How artificial intelligence will come to be the death knell of construction estimating.
I had to laugh right out loud at the passage of a column I’d recently perused regarding Pope Leo’s long-winded encyclical warning of the imminent dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). According to the piece, the Pope had inadvertently enabled his very writings to be duped by what was exposed as the obvious ear markings of digital language processing. The irony was too precious, and I nearly spat out my morning coffee as the humor erupted in me.
But this little anecdote is not intended to be an illustration of papal infallibility. Far from it. In fact, I heartily concur with many of Leo’s expressed concerns, as I have often discovered a hollow effect in the voice of my own writings, one that betrays the echo of machine learning.
My narrative is aimed to underscore the depth to which AI has permeated our everyday realities. More to the point, despite the positive aspects that AI portends, I harbor a good deal of apprehension involving the profound effects that AI is bound to interject into the construction industry, and how it will shape estimating, in particular.
At the close of my last installment of Estimator’s Edge, I posed a question that still haunts me: Will AI ultimately render the estimating profession obsolete? The answer lies with the general consequences that have arisen to date.
I have expressed my concern regarding this topic several times through various articles, all raising the alarm about potential employment displacement. But we have all seen displacement involving cultural shifts before—the industrial revolution, through the digital age—and humans have always eventually adapted, transitioning from physical labor to cognitive work, affecting the overall improvement of the common good.
Again, we have seen this all before, so why raise the level of alarm at this point? Because we have never experienced the sheer immensity of the current shift before. It portends to be a historical tsunami.
The gravity of this shift involves two drivers of critical impact that are affecting the intensity of this sea change simultaneously: speed and cognitive compression. The current acceleration of AI development is following an exponential curve, where complexity and capability of systems doubles roughly every four months!
This rapid momentum is driven by the advent of evolving hardware design, recursive self-improvement, algorithmic efficiency and the “unhobbling process” (the process in which AI functions with greater agency and requires less and less human management).
Cognitive compression works in tandem with speed and agency. Cognitive compression: imagine all aspects of human thought—reasoning, analysis, creativity, conceptualizing—all condensed into a single neural impulse. Cognitive compression is the main product of generative AI. Pondering is a thing of the past. Critical consideration is a relic.
But just as speed and cognitive compression are the driving forces behind generative AI, efficiency is the main objective. For example, a management scenario may now exist in which one person equipped with AI can perform the work previously required of 10 people.
Organizations will adjust—remember, efficiency is the main objective. And of those previously employed 10 people, how many will have the skill or resources to continue with meaningful or rewarding work? Will they simply become AI assistants? Does that even matter? If it’s efficient, it works.
Let’s translate all that into a narrative that addresses the question at hand, i.e., will AI render the estimating profession obsolete? The short answer is this: immediately, no—but ultimately, yes.
Let me qualify that the foregoing hypothetical account defines a typical estimating scenario involving a specialty contractor—a commercial drywall firm.
Recently developed estimating programs incorporating AI into their design have devised improvements that have empowered estimators to rely on automated takeoffs to a degree that they can spend more time and effort on less repetitious work.
Takeoffs are a thing of the past, as actual job-costing tasks assume more emphasis. This can be seen as the merging of roles between estimating and project management. Not an undesirable outcome by any means. In fact, I have encouraged such productive unions many times in past writings. Still, it cannot be denied that a position was just instantly eliminated. And as programs become increasingly sophisticated, it wouldn’t be unheard of for a project manager (former estimator) to take over field operations, thus eliminating another critical (supervisory) position.
As cognitive work becomes more compressed, upper managers recognize that project management can be effectively assumed by a proficient office manager, one who has already consolidated several subordinate positions (accounts payable/receivable, payroll, human resources) into one with a couple of keystrokes.
Now that we have reduced a construction management firm from a team of 10 or 12 employees to one or two, an astute executive will invariably recognize the superior problem-solving capacity of his digital counterpart and will eventually consent to relinquish the decision-making process in a voluntary act of agency inversion. This is the crucial tipping point in which humans will care more about efficiency than agency (power).
If all of this seems a bit too far-fetched (or too dark), consider the speed with which the current digital age has advanced (or, controlled) our culture, perhaps you should reconsider your skepticism. In any case, it’s another “wait and see” prognostication.
Vince Bailey is an estimator/project manager in the Phoenix area.
