In this interview‑style episode of Construction Legends, host Cian Dillon Brennan (Speaker A) talks with AI practitioner Adrian Smith, founder of Rungopher, about practical ways construction firms can adopt artificial intelligence. The conversation starts by demystifying the AI landscape—explaining that major tech firms each run their own large language models and that most construction professionals are still only experimenting with ChatGPT and DALL‑E for fun. Adrian then outlines concrete use‑cases that are already emerging in the field: AI‑driven scaffolding safety analysis, OpenSpace’s photo‑documentation for spatial planning, 360° helmet‑mounted cameras for site monitoring, NFC tagging of materials to prevent loss, and drone‑based imagery that replaces multiple site visits. He emphasizes a systematic approach: list every repetitive, data‑heavy task (email, invoicing, quoting, material tracking), then match each to an existing AI tool or develop a custom solution. The discussion moves to market trends, noting a plateau in AI investment since 2017, a surge of 2,500 new language models in 2022, and a forecast of $8 billion in construction‑AI spending by 2031, while warning that up to 80 % of recent AI‑backed ventures may fail. Adrian differentiates two strategic pathways for a construction business: (1) eliminate inefficiencies to free time and reduce costs, and (2) create proprietary AI‑driven competitive advantage (e.g., optimized scaffolding layouts, AI‑based cost‑saving recommendations for clients). He stresses that successful adoption hinges on the desire to change, clear problem definition, and willingness to invest effort in tooling or consulting. The episode closes with practical advice on where to find Adrian (LinkedIn, rungopher.com) and a reminder to subscribe for more free consulting content.
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Hey, Construction Legends! This is part 2 of my interview with Adrian Smith. He has been in AI for 7 years. ChatGPT only came around last year, so 7 years is an absolute eternity in that space. He spearheads the development of an unparalleled AI conversational platform and also consults with organizations, helping them to integrate AI into their company. Now, this is part of my series that I thought would be beneficial to you guys, which is basically free consulting for you. So When I'm trying to figure something out for my business in construction, I'm gonna try and turn it around so you can get something for free. I've learned lots from Adrian in trying to implement AI into my business, and I hope that you can too. Today we're gonna talk about how to use AI in construction, how to introduce AI into your company, and how to reduce inefficiency. At the end, we're gonna talk about basically how you can turn all of that into profit.
Enjoy.
Well, first of all, there's a couple of different language models. So every big company has a language model. So Amazon, Google, OpenAI, which is Microsoft, basically. So any of those big organizations have their own language model and they're in their own arms race. And then everyone below is also probably in an arms race as well to use those, or maybe not wanting to use those as well for different reasons. And I think that it's, for a lot of regular folk, it's difficult. How do I use AI? And so most people just started going on to ChatGPT as just messing, just having a bit of fun, right? And creating some poetry or a funny thing or whatever. And then The also DALL-E, which is the image generator, just trying to make, you know, fun things.
Yeah.
And a lot of people haven't progressed from that. Like how could your average person on a construction business, right? Which, but in the best of cases are 5 years behind technology-wise anyway, in comparison to tech, for example. How would they start using not just ChatGPT, but AI generally? How would they approach it in their businesses?
Yeah, I was doing some research in the lead up to this conversation about AI in construction and found some really cool things like someone developing a model where basically you can take a picture at scaffolding and it tells you all the weak spots within the scaffolding model so it's safer. And so like, that's in progress right now. There's another company called OpenSpace and it was, it came out, there's an article that I read, a gym was expanding in the States but during COVID couldn't actually travel to get there. And so OpenSpace uses AI-driven photo documentation for the site to allow them to actually space out the site and then actually embed using AI the imagery on top to understand where the machines would best fit, like the weight benches or the treadmills. Where would they best go in this particular setup? What's the best spatial awareness? What's the best flow? All those kind of things. And so it's starting to like look at from a, especially from a construction point of view, like what are the repetitive tasks that you do every week? I would just write a list. I would sit down and go, okay, What are the things that I do every single week or every day? What are they? And it could be like, I check my emails, I do my invoicing, I, you know, whatever it might be, write down the repetitive task and then go Google or go into ChatGPT, whatever it might be. What tools are available for enter repetitive tasks? And then basically you just start to adopt it in. And so if it's email, if it's calendar management, if it's start like all the way up to like adding NFC stickers onto building materials that Every time they enter a truck, it tells you what's missing so that you're not missing out on money. OpenSpace also does like— I was reading articles about some organizations that are basically on top of their hard helmet, there's 360-degree cameras that the tradies are using. And so they're walking around the site and basically AI is using data. It's picking up data to say, are they on track with the build? Is it safe? What's the environment like? Are we losing money? Are we making money? Are we on track? All those kind of questions it's asking. So there's heaps, there's heaps. The research says and research predicts that $8 billion is going to be invested into the sector up until 2031 for AI in specifically in the construction building industry. So it's coming, which is amazing. But yeah, construction is slightly behind.
There's a friend of mine who's got a— I was just thinking of what you said. He's got a business that has drones that go on oil and gas sites and they fly along the pipeline and they're basically looking for, they scan it and they do the imagery as well. But what they have been doing to now was they send that back to an engineer. So rather than an engi— like, so the drone replaced multiple engineers going to site.
Yeah.
And then we only have to hire one engineer. Now it appears that you can have the data that will be analyzed by AI and then I guess send it back to a different engineer, but you have one less layer in the process of getting it done. And that, that can just constantly be working all of the time. So from a maintenance point of view, it's absolutely fantastic.
Yeah, I think that, I mean, if we're all being impacted by these mobile phone cameras, right? Like that's AI. So basically it's picturing, it's taking a picture through the front windscreen and its AI is identifying that you have a phone in your hand. And so that's the same thing with the drones. They do it in farming as well. Like you think about 10,000 hectares, you don't want to be on a quad figuring out where your fence has actually failed and where the cattle's getting out. So they send a drone along the fence line to go, it's targeted here. And, you know, so there's a lot of like ways that people are doing it. I kind of hate the mobile phone speed camera one, but I mean, it's helpful for safety as well. Yeah.
What trends are you seeing in the AI industry now?
It's been interesting. The Stanford Index report was really, has shaped a lot of like of my views on AI because they've actually said that both investment and adoption of AI has actually plateaued since 2017. So everyone's been talking about ChatGPT, but AI has been around since 1950, actually. And so it's been a long time coming. But the issue is, is that where there was like a couple of language models a year released, 2022 saw over 2,500 different language models in AI released, like a huge amount. And so the trends now is that people are trying to decipher what is here to stay and what's actually going to fail. And there's some predictions that anywhere up to 80% of the companies that have had investment in AI in the last 2 years will fail because it's all data-driven and it takes a heck of a lot of money to keep it up and to keep building these models. And so the trends are— it's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next 12 to 24 months because we've had such a high intensity, like, AI moment. Like, for us, we've been building it since 2017 in our SMS world. No one cared about AI 12 months ago. If I said we're an AI-backed platform, everyone would be like, don't even know what it means. But now you say it and people are like, oh, are you using ChatGPT or are you using Bard or are you using what language model? You're like, you don't have any idea what you're asking. Like, but it's been interesting to see even in that 12-month shift, what's happened. So people are starting to get the language, but they don't know how to apply it. And so the next, the next stage is actually how do we apply this to our business.
That's it, exactly. So next question directly for you. Hey legend, just quickly, if you got any sort of value from this video, hit the subscribe button and we'll send you a free virtual construction site coffee via fax directly to your fax machine over here. Hit the subscribe button.
Cheers.
Let's just take this as personal consulting for me, right, Adrian?
Yeah.
So we're consulting. But also for those listening. So two examples, right? So I'm a construction services, project services company.
Yep.
And so our clients are construction subcontractors generally. How would you approach using AI into my business?
Yeah, so I would start with anything that's data heavy. Like I said before, like Finding anything that's repetitive and try and find an efficiency in that.
And is that by— is it as simple as finding out what the repetitive task is and then looking for an AI company to help with that? Or is it setting up my— getting the OpenAI API, linking it up and trying to develop my own one?
No, I would start by just going, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? I spend too much time on data sheets. Okay, well, what product currently on the market is there? And let's take this too, because AI imagery is behind AI text. And so anything that's text-based like Excel, Word, you know, anything like that, then AI is pretty clever at this point. And so I would look at my day, my week, my month, and I would go, what are the tasks that I can get AI in? And I would do exactly that, write everything out. Like, where's my time killed? What do I spend all my time doing? And like, it could be as easy as just going, okay, well, if we're looking at quotes, if we're looking at materials, if we're looking at all these things, like, let's find something to scan these documents and go, are they accurate? Are they true? What's missing?
So, okay, and then, so if you were a construction company, like a scaffolding company, for example, two different ways to approach this. One is, what would you do now to eliminate inefficiencies? Okay, so that's one. And the second thing is, because you also mentioned a bit of like if you wanted to create a bit of IP or you want to get a competitive advantage, what would that— because there are two different projects. There's one is trying to reduce inefficiencies, which is great, and then there's one trying to get a competitive advantage.
Yeah, so reducing inefficiencies, where do you bleed money? That could be as simple as we always miss something, we always miss bars, or I'm gonna try my best to use the right terminology here, the right language, but With scaffolding, for instance, like where do you bleed money? What is the thing that costs the company the most amount of money? And that could be purely in the amount of times we miss particular materials and we have to do multiple trips. So how do you use like NFC tagging to make sure that what you need for the job and what goes on the truck to the site is actually happening? Now, a friend of mine—
and also to demonstrate that to the client as well. If you have a paper trail, which is where things fall over a lot of times.
Yep. So a friend of mine has a backline company, so supplies drum kits and bass amps and things for, for concerts. And so he's put tags on each piece of equipment, each cable that he has and is needed for a gig. And whenever he loads the van, he's got a scanner and it says, what do I need for this gig? And he loads it in and it says, you're missing 4 cables or 1 microphone or whatever. And so there's a lot of these things already out there that you can actually start to go, well, what do I need for the job? And then how do we track it the best way possible outside of manpower? How do we tag it? How do we make it? And it's, you know, you do some heavy lifting at the start, but then it makes your life a whole lot more efficient to make sure that you're not missing things, that everything comes back from the site so you're not losing money on having to replace gear. So a lot of these things, any scanners that you might have, you could just scan a site and go, okay, there's 10 pieces of material still sitting there that's cost you $10,000, whatever it is. So finding the inefficiencies, the competitive advantage is very different, but they probably are linked because— for sure, because you know that someone else is bleeding the money at the same rate you are. So how do you use your inefficiencies to actually help you get the competitive advantage?
Well, okay, so to add on to what you're saying there, the way I would approach it is that one is get rid of your basic day-to-day inefficiencies to buy back more time. Okay, that will free you up to be more productive, win more work, more revenue-generating activities. Second thing is from the competitive advantage point of view is obviously it's again reducing costs in that, you know, tagging and making sure that you eliminate leakage, let's say. And then I think the next layer, probably a very important layer, maybe the most important layer is if you can think, how can I use AI in scaffolding to save our clients' money. So if we can say, okay, you don't need this much scaffolding, if we have it— like, the only way I can describe it is, you know, when you go into those lobbies that have elevators, and at some stage someone developed the one where you press the button and it gives you the most efficient elevator to go into at the same time. Yeah, yeah. I think if you could do that in your construction business, it's going to make, you know, okay, well, this is the most effective way of doing it because our AI It says it's the most effective way and then we own the AI, so you need to pay for it basically.
And it really is depending on how much, like how much do you want to have a crack at this, right? Like there is a question that comes down to desire. Like are you happy just living with the inefficiencies in your business currently? Or do you want to actually have a crack and try and solve some of those inefficiencies and then turn that into profit and buy back your time? And what is the lifestyle? What is the profit change? What does it mean for your employees? Stuff doesn't always go missing in your, you know, like, so there's a lot of these things that you— there has to be a desire to go, I want to do this better, and so I will put in the hard work to go, is there a better way to do this? Hire a consultant in, do your own Googling, whatever it might be. But do you have the desire to make that happen? Because the tools are out there. Absolutely.
Your question that you, you said there, which is my favorite question in construction, and when I get on to almost every client who's got a massive dispute or there's something contractually happening, there's loads of money. The first question I always ask is, what's the problem we're solving?
Yeah.
I think if people ask themselves about AI, what problem are we solving? A lot of the problems that you're already solving, you're solving by hiring more people.
Yeah.
You mightn't have to do that anymore, basically. Exactly right.
Right? Yep.
Adrian, it's been absolutely fantastic having you on and getting your insights into AI. It's a journey that my company and myself are knee-deep in, and it's been very enjoyable. I will tell you guys that I have looked at Adrian's service and product myself and been absolutely blown away.
Thank you.
That's very kind. And I think that, you know, there's a mentor of mine that has a really, really big AI video online. And one of the things he said that I was like, oh my God, we're here already, looking, listening to your stuff. Was that when you have like a help desk or someone and then you go, hey, sorry, can you just put it on the AI please rather than a human? Because I actually want to get this solved quicker.
Yeah.
So when AI is like preferable, you know, when you ring up people and you're like, oh, I'm on a computer, it's the worst thing ever. Can I speak to a human? Can I speak to a human? Now if you get a human, you're like, can I, can you put AI on please? Because I just want it to be—
AI doesn't get moody and try and like prove a point. It just does what tough to do, right?
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Adrian, thanks very much. Where can people find you and your business, and how can you help?
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Adrian Smith, or else my business is called Rungopher, R-U-N-G-O-P-H-E-R, like the little animal, uh, rungopher.com. But yeah, you can find me around.
Okay, take it easy, Adrian. Hey, Construction Legends, I hope you enjoyed that. If you want more of the same, please click here to have another cool video. And we've also got a full contract negotiation training course. It's 6 weeks, everything you need to do to negotiate your own contract. It's a playlist, click on it, go through all the training, and it'll make you way, way better and allow you to sign way less riskier contracts and set yourselves up for success. Okay, so choose one of them and go for it and conquer.
