Reported by: Katie Coyne, Freelance Journalist
Digital Construction Week (DCW) will be a chance for ALICE Technologies to showcase its plans to optimise construction worldwide, says founder and CEO René Morkos.
DC+: Who are you and what do you do?
René Morkos: ALICE Technologies is the creator of the world’s first generative construction and optimisation platform, ALICE. It is used by major contractors, such as Costain, Mace, Skanska-Costain-Strabag JV (HS2), Align JV, Implenia, Zachry Construction and more. ALICE allows teams to understand how long a project will take, what it will cost and what is needed to deliver it.
ALICE Technologies’ purpose is to help customers reduce risk, cut construction costs and build time. On average, it helps teams achieve 17% reductions in project durations and 14% labour cost savings.
I’m a civil engineer, and I founded ALICE. It was my first-hand experience on construction sites that inspired this exploration of AI. Undertaking a PhD, I found that only around 3% of a construction site is worked on at any time. I set out to use AI to reduce the waste of resources and space. The company’s vision is simple: optimise construction worldwide.
What are you launching at DCW and what problem does it solve?
ALICE is showcasing two capabilities: a feature, Schedule Insights Agent; and a new optimisation mode called Targeted Optimisation. Schedules shape cost, risk and delivery, yet extracting insight or acting on it remains slow and manual. Teams spend hours in spreadsheets, explaining changes after the fact, and lack the tools to quickly identify and optimise around the specific tasks within large programmes (tens of thousands of activities), driving delay.
The Schedule Insights Agent changes current practices by making construction schedules easier to understand, analyse and act upon. It embeds conversational intelligence directly into the ALICE platform. Powered by the latest generative AI models, the interface enables users to chat with their schedule, asking questions in plain language and receiving context-rich answers in seconds, without complex filters or manual analysis. It also supports multilingual interaction, enabling users to ask questions and receive answers in their preferred language.
Targeted Optimisation enables project teams to move from diagnosis to action. Rather than re-running an entire schedule, teams can identify the specific tasks driving delay and optimise around them – receiving a concrete, adoptable schedule in return. It is designed for the scale and complexity of major programmes, pinpointing the critical few activities among tens of thousands that will have the greatest impact on delivery.
What would otherwise take hours or days of manual acceleration and delay analysis is reduced to minutes with Targeted Optimisation. These two capabilities are built for all construction teams, enabling anyone to quickly understand how to recover or accelerate a programme with clear, actionable answers.
Who tested it and what were the results?
These capabilities are proven in the field. Suffolk Construction used ALICE on a life-sciences development project during pre-construction, where schedule certainty was critical. When supply chain delays and external factors put a key deadline at risk, the team needed to identify what was causing slippage, validate that the plan still held, and find practical ways to recover time.
Using the Schedule Insights Agent alongside Targeted Optimisation, the team gained deeper schedule analysis and pinpointed the specific optimisation opportunities needed to act. They resequenced the project, brought work forward, and recovered 42 days on the project.
Aleksey Chuprov, senior vice-president for data and IT at Suffolk, said: “On its own, Insights Agent can create value in just highlighting what can be improved, but when connected to the targeted optimisation algorithm, it allowed us to save further days by improving productivity by 30%.”
Another UK-based general contractor used the Schedule Insights Agent on a major airport to help its monthly schedule review process with stakeholders. The review included data from spreadsheets, email and printed documents. Manually collating the information allowed room for inconsistencies and errors, which confused more than clarified the stakeholder’s questions.
Previously, the monthly reviews took over 16 hours of manual work to compile, but with Insights Agents, the review became part of the planning workflow and helps a review be completed in about 4.5 hours, which is a time saving of more than 70%.
What’s your stand number?
D642
You can read the full article here.
