Rajitha AI mini episode (using) === Jeff: ~People looked at this and said oh, these, the trades are gonna be safe from ai. And yes, I think they're gonna be safe from AI in that there's not going to be an AI coming anytime soon that's going to build. The building, right? I think we're a little bit ways off from robots building things and replacing construction jobs. ~ ~But I can't imagine that this was an industry. That immediately dove in. And maybe I'm biasing myself 'cause my father-in-law owns a contracting company and I think he can still barely use his digital camera. But how did that go on that end, ?~[00:00:00] Imane: Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're bringing you a mini episode with Rajita Chopper, VP of product at Procore, the construction management platform, bringing AI into one of the most hands-on industries out there. In this episode, Rajita shares how AI is changing the way construction projects get built from using LLMs to streamline processes, like requests for information and construction site walkthroughs. She also talks about how to get AI buy-in from an industry traditionally slower to adopt new technologies and filled with red tape. So here's Rajita Chapala in this AI mini episode. Jeff: When we think of vertical AI in these. More kind of hands-on physical verticals that maybe aren't thought of as, charging forward on innovation. How did that go? How did you get these people on board or get to the point where this was something that they were adopting so heavily? Rajitha: Construction gets a bad rap for being very hands-on, but it is hands-on. It is very complex. You have so many collaborators in a typical Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: Think of a building, either an office building [00:01:00] or a airport or a bridge. There's usually like thousands and thousands of Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: working on the same project, right? So you can, I imagine the complexity of everything involved and the complexity involved in getting the information to the right person at the right time. Jeff: Right. Rajitha: There's a reason why folks are not distracted and jumping on to the latest cool technology. They're very focused on getting the job done on time, under budget. And then without any major incidents, right? Because safety incidents cost you a lot of money Jeff: do. Rajitha: that's the focus. So the way, aI can help Construction, is more on the efficiencies. How can it , bring them under budget and on time without as few incidents as possible and as few reworks as possible. Rework is Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: and you have to go in and drip it all out and do it again. Jeff: This is not software, right? Where maybe you mess up code and you just go rewrite it. You spent money on physical inventory. Rajitha: That's right. And it costs time and money. Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: and wastage. That's where you wanna [00:02:00] focus information the first focus is really dissemination of information. How can you make that faster, Point of the revision changes? Can you easily look at what changed from the last version to this? That's a huge use case. Following up on people, did everyone get the right revision? Did they look at it? Do they look at the questions that are coming? There is this process called RFIs. It's called re request for information. And it starts even before the project starts where the owners will get out specifications and say, this is what we want you to build. And the general contractors come in and say, okay, I understand what you want me to, let me go get estimates from my trade folks and my specialty contractors who need to do all of this work. So they go in and in that process, when they're sharing all of these documents, the trades will look at certain parts of the specification. In some cases, the GCs will look at certain specifications, say, oh, when you set this, did you mean A, B, or C? And They need before they can start to price it out. give an estimate, So that process is called request for information. So , it can come from either the trades or it can come from [00:03:00] the GCs and it goes, usually goes to the owners and architects who made the specifications and the designs. That process takes a lot of time, and there's a lot of streamlining that can be done. How you asked the questions, did they answer it right? Is there intent? Can you determine intent from how? It was written to answer the question. If it's ambiguous, then go ahead and request the information and then make sure that the information coming out answers the question at the right time. That's just an example of things you can streamline there's tons of these processes. one of the first AI products we released at Procore was automated area takeoff. To do that, you can use computer vision to look at these drawings, extract out the measurements, and then decompose that into, how much concrete , how many sheets of drywall and so on. So those are exactly the kind of things that AI can help with. And now with LLMs, , you can use it for many more. Construction is full of unstructured data and I say this every day as I talk to our customers, is this is truly construction's time for Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: because LLMs in their current form uh, [00:04:00] best with unstructured and multimodal which Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: the sphere of construction is between . Capturing your videos, your photos, any kind of drone imagery that is automated and all the drawings that are involved. And then the documents back and forth. your specifications and any. Correspondence between all the different collaborators that work on the project, your architects, your owners, your general contractors, There's a lot of content that generates and most systems will have all of these as document repositories, but then you also have to tag them separately. And Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: As we started to do is more tagging. But now , you can ask questions. You , no longer need to rely on a person who remembers where the folder structure and who knows what document went where, You no longer have to rely on a person, you can just ask the system, Jeff: I love that the first example was, not even before a bid was accepted, but during request for information, there's, massive ways to save time and efficiency already. This seems like one of those things where I've heard again and again and something we're trying to practice here [00:05:00] is. A lot of these tools don't work great if they're bolted on or if you're making someone change their flow or their work pattern or kind of do something really differently, they're just gonna keep doing the thing they were doing to make it really work. It just has to work. Looking at Procore, was that like a key part of driving kind of the construction industry to move forward is, there's no change management, there's no changes. Just it's going to fit into making these things you already do better, faster, stronger, smarter. Rajitha: That is the ideal scenario, right? I Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: say if you can make AI work at a consumer level like the maps, if it folks can just use maps without. Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: Understanding how it works, that's a win and everybody's going to use it. I get this question all the time from my customer. They say, oh, the trades won't use ai. And I said they use smartphones and smartphone is filled with ai. Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: for sure it's getting that consumer grade. But in some ways, it's also building the trust. If Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: some of the tedious tasks and they can see that it can happen. Without them , handholding the process all the way through. That builds trust. Then they [00:06:00] have you build a trust to then leverage it to go up the chain. Serving up more insights, serving up more automations and suggesting more automations. They're more likely to take that Don. To get there. Now let me be clear. I'm not saying Procore by any means, solved all the AI challenges for the industry. We are still way early in our journey. What I can say is they are very much more open and excited about the potential of AI and. As much as I've been evangelizing and procore's been evangelizing and rest of my partners in the construction industry, all the new startups are evangelizing. I think really the change came from LLMs and Using LLMs in their personal life. How easy it's to use and get answers. Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: The, some of them bringing that learnings into their work and seeing the value of what it can bring. And actually a funny story two years ago is when Nelms really burst into the Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: We had our executive cab meeting in February and we [00:07:00] were ranking, and we tend to do this. We are very customer driven and we'll bring our. our cab members and say, Hey, here's a few directions we are thinking about. Give us what you think is important to you. Not that we'll take that a hundred percent, but that's one more data point into how we create our strategy. So when we did that, AI came at the bottom of the stack. I think it was the ninth priority. Fast forward three months, by June, we are having customers say, Hey, remember you guys wanna talk about ai? Let's talk ai. What does Procore think about ai? What are you planning to do? What should we know? What should we do? So it, it's come a long way, but this, it's just we are scratching the surface. It's still Jeff: Yeah. Rajitha: There's so much we can do. Jeff: Like you said, . People didn't realize how deeply you'd been using it already, when you can type in, the kind of rough name of, a restaurant in your map and it just magically takes you to the right restaurant. Or all the kind of voice assistance, there's some level of AI built into those things for them to work. It just now more , at some level , the curtain was pulled back a little bit to say, Hey, there's [00:08:00] ai. Then people started to, lose trust then. Gain trust, and this is gonna be one of those kinda yo-yos, I feel like, where it keeps going back and forth until it just becomes a part. And, construction seems to be a great spot for this