Brendan Rawlins, Associate Product Manager — CMiC, recently shared his insights on how AI and analytics are transforming construction. He emphasized the growing importance of data-driven decision-making and explained how AI is revolutionizing reporting, predictive analytics, and automation to make construction operations more efficient and insightful.
This Q&A article reveals how CMiC's latest AI-powered tool, "AI," enables users to interact with their data through conversational AI, asking questions and gaining real-time insights. You'll also get a glimpse into the future of automation, predictive modeling, and how businesses can leverage AI for greater efficiency.
Q: What would you say are the biggest advancements in software development in recent months as it relates to analytics and reporting within the construction software space?
A: The biggest advancement right now is AI. AI has changed the game immensely in the analytics space. We not only have reports and data, but AI can now take all of that information and essentially make decisions for you.
You can analyze historical data from twenty, thirty, or forty years back and make projections—very informed decisions that, while I don't want to downplay the human mind, benefit from AI's computational advantage. AI can handle many tasks simultaneously that we simply can't. It's basically taking twenty different tasks and consolidating them into one.
Q: Do you think most software should incorporate AI into its functionality? Otherwise, is it at a competitive disadvantage?
A: Absolutely. I think that's happening very quickly in the software industry—not just construction software, but everywhere. I believe any software on the market right now has some form of AI, and if they don't, they're working on it. If you don't have an AI strategy or plan in the software world, you're going to fall behind.
Q: In a recent session you facilitated, you recommended using AI-enabled software capabilities to have a conversation with your data. For those who are new or early adopters, can you elaborate on that?
A: One of the amazing things about AI—and I often think about this analogy—is that when calculators first came out, there were probably skeptical people saying, "I don't know if that's going to work. Humans need to be doing the math. What if it's wrong?"
With AI, you need to build. Once earned, you recognize that it's often correct in what it's telling you, and it's very efficient.
The next breakthrough is that AI actually converses with you. ChatGPT changed the game because it took AI from behind-the-scenes tasks we didn't really know about—like pre-authorized credit card payments—and made it conversational. These were processes that happened without us knowing.
But ChatGPT enabled us to actually have conversations with something. It's interesting—when people use AI chatbots, most try to be polite, saying "please do this for me." We don't really know who or what we're talking to, but we appreciate the ability to have specific conversations.
This conversational approach provides ease of access to do essentially whatever you want, especially in software. At CMiC, we've embedded conversational tools into our software to gain insights and converse with our data in real time. It's been effective and exciting for us. But like I said, AI is everywhere—any software company that's not incorporating AI is probably falling behind.
Q: Can you tell us more about the new AI functionality that CMiC has recently launched?
A: We've launched a feature called "Al" across our entire software platform. It's actually a tribute to Allen Berg, who was CMiC's founder.
We've given users the ability to tell the software what they want it to do. Our developers are working hard on streamlining that process. In the analytics space particularly, all of our data is in one place when you're working with CMiC. If you're a construction company or general contractor, all your data is centralized.
The power of analytics is having all your data in one place, but by incorporating conversational exchange in analytics, you can gain insights simply by asking questions. It's very simple—it works just like any AI tool such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. You can have real-time conversations with your data and ask it to make projections or perform various analyses.
Q: When you think about AI in the future, what are you most excited about?
A: AI started behind the scenes—we didn't know what it was doing or how. Now we're telling it what to do. I think the future of AI, especially in software, centers on two exciting areas: generation and automation.
While it might sound a little daunting the first area is having software generate things for us—create things for us. Using natural language, we can ask it to create invoices, print reports, or do whatever our software is designed to do.
Q: In terms of automation, what else do you see being automated in the foreseeable future?
A: Automation is where things are going to explode in the AI world. Think about tasks like completing taxes or month-end processes as an accountant. All your data is in one place. If you could have a conversation and say, "Complete my month-end process right now" or "Do my taxes for me based on all the data you have"—that's where automation will really take off.
We got a taste of having things at our fingertips with Amazon, which changed the game for products and physical purchases. But the biggest transformation in software will be these automated processes that people used to do manually, now completed automatically.
Admittedly, this brings some wariness—we like people doing things for us, not necessarily computers or AI tools that nobody fully understands. But the exciting thing for businesses is the efficiency gains they'll notice. Certain tasks can be completed more efficiently and accurately by computers than by humans, as much as we don't like to admit it.
That's where the software world is heading. Generation and automation processes in AI are going to be huge.
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