for years. 

On this basis we could call our system AI as it creates detailed and accurate costing at the push of a button, but I know that underneath is all structured logic, the same as most of these other systems, so it isn’t AI. What structured logic means is lots of statements like if X = this, then do this. These can be very, very, complex, and very smart, and so look like AI, but this is not AI.

For example, here is our logic flow for costing a wall, it is very smart, can handle millions of construction permutations, but is not AI.

AI on the other hand, is defined as “making it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks”. The critical words are “learn from experience”. I don’t believe that me configuring our system do these tasks is the “machine learning,” so it’s not AI.

ChatGPT for example can learn by itself and create new information based on this as a result. What it can do is recognise patterns in the information on a scale beyond what a human can achieve and so create its own “if X = this, then do this” instructions. There are two big limitations with this though, and therefore probably all AI:

• a) It is only as good as the information it is learning from; it needs a lot of data, and rubbish in = rubbish out. AI drift or hallucination is also a well-known phenomenon.
• b) It can’t come up with something it has never seen before. It might combine patterns it knows in a new way, but it won’t have that flash of inspiration that humans can.

Much of the current focus of AI is around documentation with tools like ChatGPT, and it can do stunning things with this. I had a bike crash a little while back and as a result had a session with a concussion clinic. The doctor recorded it, and their AI tool created a set of notes for it. The result was stunning, it picked up subjects that we had talked about at different times through the meeting and collated them into a coherent summary. There is no question for me that AI is a huge aid to any sort of writing task.

One question that came up at the Callaghan presentation was “Can AI cost my design?” If it could, this would impact my business a lot, so I have paid a lot of attention to this space. I have seen AI tools where you can teach them the symbol for a say a light switch, and it will then go through a drawing and find all the light switches. That is useful, but you still need to tell it what that light switch is and what it costs. That is because the specification could be a note next to the symbol, a note somewhere else on the page, a note on a page at the front of the drawing set, in a separate specification document, or not there at all because “everyone knows you use this type of switch on this sort of build”. We’ve explored this, and training an AI with this amount of variability is not practical — yet, anyway.

We trialled an AI tool from France that could take 2D drawings and convert them into 3D walls and rooms so looked promising as it would save us modelling these over the drawings. What we found though was that the time it took to fix the issues like having to split walls that were partly interior and partly exterior or correcting windows and doors as it couldn’t know the heights, was about the same as us modelling it ourselves. It did have a smart feature that created rooms from the walls, but that really isn’t AI, ArchiCAD has had this for decades.

Does that mean AI is a waste of time? Absolutely not. There are, and will be, plenty of situations where being able to identify optimal patterns from apparently disparate information will create intelligent insights which may even be very creative, but it is always going to need some form of human oversight. I’m sure that over time the amount of this oversight will reduce to the point where AI may well get close to what we are imagining for AI now, but I think this will be a long time coming.

So is AI going to take over everything as we keep hearing? No.

Will AI have a big impact? Yes.

Will your job go? Maybe.

Will it change? Definitely.

Should you believe me? Well, my strike rate on these big technology shifts is 100% wrong so far, so maybe, maybe not.