Dive Brief:
- Turner Construction, the largest contractor in the country by revenue, has embarked on a deal with OpenAI to give every Turner employee access to ChatGPT Enterprise, according to a Tuesday announcement.
- The partnership, which will last for two years, came together as the company made the decision over the summer to go “wall to wall, floor to ceiling” with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence product, according to Jim Barrett, the head of global innovation for the New York City-based contractor.
- Turner already uses the tech in its work, from AI-powered assistants and photo analysis tools to digital tracking systems and autonomous drones, per the release. Barrett told Construction Dive that AI reaches “literally every function in the company.”
Dive Insight:
The announcement came amid Turner’s Innovation Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, which ran from Oct. 21-23, where attendees participated in AI learning sessions led by experts from OpenAI, according to the release.
Attendees then put those lessons to the test at Turner’s largest-ever AI agent build session, a collaborative hackathon, where teams created more than 100 custom AI agents, according to the news release. Participants designed these tools to address current, on-the-ground project challenges from streamlining contract reviews to enhancing safety protocols.
The work builds on a vision the company shared going into 2025. The New York City-based contractor has at least tripled or quadrupled its investment in AI over the past couple years, Barrett told Construction Dive in January.
Barrett emphasized that there will be experts embedded throughout the company that he called “AI champions” to help employees get up to speed on the tech. Barrett also mentioned the importance of guardrails for emerging uses and making sure what’s generated by the tools is accurate and hallucination-free.
“We'll probably have 20 to 30 people that will be dedicated to helping coach our people. We want to make sure that we're getting everybody up on that learning journey, and that they're really leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT and other tools,” Barrett said.
Because the deal is for two years, it allows Turner to be flexible down the road, Barrett said. While the company views ChatGPT as the strongest enterprise solution for the entity at the moment, it’s still early in the AI arms race.
“We're always exploring the different solutions that are out there,” Barrett said. “It’s a constantly changing landscape, and we want to be at the forefront of that.”
With that in mind, Turner is being selective when it comes to its investment. The advent of AI at the company, and the ability of its employees to build its own agents, changes the buy versus build calculus, Barrett said.
Procurement agents, Barrett said, are building tools to review and level bids, while estimators are building agents to read through building specs and cross reference them to changes in drawings.
Turner is also training its employees to build their own agents, he added.
As AI providers knock on Turner’s door, with, “startups in particular, the question now becomes, if we can build something ourselves over a weekend,” Barrett said, “then why would we necessarily pay for someone to build it for us?”
