Student housing is one of Juneau Construction Company’s specialties, but the Hub Knoxville project is different. Atlanta-based Juneau is the nation’s second-largest student-housing builder, and Hub Knoxville—a three-building, 800,000-square-foot, 2,000-bed off-campus housing complex adjacent to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville—is the largest project in the company’s 30-year history. Residents will enjoy nearly 23,000 square feet of interior amenities, from a fitness center to a study lounge, and 30,000 square feet of retail space. And for students who need to relax or unwind after a tough exam, a nearly 20,000-square-foot rooftop terrace on the 12-story, 1,750-space parking deck will feature a basketball court, resort-style pool, hot tub, grills, and spots to lounge and enjoy the view.
“The parking deck is the tallest structure, so you can see the mountains, the river, the stadium,” says Alex Hale, Juneau’s project director for Hub Knoxville (construction began on January 19, 2023, and the first building will open in June 2025). “It’s a good hangout place.”
And yet what’s most interesting about this complex are not the super-sized amenities, but Juneau’s embrace of a new technology. Hub Knoxville is the first Juneau project to incorporate Buildots, an AI platform that uses algorithms and onsite data to provide detailed progress reports and forecasts. The reports can help crews to anticipate and reduce potential delays, adhere to their schedule and improve efficiency.
TRUSTING YOUR GUT—AND THE DATA
To capture images and data, a crew member walks every foot of the jobsite once a week while wearing a 360-degree camera. That information is then loaded into Buildots.
“It gives an AI analysis to track what’s done and what’s not done,” says Hale. “I can see an activity and say, ‘Okay, last week, I hung 100,000 square feet of drywall. The week before, I hung 95,000 square feet of drywall and I hung this much the week before that.’ It can show me that info on any floor, any building, any timeframe, any way I want to see it. And we’ve uploaded our schedule into that. So with those two in conjunction, it can look at my schedule and say, you’re supposed to hang 120,000 square feet of drywall a week. The last 10 weeks, you hung 100,000 roughly every week. That’s a lot more real data than we typically get. And it will flag these activities and show me, hey, your drywalls, your cabinets, you’ve got a delay there. And then I can dive in deeper and ensure we hold trade partners accountable for meeting deadlines.”
The program doesn’t simply identify problems. It also shows areas where workers are on or ahead of schedule. “We can see what someone’s best week looks like, what someone’s worst week looks like, what someone’s average week looks like,” says Hale. “And we can use that to look at trends over time, rather than just say, ‘It’s been three days, you haven’t really got anything done,’ we can say, ‘Let’s see what you’ve done over the last two months and use that as a projection going forward to anticipate when we think you’ll finish.’”
Buildots technology helps crews to read and understand that data onsite, which can lead to better decisions. “We are encouraging clients to supplement their gut instinct with data,” says Jessica Herrala, Buildots’ regional director for North America (the Israeli-based company has offices in London and Chicago) and a University of Tennessee graduate. “Gut instincts aren’t a bad thing, but I’ve been in construction a long time, and that’s how so many delays happen. The system can see delays before the naked eye can. So we spend a lot of time with the project superintendent and the senior project manager and the project director to say, ‘You don’t see these delays today, but we can see them coming.’”
EMBRACING ANALYTICS
Accepting bad news from an AI platform can sometimes be difficult. “We tend to be therapists sometimes,” Herrala says. “As construction people, we’re proud of what we do. So being told that the project isn’t where you think it is, that’s hard in our industry. What the data is showing is sometimes a hard pill to swallow.”
For Hale, Buildots was like any new software: It took a while to feel comfortable with it. After using it for a year, however, “everyone’s on board,” he says. “Once you learn to see the data not as a criticism, but as a way to improve things, I think people receive it a lot better.”
Thanks to the mix of AI and Juneau’s experience, the project is on schedule despite Knoxville’s unique geology, which makes below-grade work unpredictable. “Lot of caverns, deep rock, shallow rock—it’s kind of jagged,” Hale says.
AI can feel the same way. It’s a little scary. But Hale views AI as a tool—not a threat. “I don’t think it’s going to take our jobs, by any means, but it’s making things we used to do slowly go a lot faster,” he says. “We used to go back and look at pictures and try to figure out how many bricks so-and-so is laying every week. Now, instantly, without effort, we can see that for any space, any timeframe, any activity on the job. It’s taking tedious tasks and organizing the data and turning it into something we can use.”
That view is important, because AI isn’t going away. Herrala shares a quote she heard at a recent conference: “Moving forward, there will be two types of leaders. Those who leverage AI—and those who become irrelevant.”
