Empower Your Construction Projects with Project Pipeline Management for Construction Industry

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hi I'm Tom Stevenson and welcome to construction project management tips I'm a professor of construction management and I've taught thousands of students over the years and I have a deep fascination with everything construction today we're going to talk about chat GPT and can it help the construction industry there's been a lot of Buzz over the last six months or seven months on chat GPT I've been playing around with it a little bit to try to become familiar with it and of course I'm trying to think how that might affect well teaching that's a big topic altogether but the construction industry so you know one of the best places to actually go for information about chat GPT is chat GPT itself and you know you can ask the question uh basically what is chat gbt and it'll give you a answer and you can vet it you can edit it but but essentially as it says here it's to it's built to engage in conversational interactions providing answers explanations suggestions discussions on a wide range of topics construction oriented can be one of the topics since very specific you can dive really deep into some of the questions one of the nice things about chat GPT if you haven't used it I definitely suggest you do it doesn't cost you anything at this point you can go in there and you can ask some questions but what it does so much better than say a search engine is that you can keep diving deeper you can take that same topic as if you're questioning somebody and that's knowledgeable on the topic and dive deeper now one of the things that it's actually pretty good at even warning you that the data isn't necessarily 100 correct it could lead you in the wrong interaction with things so at this stage for sure I wouldn't be taking everything that it says as necessarily truth but can you get more detailed answers can you narrow things down can you become more suspect of something by asking questions absolutely absolutely you can but just you've gotta you've got to use it with a very critical mind not that oh it says this so it must be so because it basically is as it says on the second bullet here the models pre-trained on diverse sources of data from the internet well guess what there's a lot of stuff that's not right on the internet currently it's using uh data from the end of 2021 that's like ongoing change that'll be changing I'm quite sure in not that long the data sets that I'll be grabbing will be updating constantly but currently that's where things are at and I think we have to put it into historical context too of how quickly things change but definitely it's from internet including books that could be pretty good articles websites uh allowing it to accumulate a vast amount of knowledge and it has means and methods of vetting information that would be more likely to be correct than uncorrect but at the same time I'm sure you've all seen on generic sort of videos and reports oh I asked chat GPT this question and it was a hundred percent wrong well I can concur with that like I can ask it certain building code questions and sometimes it's right and a lot of times it's wrong but I'm just inferring that very soon when I ask a building code question it's probably going to be tilting more to being more correct than Incorrect and I see improvements on that because that's something that you know if you're able to uh say a specific code requirement and put in the parameters of what you're asking for it over time can get pretty good at answering those questions I believe because it's very it's very right or wrong in a lot of ways when you ask some of those questions there's always gray areas but nine times out of ten it gives you a pretty good sense of where things are at and you know that's the same with in truth with people and we'll talk a little bit about that you know and I you know can jat chat GPT so this is kind of what the environment looks like and one of the things I kind of like too is that it records it because you know you can sign in I usually use my Google thing to sign in and it keeps basically a record of what what information you've asked so you could go back to something and you could go diving deeper into it to find out more valid information you know how can chat GPD help to improve construction management automating repetitive tasks such as document generation generating reports providing insights on Project progress I can think of an example you know if you've been following my YouTubes uh that I do a lot of stuff on MS project besides all the other ton of stuff on construction management and I look at Microsoft Project and it does certain things right like it will do um it will do auto leveling of resources well that's something up to now you do not want it to do because it has no clue and it just distorts your schedule and makes everything very bad uh it also does what we call effort driven scheduling so you know two people would take uh two weeks to dig a trench it would take four people one week it would take us four people uh sorry two people yeah that's right two people two weeks uh four people one week eight people uh eight people two and a half days and then it keeps going right and at a certain point it's it's like fiction there's no way well I think that if you had AI tools built into a software like that you would be able to look at previous projects and give you a scenario that might be very reasonable I'm always getting questions about durations for various activities I think that over time there can be a lot of historical databases that it could draw upon that would give you more accuracy in predicting certain durations or at least durations that you could review and look at to see that this maybe makes sense or doesn't make sense more real more realism built into it um so I think that kind of information will be very very helpful in supporting experienced people doing the work vetting it and making sure because there's always unique factors to particular construction projects that you might not have in other environments so that that I think is very very useful from that perspective and you know what you can ask the program how it can help and you can dig into that you know I even create a slide deck for teaching a three-hour class on Little's laws it relates to lean Construction I'm sorry so there you go I'm an AI language model I do not have the capability to create a slide deck but it really does actually it has it's not going to be with images and things of that nature yet and I'm saying yet uh but definitely it gives you a breakdown and then you can ask deeper questions of things and then you can review it of course to make sure that this actually um makes sense like we're composed throughput I'd have cycle time there you know there'd be differences but it would definitely give you a good starting point that could save you a few hours and putting that together I can see how it could be helpful for me in that case uh it could be helpful when the data sets get to be current to say updated to more current data sets and information to review it for those purposes so I can see a lot of use in there now the other thing I I found um and I'm thinking about this a lot right and maybe take a minute and I've done this in some other presentations so you might might have seen it if you've watched some of my other presentations by the way if you enjoy Construction Construction management how things get done productivity tools leadership click subscribe you'll take a look at my playlist you'll see I have a wealth of information loaded up on there and it can be very helpful for you that way so please and it helps to support the channel click notifications but if you take a few minutes take a look maybe even just pause this because I don't think I'll wait too long here but take a good look at this I'll give just a few seconds here and you can pause it what what's going on right now I live in Toronto and I could probably go to probably any inters section in the main part of the city and see something a little bit similar but not as chaotic not as chaotic uh lots of traffic but this seems like absolute chaos people don't know when the cross you've got street cars you've got horse and Buggies you've got some gas powered vehicles uh model T's Etc so this is at the crust of technological change this is Chicago 1908 and what you don't see is street lights so we make all these advancements you know with the street cars and the gas powered vehicles and the transition from horses to all these other types of vehicles big sort of shifts taking place but when these big shifts take place sometimes we don't have everything in place for it so I look at chat GPT as and it's just one of many that are going to be you know evolving in the next short while Microsoft has invested a lot of money into chat GPT Google has its own stuff going um but you look at that and I think and this has been some of the feedback too with some of the innovators in the AI area that they've kind of gotten nervous that it's moving too fast because that's the thing it does go very very fast the rate of technological change is totally ramped up in the last 15 20 years it's been happening since the Industrial Revolution but it's been getting faster and faster and faster and so that means that very often things are going to come out and then regulatory authorities governments they're like spinning on their heels because they've got these big bureaucracies political environments and it takes time to enact laws and regulations and then there's this big sort of turnaround it's kind of like when Uber came into probably your city too wherever that may be but Toronto it was kind of like politicians oh we can't have Uber but meanwhile everybody was already using it and then if they took it away uh they'd lose votes quite frankly taxi drivers didn't like it and the licensing cities made a lot of money from licensing so there's this disruption that takes place so you can expect that with chat jpt um and there'll be responses things will be happen later on you know cell phones everybody was driving and using their cell phones and that was okay the first few years until everybody was getting into accidents and a lot of people were getting killed and then they put in laws to say you know you've got to um you've got to not use your cell phones when you're driving so there is we're in this environment and that there's going to be some things that may play a role here as I said this this rate of change has been speeding up rather dramatically and we have to also be able to part of that too is learn faster and govern faster as I just said uh Chachi BT though used in the right way can help you to learn faster if you're trying to make it do everything for you without thinking about it you're going to run into problems it's kind of like when I've had students that would you know the student would come oh that student over there they used a template for their schedule I'm like I don't I don't care if they use the template as long as they made the template work but then I look at it and it's like they've got things in this schedule that aren't in the project that I've given them so it's not working very well right uh if you're thinking that you're just going to do chat GPT and not look at it and not think about it in this stage of our Evolution you're going to run into a lot of problems but if you're thinking you're going to use it how can I use it to get my work done better to get my work done more efficiently to make things go smoother in the construction environment to learn from things as we're going to make our own construction environment safer to make it uh less focused on kind of bureaucratic tasks that slow us down and if you're going to use that to your advantage I think that's a good thing but again you've got to look at it very very carefully to make sure that you're not accepting something that is substandard that is going to be detrimental to you your project your team clients others that you interact with so this is where this comes full frame and you know you can think of some historical comparisons and some of these are you know the media or the movie sector uh can make things a little bit scary but I think Alan Turing had uh what they called the Turing task um 1950 this is just taken from um Wikipedia and Alan Turing of course um basically during World War II um basically had the it was one of the code Busters for uh basically England and uh was one instrumental in actually helping to break some of Germany's codes that helped in a lot of ways uh tilt things in um basically the West's favor during World War II so basically a real hero during that time period but he had this test that basically you know can you have a conversation with basically this Ai and not know it's Ai and that's kind of telling you um that it's been a success right when it's indistinguishable from that of a human so I think that's pretty close like that you know people can dispute and go back and forth on that but that's pretty close and it's gonna if you want to argue that it's not there it will be there in not too long that aspect of it thinking for itself and innovating and creating that's the ways to go um Kasparov and big blue so that was IBM's and Kasparov of course world chess champion one of the best ever um first time couldn't uh could beat it a second time it had improved enough that couldn't beat it anymore um so that was kind of like where the computer could out think a human uh in the Chess World the best human uh in Chess at the time how in 2001 A Space odyss see if when I was a little kid I remember that movie came out and it was kind of spooky because this computer was able to um basically choose between life and death and humans and that sort of thing and of course more recently Star Trek and the Borg uh you know if you've watched the Next Generation uh basically and data artificial intelligence and the one that we all get nervous about is Arnold Schwarzenegger in uh the Terminator with Skynet and these types of things uh you know I don't think I don't perceive a Skynet but I do perceive governments and Military uh aspects of uh utilizing it for sure and so that can be definitely scary stuff so as I said there is some scary stuff with uh artificial intelligence but I think you know humans generally try to do things for the betterment but there will have to be some controls in that put into place but for now like things like chat GPT uh basically it can be helpful tool for you to really get down to an answer on something I had a question lately for my accountant and I was kind of getting left right and Center I wasn't getting exact answer and I just went on chat GPT and then it kind of gave me the answer and then I said I said to the accountant does this make sense I said yeah that makes sense and so it was okay so you can use it as a tool to help you in those particular areas anyways that's the quick sort of intro to chat GPT I would give it a try it's very easy to use think of something in your realm of construction that you would like to dive a little bit deeper or get a little bit more questions and don't accept the first answer it gives it's almost like the five whys keep asking more deeper questions of it and then you can usually get more specific in what you're asked after all right so uh I'm Tom Stevenson uh if you haven't clicked subscribe yet please do and I'm wishing you a wonderful day and we'll see you next time bye for now