Using ChatGPT as a Virtual Assistant in your Construction project.
Contributing Author: Lot Kaduma
As a construction manager, you probably spend a lot of time and effort collecting information, planning tasks, updating progress, filling forms, compiling reports, and sending communications among other administrative chores. Do you usually find this process to be laborious and repetitive? Would you rather be focused on tasks that add more value to your project?
What if you had a tool that could automate these time-consuming tasks and optimize your project from start to finish in order to free up space for you to focus on more productive effort in delivering on your project goals? We can only leave it to your imagination to decipher the possibilities. Thanks to ChatGPT, such possibilities will soon be within your reach.
What is ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI. It functions like having an assistant that can answer your questions on any kind of topic and have a conversation with you like a human would. From doing complex tasks like writing computer code to mundane chores like generating cooking recipes, it is amazing what it can do for you. For instance, we found a YouTube video where ChatGPT was used to create a hit song. It knew how to create chord progressions and lyrics. The song turned out so well that you would think it was created by a human being. So, we decided to take it for a spin and asked ChatGPT how it could assist us in a construction project.
Note: We start a conversation with ChatGPT through phrases or sentences called prompts.
Prompt 1: What are the Use Cases of Chat GPT in Construction?
First, we asked ChatGPT to tell us about its possible use cases in Construction and it provided us with the following:
Interestingly, the first use case it mentioned is to serve as a Virtual Assistant. Although it might seem generic at first glance, it does unify all other use cases and addresses exactly where we need to act mostly on the construction site.
As a construction manager, you could ask questions and receive answers about the status, timelines, costs, resources, and different aspects of a construction project. Apart from that, ChatGPT can provide recommendations according to best practices. From understanding legal or building code requirements to conducting quality or risk assessments and can be a handy tool when carrying out research on any construction-related subject. This is why having such a tool would be helpful to keep you on track and not be behind your project goals.
Prompt 2: How can ChatGPT be used as Virtual Assistant to manage a construction project
To understand our focus use case in more depth, we asked ChatGPT to explain how it can be used as a Virtual Assistant to manage a construction project. It did come up with some interesting use cases that address time-consuming tasks when managing your construction projects. Tasks related to communication and coordination, information retrieval, task and schedule management, issue tracking, risk assessment, document management, and resource management are common scenarios.
An example of a repetitive task related to document management is the Construction Daily Report or Construction Daily Log. It provides a summary of the daily field activities such as the work performed; the workers, materials, and equipment used; as well as daily visitors, weather conditions or any issues encountered among others. Typically, in a construction project, different daily reports are required from the site superintendent/foreman, the subcontractor, and the general contractor. In all, these reports combine to serve as important documents which provide records of the actual status of the project.
Next, we asked ChatGPT to generate a construction daily log to see what we could achieve with it.
Prompt 3: I need you to help me generate a Construction Daily Log.
So far, ChatGPT provided an explanation of a Construction daily log. It also generated a template to serve as a guide that we can use to create our own documentation. Note that the reason for providing us with a template is that we didn’t give any specific details of the project.
So, we decided to go again with a longer and more detailed prompt.
Prompt 4: Can you provide me with a Construction Daily Log in a table?
Here are the project details:
Project Name: Residential Development
Job Number: RD-2023–08
Address: No 10, Regency Street, Accra. Ghana.
Date: 01/06/2023
Site Conditions: Weather is Sunny with clouds, the temperature is 35 degrees Celsius.
The work progress: Pouring of Concrete in Foundation.
Please ensure to include Tasks Accomplished, Crew List, Equipment, Materials, Deliveries, Safety Issues, Delays, Visitors, General Observations, and Photographs in the report.
This time we asked ChatGPT to provide the Construction Daily Log in a table format. We included project-specific information such as the project name, job number, site conditions and the specific items that we needed to be captured in the report.
Looking at the image above, ChatGPT did try to represent something much more relatable to our expectations than its previous response. However, it made some errors with the materials because pouring concrete does not require reinforcement bars and formwork. These are used before pouring concrete occurs. Also, Formwork (sometimes referred to as shuttering) is a work activity for creating the mold where concrete can be poured and contained until it hardens. It occurs before pouring concrete can commence. Timber, steel, or plastic are common materials used for formworks.
What are the Limitations of using ChatGPT in a construction project?
Every technology has its limitations and ChatGPT is not an exception. Considering it is still evolving, you should expect to experience some hitches. This is why you need to pay extra caution while using the tool.
Based on our interaction with the tool, here are some of our observations about its current limitations:
It is not always accurate: Yes, it makes mistakes and can give inaccurate and misleading answers. Remember in our previous prompt that it made errors while describing the materials used during pouring concrete work. Open AI provided a warning to alert users about this which appears at the bottom of the chat box. This is why you should always verify any information ChatGPT shoots out at you.
It is limited by available data: ChatGPT will only provide feedback according to the information a user provides or the data it can access. Remember that we had to provide it with a more detailed prompt to gain better feedback for our Construction Daily Log, and this was also limited by the amount of information we provided. The reason for such inaccuracies is that it does not have access to the files or data related to the project.
However, Open AI has rolled out its API platform to enable software developers to integrate the language model into their existing solutions. A good example would be the Microsoft 360 Copilot and Bing that were recently launched by Microsoft Corp. For now, there are a limited number of plug-ins that enable users to access external data directly from ChatGPT but this is currently available with the subscription version — ChatGPT Plus. With a plugin like Link Reader, it can read content from any kind of links including webpages, pdfs, images, word and other docs. With this, you could ask it to read, summarize, interpret, or analyze everything such as emails, reports, or contract documents.
What are the Possibilities of using ChatGPT in a construction project?
Since it will require access to data related to a construction project, the best solution would be to host ChatGPT onto an existing software where the project information is stored. If you have been following our publication, you would have noticed that one of the central themes of specter automation insights is on driving awareness about Building Information Modelling (BIM). This is because BIM is the process that enables the generation and access to all the data related to a construction project through a shared database. As such, we asked ChatGPT to tell us what we can do with a BIM software that it is integrated with. We made sure to be more specific by narrowing down our prompt to the task of erecting a brick wall on the construction site.
Prompt 5: What can a BIM software integrated with ChatGPT do for me when executing a task eg building a brick wall on the construction site?
Good enough, ChatGPT provided some interesting scenarios where it can be useful for a construction task. Imagine you were a mason responsible for building the brick wall on site. Now think about the possibilities of receiving step-by-step guidance on how you’ll be required to build the wall. It will show you the picture of the wall both in 3D and 2D, while letting you know how many bricks and mortar you would need to complete the task, or how many bricks you’ll be expected to lay in an hour or a day. It can also provide you with guidance on working to the project’s quality standards. If there are sensors and cameras relaying data in real-time to the BIM model, ChatGPT can alert you, your crew and your supervisor of any potential health or safety risks. If you are the construction manager of the project, before the start date ChatGPT can be able to take-off quantities from the model and let you know what materials, equipment and labour will be required, and could even order them for you. During execution on site, you could ask ChatGPT to tell you when the masons started or finished the work; if there were any safety issues; the quantity of materials available and used, the conditions of equipment or any other issue. When works close for the day, ChatGPT would generate your daily construction report much faster and more accurately.
Overall, through text or voice prompts, you could have seamless conversations about anything related to the task because it already knows everything about the project and can even predict future possibilities. With a tool like this, you could actually be able to focus more on completing your tasks efficiently, right?
Would the quality of the BIM model matter when using ChatGPT?
As a generative AI, it has the capability to learn from the data you feed it, and this will determine the quality of results that ChatGPT would be able to provide to you.
We defined BIM as a database because its data can be structured, processed, and queried to provide any kind of information related to a project. As such, this structured nature of BIM data would be a perfect source to train ChatGPT.
However, the quality of your BIM model would determine the output you could derive from the tool. In our previous article on Level of Development (LOD), we mentioned that the level of geometry (LoG) and level of information (LoI) embedded in a BIM model determines the quality of its data. In essence, the higher the LoG and LoI the better the output that ChatGPT will be able to deliver.
Also, the extent to which ChatGPT could continue to learn from your project depends on the level of maturity of your BIM process. BIM maturity is determined by how much integration of information exists between the people, processes, organisations, and phases related to your construction project. This ranges from Low Collaboration (Level 0), Partial Collaboration (Level 1), Full Collaboration (Level 2), and Full Integration (Level 3).
As access to cloud-based integration continues to grow in the construction industry, we can envision that ChatGPT would one day be able to learn everything about your project from the beginning till the end. With this, it would even be a much more powerful tool when planning and executing your future projects.
Conclusion
We can see that ChatGPT has the potential to be a powerful companion when working on your construction project, especially when you need to lessen the burden of carrying out administrative tasks. It has the potential to guide construction workers through starting and completing their tasks on-site, prepare and distribute all kinds of communications, conduct research, as well as gather and analyze all project information to help keep them on track. For now, it does have some limitations because the free version cannot access information outside its database. However, with the subscription version, you can use plugins to allow it to access and analyze information via links to your project files (pdfs, word, images) and webpages.
Nevertheless, the best use case would be to integrate ChatGPT into a BIM platform for construction management. In this way, it can access and analyze the data related to both the geometry and the information embedded in the BIM models, as well as the information that is associated with the people, processes, organisations, and phases related to your construction project. This in turn would enable ChatGPT to assist with planning and executing your building or infrastructure projects efficiently.
Overall, here are some key takeaways that would be helpful when using the tool:
- You need to be very specific when creating prompts for ChatGPT or else you might not get the kind of answers you’re looking for.
- Don’t be bamboozled when it throws out responses that seem intelligent and conversational because it can give false answers sometimes. Always check the information it gives you to be sure it is factual.
- Its database is not current and is limited to information from 2021. If you don’t have access to the Pro version, make sure to check the internet for current data and compare it with its response.
- As a generative AI it can learn from the data you feed it. The quality of results it could deliver to you would vary depending on the quality of data it has access to.
We would like to know your thoughts, experiences, or even fears about using ChatGPT in a construction project. Do you see any potential or limitations? Feel free to comment and let’s have a conversation.
