According to McKinsey, college enrollment increases by 140,000 students on an annual basis and thus so does demand for housing—and labor to construct that housing. Juneau Construction Company is no stranger to this data and this year, they’re taking their efforts to the next course level by employing AI through a partnership with Buildots.

Through this partnership, Juneau is not simply using AI to expedite spreadsheets—it is rolling out the Buildots platform into its day-to-day practices in the office and on the jobsite to further its physical construction efforts and cultural company goals.

The three-year enterprise agreement will allow Juneau “to implement Buildots’ entire AI-powered platform across its entire portfolio, leveraging data-driven insights to deliver projects on time,” stated an August press release.

Having already employed the Buildots tech stack on several projects—including Hub Knoxville in Tennessee and One Park Tower in Miami—Juneau has begun collecting valuable data and building even more valuable places for students and residents to live.

To further illuminate the value of this partnership and the contech behind it, Jake Landreneau, Juneau Construction Company’s executive vice president of innovation and technology; and Jessica Herrala, Buildots’ North America regional director, sat down with Construction Executive to share their insights and their hopes for the final year of collaboration.

How long has Juneau been using AI in any capacity?

LANDRENEAU: It really goes back to the ethos of our innovation and tech approach as a whole: We want to adopt solutions that help support our people, our brand and the people we work with. Supporting those folks is the primary focus of our innovation technology approach as a whole. And from our end, there’s nothing we can do better than to give them back extra capacity, which is where a lot of these AI tools come in.

So, we probably started that journey five years ago and then it’s only been the last couple of years where we’ve actually had physical tools that can help reduce the amount of time it takes to understand a project and what’s going on. We can do the reality capture and get meaningful data out of it. Somewhere between the last three to five years has been when we started exploring several different avenues.

How do you get the companywide buy-in to adopt this major technology rollout?

LANDRENEAU: I haven’t run into any of those feelings of ‘AI is going to take my job’ in a serious capacity. Everyone jokes about it, but I think a lot of it is that we really focus on this augmentation approach—that we can make you better, we can help you get home to your family sooner, we can help you work safer, we can get more accomplished in a day by using these specific tools. I think if you brought too much stuff to the plate too soon, you could get that apprehension, but we’re really focusing on a people-centric approach.

What’s different about this partnership? Why is three years the sweet spot?

HERRALA: So, it’s not just that we reevaluate at the end of three years. We’re constantly evaluating our partnership throughout. We get together every quarter, go over the data, go over the feedback. Juneau will get first pass at every single product update that we do. They will be giving us constant new product feedback and they get first dibs at the next new product.

It’s interesting to see how far we’ve come with Juneau because we’ve been working together already for two years and we’re proving that the technology works, that there can be adoption on a company’s side, that there’s data to be used. So, the three-year agreement is really a good test to see where the technology will be at the end of those three years because the technology’s going to evolve so quickly and Juneau and Buildots will evolve together as the technology grows.

The feedback that you’re getting from the actual field operations: How important is that to informing the further development of products?

HERRALA: It’s literally everything. We are customer driven, so we don’t do anything on a product that is not specifically requested by the customers. Every product update we do comes from feedback directly from the customers, whether in casual conversation with the superintendents onsite or through high level conversations with people like Jake. We’re just in a constant state of improvement based on the needs of our customers.

When you’re rolling out new products to your company, how are you introducing them? Are you just rolling them out to the field and accepting feedback or are you training your workforce to know what to look for when they’re using these products?

LANDRENEAU: I think the Buildots rollout process is a good case study for that and indicative of what we like to do, which is find a project and an open-minded project team to test it out on. It just happened that it was a massive project so it was a very big first test, but those team members are now the disciples of the product and will help push those initiatives and really showed us that there are a lot of materials in the AI space that are figured out and there’s a lot of stuff that’s not figured out, but this has really good features now and tremendous potential in the future. So, it really has been a grassroots effort from one team to the next. By the end [of that major project] there was a little bit of hype—people were curious when they would get Buildots on their project or if they would have the same tool.

The Hub Knoxville and One Park Tower: Talk a little bit about what comprised each of these projects and the specific technologies that you employed.

LANDRENEAU: Hub Knoxville is a four-building, 2,700+-bed, student-housing, off-campus complex for the University of Tennessee. We’re continuing to add to that count now as we start the fourth building—the first three buildings are completed, the fourth one is in framing right now. There’s also a very large parking structure associated with it and that was the original test project—nearly $375 million of total work.

Then the next project was the One Park Tower project in Miami, which is a 33-story condo project just south of Aventura Mall. It’s been part of the Turnberry [and Associates] master development, so that’s the first building of several buildings around a manmade lagoon in the luxury condominium space.

What specific Buildots technologies did you use on these projects?

LANDRENEAU: I mean it’s the whole platform—which included reality capture at least once a week for all of the capture area, and then that’s connected to our schedule that we’re maintaining weekly as well as our models. So, it basically allows us to track progress and do some quality control work in terms of accuracy of installation as well as provide photo documentation for the project if the owner would like at the end of the day.

HERRALA: For us it’s really about helping Juneau forecast delays, so utilizing this really detailed progress tracking that creates production rates that leads to really showing the smoke before there’s fire. Jake likes to say Buildots is a bit of a canary in a coal mine.

LANDRENEAU: It really creates a lot of accountability and ability for us to check from an executive side.

How has Juneau tried to incorporate AI education into the company? And how does Buildots design with user experience in mind?

LANDRENEAU: It’s like with any contech application. It’s got to work and it’s got to have a user interface that people could actually interact with. We’d been doing a lot of reality capture well before AI was a big player in it, whether that was laser scans or drones or things like that. So, people were used to the idea of taking a lot of pictures of projects and that provides meaningful data. This really just compounded and expanded on that idea—we were already doing this, but we could up it a couple levels and we can get even more meaningful data out of it.

HERRALA: I think even a year ago there was a lot more hesitancy about AI, but I think now AI is so much in people’s daily use. I think there’s a lot of exposure that comes with Buildots—it’s exposing a lot of what’s happening on the jobsite so it really is like an extension of your team. That’s the goal of it, and to be able to show what’s happening onsite and how to utilize that data to make different decisions. So, it’s not like we’re just dropping AI into your lap, like it’s Big Brother and it’s watching over you. It’s really more a useful tool to help you perform work better.

But what about it taking your job? Because we do get this question a lot and I always say this is a tool to do the menial tasks that you’re doing every day that are taking your time away from quality and safety. Use that extra time to focus on the things that matter and, as Jake said, get you home at night, safe and to your family. Juneau has some of the best and brightest young people in the industry and they simply won’t tolerate not having a work-life balance anymore. We as the industry have to bring tools to them that are going to help them do that. And Juneau is doing a great job at providing those tools.

How will this partnership propel each of your companies forward? And how will it set a precedent for other companies and other partnerships?

LANDRENEAU: We’re most excited about the data side of this. We are quantifying things that you used to only find out from experience or communication or manually sifting through stagnate data. Let’s say I needed to figure out what X trades partner’s production rates were over the last three weeks. Now this type of data is just there at your disposal at any random time on any random day. You just pop it up, you go look and you can start viewing that on every single project. Now you’re developing a historic data set similar to what you’d have with cost and preconstruction. Everyone’s always been tracking their estimates but now you’re tracking that alongside production rates and quality in the field, so it’s just an incredibly meaningful data set and that’s going to help us continue to reshape our project approach with evolving systems.

To us, the partnership was important because we want to help drive and steer not only our company but the industry in that direction—we have a lot of ideas that really focus on data and the data analytics side of things and helping our people with that information. So this partnership really gives us that ability and that access—that’s what we’re excited about.

HERRALA: We’ve been in the North American market now for a few years and Juneau was really one of the first in partnering with Buildots. And it means everything to us as a company that we’ve not only delivered what they asked us to deliver, but we continue to become a better partner to them—and that really speaks volumes to who they are as a company and the partnership they’ve helped us foster. It means the world to us truly.

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