Written by: Amy Drew Thompson
The schedule, said Aleksey Chuprov, is the heart of the project.
“It’s everything. What is happening, the approach, the procurement, the installation. All the work of building, it ties to the schedule.”
The schedule, in fact, said Chuprov, senior vice president, data & IT at Suffolk Construction, a member of multiple AGC chapters, is the top predictor of a project’s ultimate result.
“Because if we are delivering on schedule, we will likely have financial success on the project, both for ourselves and for the clients.”
Chuprov’s background lies at the intersection of construction and digital analytics, in helping deliver projects via data and artificial intelligence, and so he was pleased to be among those in the room to aid ALICE Technologies in developing a new AI feature that allows for greater mastery of the schedule.
Insights Agent is the fruit of this yearslong process, a tool that allows construction teams to simplify the complexities of their project schedules using simple, natural language.
Helping to make schedules more collaborative, said Juan Sebastian Jurado, head of special projects at ALICE, was one of the prime directives.
“We wanted things to be easier to understand for owners and field teams,” Jurado explained, noting the complexity of schedules and Gantt charts often requires a dedicated role that focuses solely on its management.
“These people are experts in CPM (critical path method) and tools such as ALICE or Primavera; however, there’s about 80 percent of the jobsite, or at least a project team, that needs to build off that schedule in some capacity.”
But these players are often hamstrung by limited access, or none at all.
ALICE’s cloud-based system allows for ease of sharing but also helps users less versed in “schedule” to know what they’re looking at, because the Insights Agent actually helps.
Jurado presented a scenario in which an owner and a field superintendent want to get a six-week lookahead. Or maybe they just want to know which upcoming tasks are critical in their scope.
With the agent, they simply ask and receive. Literally.
“It generates a conversational report,” he said simply. “It’s really about democratizing the schedule, getting that information out to the teams and, at the end of the day, helping them make faster, smarter decisions.”
Project managers are making multimillion-dollar decisions daily, often with limited information, he pointed out.
And so, after years of internal testing, the technology is as collaborative as its human counterparts.
“ALICE does the math and the scheduling,” said Jurado, “while the Insights Agent provides the conversational interface, extracting the data from the schedule.”
Suffolk’s team was one of the first to flag potential problems and solve them in the field.
Chuprov noted as an example that the hurdles surmounted were twofold when equipment delays caused a potential setback on one of Suffolk’s larger projects in the life sciences sector.
“Our objective was to recover the delay caused by an external factor and accelerate the overall schedule,” he explained. “First, the Insights Agent was able to analyze the schedule quickly, to look for opportunities for adjustment.”
In this case, there was room for optimization in the roofing equipment installation.
“However, before you can optimize a schedule that’s overloaded with logic, you need to adjust some of the preferential relations in order for the optimization to work.”
That’s the AI part, he noted, which used the ALICE algorithm to resequence the roofing install, ultimately saving 42 days in the schedule.
“On its own, Insights Agent can create value in just highlighting what can be improved and letting the team know where the likely issues will be,” said Chuprov, “but when connected to the optimization algorithm, it allowed us to save days, to improve productivity by 30 percent.”
There are thousands of activities involved in every project, he noted, with many of them relating to each other in myriad ways.
“ALICE is the only tool in the market that allows you to leverage AI and model different scenarios, to stack those activities in different ways so you can select and deliver a strategy,” said Chuprov, noting its value at the start of a project.
But the reality is that each undertaking is unique and complex and lives in the physical world. It is at the union of AI and actuality where the biggest opportunities exist.
“Construction workers still spend 20 to 30 percent of their time on lower-value administrative tasks,” said Chuprov, who suggests pairing AI with robotics as one way to improve overall productivity.
“We could get better insights by leveraging AI tools and technologies to identify issues earlier, perhaps those that would never be otherwise identified.”
The potential is huge, he opines, in particular in preconstruction.
“Design, estimating, procurement. There is a tremendous impact AI can have in the next decade that could completely change the way that we do the preconstruction process, end to end.”
Even so, experienced constructors can be skeptical and slow to adopt innovation.
And Jurado, even at his level of AI enthusiasm, encourages this.
“You should be skeptical. You should evaluate it. You should make sure that you’re protecting your data, that the AI is implemented thoughtfully and that humans remain in control,” he said.
It’s key, he noted, but said that having “the smartest people in the world” working on solving construction problems is really exciting, because in 2025, construction itself is incredibly advanced.
“The tools haven’t evolved enough to keep up with the complexity of the projects yet, especially the types that folks at Suffolk and others are building today.”
ALICE’s mission is to grow that technology, and the conversational elements of Insights Agent are moving the needle.
“There are components of ALICE that require training to understand, but Insights Agent? My grandmother could pick it up and start talking right away.”
As such, what they’ve learned as customers continue to interact with, engineering their prompts and finding new and better things to do with it.
“It’s really fun,” he said.
More than fun, too, added Chuprov. Fascinating.
“We are living in the most interesting time,” he said. “It’s an exciting time to be a builder, because you have so many great, new tools to make things possible, to make your job easier, to build greater, smarter, more beautiful structures.”
Read the article as published in the magazine here.