San Francisco-based Slate Technologies launches an AI-powered digital assistant to de-risk construction.
Construction software startup Slate Technologies is using AI and machine learning to help improve the productivity of construction professionals. The company says its platform enables better, earlier decision making to keep building projects on time, maximising revenue. Slate’s early development collaborators include multinational construction leader Skanska.
Slate claims its solution is unlike any other construction software platform. Its ‘Digital Assistant’ executes multi-dimensional analysis across internal and external data sources, learning as it goes to offer full transparency into the building process.
Data sources include ERP systems, emails, RFIDs, 3D models and other construction-related information – along with public data such as weather, labour, and traffic; dark data locked in silos; and non-integrated systems within general contractor and subcontractor organisations.
“We’re very grateful for Slate in helping Skanska navigate the valuable unstructured data that doesn’t sit in one place and doesn’t sit in a beautifully crafted data lake or data warehouse,” states Andrew MacAskill, operational efficiency director at Skanska UK.
“It’s been such a fruitful partnership for us, and we genuinely believe Slate could be a game changing opportunity for the whole industry and we wanted to be part of its development and be in it from the very start.”
According to McKinsey, the construction sector’s labour-productivity growth averaged 1% a year over the past two decades, compared with 2.8% for the total world economy and 3.6 % for manufacturing.
By integrating and analysing data from almost any location, Slate’s proprietary dynamic scheduling capabilities are designed to help ensure change decisions can immediately update an overall schedule, and the order of individuals’ tasks. According to Slate, this dramatically boosts efficiency, improving every step of the building process.
Through its integrations with subcontractors and material suppliers’ software and systems, Slate says its data insights are valuable to the executive suite, as well as any individual executing tasks on a project.
“Slate is the catalyst for a significant shift in how we deliver buildings, where software works hand-in-hand with humans to transform productivity and profitability,” said Jeff Bettencourt, CEO of Slate. “In construction, a building project is only on schedule on the day its master schedule is created. Slate offers the first-time ability for construction companies to see what is happening with all aspects of a project – including materials, workers, and weather – to perceive problems so they can make changes along the way, minimizing waste and costs while maximizing productivity and revenue.”
Last month AEC Magazine interviewed Senthil Kumar, CTO and head of Slate, where he describes the kind of problems that Slate has set about solving, while destroying some of the misconceptions about AI and Machine Learning.
Members of the Slate team and Skanska will be talking about AI in construction at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD event on 21 June at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, London.
Meanwhile to learn more about Slate Technologies’ vision see the video below.
