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Strategic preconstruction can help contractors and developers mitigate risks such as rising costs, supply chain disruptions and lead to better outcomes, says Trevor Schick, CEO of Slate Technologies, which specializes in AI-powered construction technology.

Slate has created a “Decision Assistant” tool that leverages technology to enable teams to make well-informed decisions.

“Part of this is getting the construction businesses to really harness that data, which I think now they’re getting better at doing that with the tools that are out there,” Schick told the Daily Commercial News.

“When you use artificial intelligence…it’s not 100 per cent right all the time. It’s a learning algorithm just like everything else, and so we’re making sure we give them the information because they have to make decisions on it. If I know a storm is coming in, I can look at the external weather and I can tell them that there is a 99 per cent chance all day on Monday for rain, so they should look at rescheduling the outdoor tasks and we can tell them what those tasks are.”

Once in a while it won’t rain, he pointed out.

“Part of this is getting people’s head around we’re going to give you the advice, we’re going to tell you the amount of probability that’s going to happen, but there is still a human element in here of making a decision,” Schick explained.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh my goodness, AI and machine learning are going to come in and they’re going to take away these jobs.’ My take on it is it’s taking away a lot of the busy work. We’re getting better data to make decisions.”

Human interaction is still an important piece of that, he said.

“That’s one of the things we like to talk to customers quite a bit about, is those two interacting,” Schick said. “Machine learning will make sure that continues to get better and better as we do more and more projects.”

The amount of information that’s created in the construction industry is large and there are a lot of tools out there, said Schick.

“Our goal is there are hundreds of problems on a construction site, (we) give them the ones that are most important from a schedule perspective and a cost perspective so they can prioritize the work,” said Schick. “Normally you would have to go into multiple systems to get that data. We’re bringing it together and allowing you to go through your data whether it’s in five systems or 10 systems.

“The hard part of it is how do you pull that data together,” he added. “Once we link all that data together it allows us to start drawing insights out of it that we can give back to the user. Those insights are around how do we make sure that we help them forward look on scheduling problems and forward look on cost problems that might happen.”

Slate is headquartered in California but has an office in Toronto.

“We were originally part of a homebuilder but we’re not part of them anymore,” Schick said.

“Working with them on what they needed to do down the road was kind of the impetus for it. Then we definitely saw a product market fit beyond just what they needed. We started to work with some of the biggest general contractors in the world doing some projects…using our products to do the preconstruction design phase of it.

“As we continue to work with some of those big general contractors and EPCs (engineering, procurement and construction) we realized obviously the construction market is a massive market so it’s a good market to be in. Then when you have a product market fit with a platform like ours, we see a great market opportunity right now.”