As technology transforms every facet of the business environment, one of the most feared and misunderstood elements of tech advancement is robotics and automation.

If there’s any industry that could use a robotic revolution, it’s construction. Plagued with inefficiencies, it’s an enormous, powerful and necessary sector that requires a lot of manual processes. Regardless of where one lies on the grid of fear or acceptance, the performance offered by robotic intelligence is no longer hypothetical—it’s here and contractors can’t afford to ignore it. The slow adoption of technology by the construction industry has hurt the industry and that needs to change.

The most successful construction managers adopt technology that has been proven in other industries, especially many of the artificial intelligence solutions that led to today’s greatest innovators such as Apple, Google and Amazon. Those companies radicalized their industries with forward-thinking solutions that put faith in even the wildest platforms of robotic innovations.

Ways Automation Will Take Over Construction

Improved Back Office Performance

Many of the largest construction companies still manage complex budgets and estimates in PDF and Excel. Workflow automation will vastly improve the way contractors organize and sort the reams of papers and files flowing through their offices. Automation technology streamlines processes and procedures and drives an immediate return on the technology investment by attacking the “low hanging fruit” like double data entry.

Cognitive Process Automation

Knowledge workers often find themselves making a repeatable series of decisions using if and then logic. “When I see a schedule percent complete drop below trend, send the project manager an email.” One of the emerging cornerstones of automation is the concept that these relatively predictable decisions can be automated in a practice known as cognitive process automation. In this method, a program is taught how to perform a series of tasks and is trained how to perform them. Suddenly, employees are free to pursue new opportunities for learning, while automation introduces cost efficiencies for the company.

Prescriptive Insight

Prescriptive analytics allows advanced robotic systems to answer the fundamental business question, “What should we do?” Robotic platforms scan millions of decision variables, constraints and trade-offs to provide advice for the next best step. It offers insights not only for different scenarios of what will happen, but how things could be improved if better decisions are made. Contractors can receive recommended actions, literally at the touch of a button, to optimize a build’s outcome.

Evaluation Automation—Onsite Project Management

Onsite robotic automation has dramatically changed the way that mega-corporations like Amazon do business. While construction’s vast relationships of contractors, subcontractors, workers and suppliers are significantly more complex, Amazon’s robotic strategies show the future potential of automated supply chains and worksite monitoring.

Robots are essential for process and analytic advancements that will provide the financial transparency, safe worksites and excellent building quality into the future. This technology is something that should be embraced! The construction industry may be significantly behind other industries in adopting robots, but in the immediate future, bots will be the driving force behind compliant, profitable and stable construction business practices. A positive robotic future is here and there’s nothing to fear.