Artificial intelligence and other new technology are starting to carry the load at construction sites in Dubai, but people will remain the ones wearing the hard hats, according to the chief executive of contractor Alec Holdings.
The Dubai-based company, whose projects include the likes of SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, Bvlgari Resort hotel in Dubai, One Zabeel and Dubai Hills Mall, now uses robot dogs on project sites to monitor the progress of work and drill bots to do heavy work.
However, the main advantage of AI is not necessarily at the front end, Barry Lewis told The National in an interview.
“I think you have to be an early adopter of AI. You have to use AI to make it more efficient,” he said. “There's a lot of mundane processes that exist within the construction industry, so we certainly look into how we can use AI to optimise a lot of our systems and processes.
“So, if you look at stores and data capture, there's no reason why you should have manual entries. You should be using AI to make matching concepts.”
Alec uses modular construction to meet its various project commitments. In modular construction, manufacturing components of a structure are assembled in a factory setting and taken to the site.
Another use of the tech is through watches to monitor the efficiency of workers specific to their tasks.
“We do a lot of analysis of our people – on a construction project, people are no more than 35 per cent to 45 per cent productive,” he said. “That’s because they need to get to the jobs site, make sure they have the materials, break for lunch and head away, go back to the site, and also remain dependent on the logistics that are available.
“These are the constraints. So, we've got watches that we use that are tasks-specific activated. For example, if we have a plumber, we've done time and motion studies that when he wears the watch, we can work out exactly how long he's actually doing the activity of plumbing.”
Using the watch, which is made by Dubai-based AI productivity platform Brix, the company’s data shows that a plumber is active about 35 per cent of the time when working on a construction site, but doing the same tasks in a factory environment increases productivity to 85 per cent.
“So, you have to get to a place where you're doing more and more tasks in a factory-controlled environment,” Mr Lewis said.
But are workers comfortable with the idea of being monitored? “What it does is it gives you access to real time data. So, we use it to incentivise people … we say to them, this is your productivity level at the moment, if you achieve this [higher] productivity level, then we'll give you compensation,” he said. The company currently has about 7,000 watches, with plans to more than double that number.
While the use of tech is growing, a future where the entire process of building is automated or done with robots is not one he foresees.
“The problem with anything that needs to be robotic, you need to have scale and you need repetition. So, if you think of a car factory, it has scale and repetition. They then have the bandwidth to invest in the capital, to design equipment that specifically builds in an automated fashion,” he said.
But for buildings that are not uniform, the cost perspective does not add up.
“We don't build the same thing tomorrow that we build today,” Mr Lewis said. “So, if you can tell me I want you to build 5,000 of a particular item, I'll give you an optimised solution that will probably involve robotics. When people talk about 3D printing, the infrastructure and the capital cost to create the equipment to [automate] … it's too expensive.”
The company is focused on shifting jobs from a construction site to a factory setting, with modular units boosting productivity, he said. Even an entire bathroom can be made and transported to the site.
“If there's 10,000 people on a project today, in the future … you should have 2,500 people,” he said.
Big addressable market
The company raised Dh1.4 billion ($381.2 million) from its initial public offering on the Dubai Financial Market in October, an offering that was oversubscribed more than 21 times.
The Investment Corporation of Dubai, the principal investment arm of the Dubai government, is currently the biggest shareholder of Alec and sold one billion ordinary shares, or 20 per cent of the company’s share capital.
Alec, which has projects in the UAE and Saudi Arabia across sectors including leisure, hospitality, residential, commercial, airport expansion, retail, and oil and gas, had a backlog of Dh32.9 billion in outstanding work as of the end of September last year. Among new projects the company is working on are the first phase of the Stargate data centre in Abu Dhabi as well as the Wynn Resort in Ras Al Khaimah.
“The addressable market [in the UAE and Saudi Arabia] is significant. There’s a lot of opportunity in the data centre space, lot of opportunity in the hospitality and the entertainment space,” Mr Lewis said.
While the company remains open to new markets, they take a lot of effort and time, he added. “Currently, the two markets we're in are quite bullish. In the short and medium term, we see that there's sufficient bandwidth for us, but if one of our clients wanted us to go into a specific area that's not in our normal area of operation, we would consider,” he said.
