One of the most common complaints about new construction projects – from housing to office blocks to leisure facilities – is that "everything looks the same nowadays".

Listen to this article

This gripe against contemporary building design has some justification, but what if – as is becoming increasingly common practice in the construction industry – we outsource more of this task to artificial intelligence?

Once the predictive capability of construction modelling technologies becomes near-perfect, and digital memory effectively permanent, optimisation, prediction and data-driven governance may significantly reshape the construction industry's professional judgement, contractual responsibility and creative agency.

The first and most significant impacts of AI in construction are likely to occur at project inception.

In time, perhaps just a few short years, it is plausible that, rather than beginning with a brief authored by an architect or developer, construction projects will instead emanate from AI systems trained on decades........

© LBC