Brief
Drones, machine learning and artificial intelligence are among the technologies in use right now to boost efficiency in construction and help relieve a labor shortage. ZenaDrone CEO Shaun Passley explores how these technologies can be paired to enhance planning to match property details and increase overall productivity while relieving some of the strain from snarled supply chains.
Insight
Construction is back, but many of its workers aren’t. In April, total job openings in the construction industry hit 440,000 — the highest number recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in more than two decades.
That number is down to 375,000 in a BLS recent report, though the building industry is still struggling to fill an historic gap between the number of jobs available and the number of people willing to take them. News reports have relayed anecdotes of builders hiring more women and paying high school students top dollar.
Both ultimately may be good things, but there is another, more sustainable solution: developing new technologies that, in some cases, can do a job better and more safely than any human worker ever could.
earning technology is particularly important in industries like construction, where experience often matters more than education. Building and development sites require rigorous planning, and even then they can be fraught with safety hazards due to unknown factors.
Exhaustive surveilling can be cost-prohibitive, as can teaching an army of new workers the ropes, both in terms of money and time. Without sufficient training or experience, human workers can easily incur physical costs, as well. What’s needed now are tools that can not only do the job, but make planning more efficient, effective, and safe.
Thankfully, those technologies, which we know familiarly as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), already exist. The hard part is evolving from the theoretical world to the building site. Project planning is an obvious place to start.
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