Construction is often reduced to the most visible project activities, occurring out in the open for the world to see. In reality, countless support functions behind the scenes make projects possible before the first shovel ever hits dirt. Our legal teams provide just such critical support, now enhanced by the massive data processing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to protect the interests of our clients, trade partners and operations and empower our teams to build the future of our communities.

While external-facing AI tools can be flashier and more accessible to the average operations professional, others – like Document Crunch and Reveal – work more quietly in the background. These tools and others like them give our operations and legal teams the ability to organize, parse and analyze project documents at previously impossible rates, driving hours out of the office and returning them to the field, where our teams turn powerful and personal connections with clients into groundbreaking projects.

Crunching Time

Our legal and operations professionals conduct contract reviews as a critical first step when bidding or negotiating a new project, and a comprehensive early review sets the stage for success at every phase of a project’s lifecycle. The task, however, can be time-consuming for all involved. Using tools like Document Crunch, our legal professionals like Senior Vice President Jeff Brannen streamline their own pipelines of contract reviews while also making project teams more engaged in planning, more prepared for collaboration and more confidently familiar with contracted terms.

“No two projects, nor their contracts, are exactly alike, so completing review checklists becomes tedious for legal teams and a true challenge for project teams unfamiliar with legal jargon or contract differences,” Jeff says. “The process didn’t match our commitment to efficiency and excellence in all other areas.”

Jeff sought to course correct by leveraging the ability of AI tools to both condense the amount of information project teams need to sift through during contract review as well as give teams user-friendly means of navigating contracts based on more readily understood checklist items.

Now, rather than poring over every line of a contract, of which only portions are relevant to their day-to-day construction activities, Document Crunch does the heavy lifting. The service’s algorithmic processing enables clean parsing of contract provisions, assigning them to corresponding checklist items and providing hyperlinks to quickly navigate between the two.

“By leveraging AI-powered tools, my team and project teams are empowered to do more with less time,” Jeff says. “Every hour we save on contract review is another hour we can channel directly into our core priorities of developing lasting client relationships and delivering projects with excellence.”

Beyond simply improving a procedure for Balfour Beatty’s own risk management in a project, contract review made more effective by AI streamlining continues to pay dividends as a project progresses from preconstruction and into active construction. Because project teams are more proactively engaged in the early checklist reviews, contractual questions that rise mid-project now require less frequent or less intensive consultation with Balfour Beatty’s legal counsel – the project teams have become experts in their own rights.

“Our operations team needs to understand the contract in order to best advocate for our client’s project goals,” Jeff adds. “With a firm understanding of the mission and an efficient way to navigate project contracts, our operations teams arrived ready to address any issues as our clients’ allies.”

AI Revelation

Whether as a matter of course in contract renegotiations or as a more serious method of ensuring a just resolution to a contracted project, legal discovery is a broad- and far-reaching mission of truth finding ultimately aimed at benefiting every stakeholder. But modern construction, with its intricate layers of tech-enhanced planning and operations, digital communications and more, generates untold amounts of discoverable documents that must be carefully combed for relevant information.

Here, too, AI-powered tools enable our legal and operations teams to bypass the most tedious aspects of legal discovery, get right to the heart of the matter and invest the saved time back into our client relationships and operational excellence.

Aaron Bath, Balfour Beatty director of litigation management and an expert in AI business applications, first piloted Reveal eDiscovery in 2020 – the time saved was quickly evident and algorithmic AI tools like Reveal are only intended to become more efficient over time as they “learn” and adapt to an end user’s preferences and data.

“It’s important to remember that AI-powered tools like Reveal don’t remove the human element in our legal or operational processes,” Aaron says.  “AI and machine learning tools like Reveal and Brainspace allow us to do more than just keep up with the overwhelming volume of data in today’s construction industry. They enable our in-house legal team to cut through the noise, identify key information faster and redirect valuable time and resources back to what truly matters—building trust with our internal and external clients while delivering world-class projects.”

Far from just being an onerous process on legal professionals, eDiscovery can also be burdensome on project teams who, in many cases, may have already moved on to new and just as demanding projects. The breadth of litigation discovery often means that project teams would need to spend valuable hours locating, downloading, properly formatting and then submitting documents to Balfour Beatty’s legal team.

  With Reveal’s advanced AI and machine learning capabilities —  spanning supervised and unsupervised learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and generative AI — we unlock actionable insights from project records that were previously hidden in plain sight. This technology doesn’t just streamline eDiscovery; it empowers our construction teams by proactively identifying risks, trends, and key information.

What’s Next for AI?

Asking what AI can do in construction is tantamount to asking, “What are the construction uses of a drill?” The field of emerging AI technologies is vast and rapidly developing, and our teams – from frontline construction experts to our virtual design and construction (VDC) leaders to our back-of-house legal counsel – are constantly exploring the new heights of efficiency and excellence to be gained by fully leveraging machine learning.

Some tools like Reveal and Document Crunch work better than expected while others may not pass muster, but Balfour Beatty’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of possibility remains.

This article is part of an ongoing series on Balfour Beatty’s applications of AI tools to the construction industry – Part 1 explored our forthcoming LLM chatbot, StoaOne. Stay tuned for a future edition of Building New Futures in which we examine the AI-enhanced tools used by our VDC teams.