Can artificial intelligence change construction?
IBM's Watson supercomputer has beat Jeopardy champions, reconstituted recipes, and even helped create highlight reels for the World Cup. Now it's taking on a new tech challenge; changing how the construction industry operates. A new partnership between IBM and Fluor, a global engineering and construction company, will put the supercomputer's computational skills to work on making building more efficient. The new Watson-based system, in development since 2015 and now in use on select projects, will be able to analyze a job site "like a doctor diagnoses a patient," according to Leslie Lindgren, Fluor's vice president of Information Management. That degree of risk analysis, predictive logistics, and comprehension is no small challenge given the complexity of today's construction megaprojects.