The Role of AI in a Changing Workforce

On average, over four million Americans will retire each year from now through 2027. These record-breaking numbers are sending shockwaves through the workforce, particularly in industries that rely on experienced and skilled labor and institutional knowledge gained over decades. The architecture, engineering, and construction sector (AEC) is one of several industries facing decisive losses to its workforce in the near future, and firms, agencies, and organizations are concerned about their abilities to fill vacancies as experienced staff leaves. New workers lack the real-world skills that come with on-the-job learning and the experience that is gained over many years. With the expected sharp rise in retirements, there isn't enough time to get new talent up to speed. At this pivotal time, using artificial intelligence (AI) can help reduce the strain on the next generation of workers and accelerate their adjustment to a new professional landscape. 

How AI Can Help Emerging Professionals 

AI can be used to automate repetitive and time-intensive tasks, support informed engineering decisions, and help staff explore different design possibilities. This creates time savings, more comprehensive solutions, and greater opportunities for engineers, project managers, and data scientists to push boundaries and learn at a faster rate. In the face of massive workforce changes, AEC firms that strategically implement AI will be able to provide the most support to their incoming talent, helping them grow and succeed.  

Let's look at some specific ways AI can help:  

• Automates lower-value, repetitive activities like data entry and calculations to free up time for higher-level, innovative work.  

• Allows early career workers to upskill and keep up with industry developments.  

• Delivers on-demand mentorship. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Claude, can be used to access quick explanations of complex concepts; generate and troubleshoot code, create design templates and professional documentation, and answer industry-specific questions. At a minimum, these tools are productivity boosters that can reduce the stress of embarking on a new career path. 

• Provides feedback loop. AI can review site plans against municipal codes before they are submitted, identifying key elements in drawings, detecting discrepancies, verifying compliance with standards, and flagging any potential issues. 

• Reduces the learning curve by creating designs that are automatically generated with specified requirements, allowing for easier and more efficient design iterations.  

BRYX, KCI’s Model-as-a-Service platform, provides easy-to-use yet powerful machine learning and computational models designed for AEC-focused applications. Our pretrained models process and analyze data to provide insights and support informed decision-making. The BRYX catalog is growing; take a look at the catalog to see how we’re taking productivity to new heights!