In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that technological advancement would double every year as the number of components per integrated circuit increased. With the rise of AI, Moore’s Law has become a thing of the past. We are now living in the Zettabyte era — a period marked by better hardware, smarter algorithms and more digital data.
To put it into perspective: from the beginning of human history to the year 2003, humans collectively produced about .5% of a zettabyte (a digital unit of measurement). In 2013, that same amount of information took only two days to create — and since then, the rate of advancement and data production has continued to compound.
We have artificial intelligence (AI) to thank for this exponential growth. Here, we explore how AI is revolutionizing architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) roles — and explain how you can incorporate AI tools into your daily routine.
AI Makes Tedious Tasks Easier
Just as the invention of the washing machine liberated those responsible (mainly women) for a time-consuming daily chore, AI is already enabling humans to spend less time on mundane tasks. At a recent seminar held at McCoy Rockford’s Houston office — AI in Action: Your Advantage in AEC Marketing — the Zweig Group outlined an expansive list of AI-based productivity tools. Everything from asset management to proposal development can be done more efficiently with AI.
Here’s a sampling of the tasks you can streamline.
Marketing
ChatGPT, and the many tools that draw from its data, has made it easier than ever to write social media posts, blog posts, eBlasts and press releases. Just as useful are the plethora of photo editing and generation tools that allow you to quickly clip out a background, remove subjects or whip up a hypothetical rendering of a project. There are also a host of video and voice generation tools that can add animation to static photos, build videos and create realistic avatars.
Asset Management
For architecture, engineering and design professionals, organizing and searching through large graphic files can consume a significant portion of the day. With AI, you can automatically add meta data to photos, allowing you to search for assets using descriptive keywords, rather than manually naming and nesting your files.
Business Development
There are a host of AI tools that can make life easier for sales professionals. Email-based AI assistants can scrape the web for relevant topics and events – and deliver them to you via email. Meet an interesting lead at a recent conference? There are AI platforms that can analyze their online presence and deliver detailed analyses of their temperament, interests and professional history. Need an easy way to manage business cards and other contacts? There are multiple AI tools for that, too.
Proposals
Proposals are an essential part of AEC workflows – and they can also eat up a lot of time. AI can help you conduct research, automate your internal processes, build presentation decks and even edit headshots in seconds.
How to Incorporate AI into Your Daily Routine
As you dig into the world of AI resources, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tools available. How do you decide which tools to test first? Start by quantifying how you spend your day. Make a list of each task you complete and the time it takes to finish it. Once you have a representative list, ask yourself which activities required the creativity, imagination and insight only you can bring to your job, and which tasks amount to busy work? These line items are obvious candidates for AI automation.
But let’s take it a step further. Are there creative tasks you enjoy that could be optimized? Perhaps you’re a gifted designer who delights in creating architectural renderings. Could some of the process be performed by an AI tool, leaving you with the more challenging tasks of editing and refinement?
Change Is Hard – But Worth It
In the Zettabyte Era, the ability to adapt to an exponentially evolving digital landscape is essential to professional success. Goldman Sachs has predicted that generative AI could replace up to one-fourth of current global jobs, with office and administrative work being most at risk, followed by law, architecture and engineering1.
But here’s the good news: many of those jobs will be replaced by new roles made possible by emerging technology. By incorporating AI into your workflow now, you’ll be preparing yourself for the next phase of your professional evolution — and reclaiming some precious time while you’re at it.
Sources:
Goldman Sachs: Generative AI Could Replace 300 Million Jobs | AI Business