The construction industry is on the cusp of a transformative era, with artificial intelligence and large language models playing an increasingly integral role in contractors’ daily workflows. One area where contractors can quickly leverage AI to drive quantifiable business gains is materials procurement.
Recent advances in LLMs and machine learning can help contractors answer some of the core questions that hold them back from material savings. For example:
“How much wire have we purchased so far this year?”
“Are we paying more for copper pipe compared to similar-sized companies, and why?”
“What did we pay when we bought a similar part from a different manufacturer?”
“What is the optimal procurement strategy for a bill of materials, optimized for cost and availability risk?”
These questions are hard to answer because good data is so hard to come by in procurement today. Field teams, vendors and manufacturers often use different vocabulary to describe the same parts, and purchasing data might be trapped in paper documents, emails, spreadsheets and PDFs. LLMs can extract and structure this data, while standardizing terminology between field, procurement and suppliers. This will make it much easier to understand procurement volumes across the company, which help drive bulk price discounts.
Additionally, by collecting procurement data in context, machine learning can be applied to make suggestions that enhance project management, for instance, predicting the volume of sheet metal that is likely needed to complete a project and getting the best bulk price. This procurement “co-pilot” can help contractors source and procure materials to drive the best possible project outcome.
With AI-powered solutions becoming increasingly integral to construction SaaS offerings, the industry is poised to achieve unprecedented levels of productivity and sustainability.
