Even years after its debut to the public consumer, artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) are still very much the talk of the town. While Balfour Beatty teams have explored myriad applications of AI technologies, from proprietary LLMs to thorough and efficient legal document analysis, AI has another, even more natural fit in our business operations: with our Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) teams and preconstruction services.

Balfour Beatty’s VDC teams across the U.S. are unified in their commitment to leverage state-of-the-art tools and technologies that could generate value for our preconstruction teams, trade and design partners and clients. With AI tools like Firmus, our teams are seizing an exciting opportunity to push the construction industry forward, helping to train these models for exponentially better accuracy.

Firm Foundations

First launched in 2022, Firmus (Latin – firm, stable) is an AI-powered preconstruction tool, aimed at eliminating every possible inefficiency or value loss during preconstruction and design reviews.

Very early on, Balfour Beatty’s VDC leaders realized the tool’s potential for our operations – not only could it be trained for a level of scrutiny beyond human capability, but it could also free up valuable time for our teams to attend to other critical phases of preconstruction rather than poring over every detail of design documents. In other words, a firm, reliable foundation on which to base design and constructability reviews.

“Firmus isn’t doing any basic task that our VDC teams aren’t capable of doing manually, but when trained and refined with quality data, it can do them faster and more accurately,” says Sam Burns, Southeast VDC director. “Scope gaps and design discrepancies between design documents and material reality can sometimes be unique, but they tend to follow repeatable – and learnable – patterns.”

As Balfour Beatty’s VDC teams have deployed Firmus on current projects (or introduced it to data sets from past projects), they proactively guide the tool’s machine learning capabilities to digest and “understand” instances of design omissions or inefficiencies.

Every little discrepancy – a plumbing line exiting the building that doesn’t match up with the civil utility, light fixture layouts and quantities that don’t align between different plan sets or a planned window that doesn’t have enough detail to be accurately priced – is an opportunity to refine the design. By doing so, we create more confidence in the eventual project schedule and create real value, in both money and time, for all project stakeholders.

Opening Channels

Balfour Beatty has always valued open collaboration between project stakeholders as a path to success, and incorporating Firmus into the preconstruction process has only enhanced the value-generating potential of our collaborative spirit, bringing all parties together at a user-friendly and virtual meeting table.

After scraping and analyzing all design documents with AI, Firmus is poised to present stakeholders with a wealth of highly technical data. While that data is well-understood by our operations teams and the design partners who need to act on it, it could be overwhelmingly dense for clients and owners. Nevertheless, clients and owners often still play a key role in preconstruction decision-making.

On the front end of the Firmus platform, all stakeholders can track changes and progress of identified issues, assign tasks to each other and leave active feedback. Collaboration has always been our way of doing things, and this tool only makes that foundational principle easier.

Pushing the Industry Forward

For all the previous talk of data and machine learning, it’s worth reiterating that AI tools are only ever as powerful as the data on which they are trained. Input bad data - output bad insights.

Through a strategic and measured period of nationwide testing, training and frequent feedback, Balfour Beatty’s VDC teams are constantly evaluating the merits of Firmus (not to mention other smaller scale, AI-enhanced VDC tools and contributing to their gradual data refinement.

“Our part in the AI-training process not only contributes to a blanket improvement of this exciting tool, pushing the industry forward, but our teams are essentially on the ground floor,” Sam adds. “Tools like Firmus can only grow in applicability for our operations as they’re trained on our data, understand the way our teams work and what we value as factors for project success.”

Our VDC professionals possess the collaborative spirit and technical knowledge to leverage AI tools like Firmus to their fullest potential. As AI tools and the data they maintain continue to improve, the ceiling for value generation is much higher than anyone can imagine.