Explore how artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing significant roles in construction estimating today, particularly in Bluebeam's functionalities. Learn how these technologies are transforming the effectiveness and efficiency of construction estimating, enabling more work pursuits and business growth.
Key Insights:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are already playing an important role in construction estimating, including in Bluebeam. They are expected to play increasingly larger roles as technology continues to develop.
- Bluebeam leverages AI and ML in various functions such as the markups list, batch processing, Bluebeam Studio, and visual search. The latter aids in recognizing different shapes or symbols on a plan, a feature that has been greatly improved since its introduction in 2011.
- Other construction estimating software also utilizes AI and ML, offering time-saving features such as visual search and optical character recognition. These technologies enable the software to do a lot of heavy lifting, allowing for more efficient cross-collaboration between teams and flexible work arrangements.
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Hey everybody, welcome back. In this lesson, we just want to briefly touch on the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning, both in Bluebeam for use in estimating purposes, but also just in the estimating software world in general. The main objective of this course is to, or this specific lesson, is really just to outline how artificial intelligence and machine learning already do play a very important role in construction estimating today, as well as in Bluebeam, and really just highlight the fact that they are going to be playing increasingly larger and larger roles as technology continues to develop.
So I am on Bluebeam's website, and they've actually created a little bit of a timeline here of all of the different kind of parts and pieces and functionality within Bluebeam, specifically within the estimating functions that rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to allow you to really optimize the time it takes to use Bluebeam and get your estimates done while using those features. We're just going to go through a quick run-through of some of these items. So the markups list, that is going to be an interactive window, and the sorting and the filtering capabilities, that is some of the early advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Moving along, batch processing, something that we didn't touch on a ton, that is more going to be for working in huge drawing sets and doing things like design reviews and doing things like editing of documents, but that is another AI and ML functionality. Bluebeam Studio, which we did touch on, that is a way for folks to collaborate in real time. Down to visual search here, this is something that we did look at.
So the ability of Bluebeam to be able to recognize different shapes or different symbols on a plan, that is going to be some of the most early kind of machine learning capabilities that are built into estimating software. So this is something that was new back in 2011 and has continued to be iterated on. So Bluebeam has gotten way better at this than they did when they first started.
Other construction estimating software out there, Toggle AI is a key one, Onscreen Takeoff, Procore has an estimating software, a lot of different tools that really do a great job of visual search, as well as this optical character recognition, OCR capability, that is going to allow you to pull text off of PDFs. So basically for you to use this visual search, not only for images, but also for text as well, and really just allows the software to do a lot of the heavy lifting of pulling the text off of the PDF and allowing you to kind of search for it instead of you having to go to every single instance of that text or that symbol and clicking on it yourself. So huge, huge time savers in estimating processes by using these two items of visual search and optical character recognition.
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Going down, we've got Dynamic Fill. This is also something that we highlighted in the course. So this builds off of some of the optical character recognition and the visual search functionality, and it allows Bluebeam and the software to actually be able to start to figure out the boundaries of certain rooms on a plan based on the lines and the line widths that they are drawn with.
So you saw it when we did Dynamic Fill, instead of you as the user having to click on all the different corners of the room and actually outline the boundaries of the room. With Dynamic Fill, Bluebeam is able to see where the room is and just allow you to click down on your mouse on the interior of the room, and the Dynamic Fill will automatically fill out the whole area of that room. So Dynamic Fill is an extremely valuable tool.
It can save a ton of time when doing various different area takeoffs, when doing area takeoffs of large rooms, when doing areas that have a lot of different maybe angles and crevices and wall juts in them so that you don't have to tediously click through all of those different wall lines to properly outline the room or the space. And then lastly, the Bluebeam Cloud. A lot of this technology is just being brought onto cloud-based and cloud-hosted servers instead of it sitting on a desktop and not being able to have that information shared with other folks.
Getting all of this up on cloud is really allowing for more cross-collaboration between teams and work on mobile devices and work that is way more flexible than traditionally just having an application on a desktop. So that is how Bluebeam is and has been pioneering with machine learning and artificial intelligence. As mentioned, there are a handful of other software that today are really changing the game when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Toggle AI was one of the ones that was mentioned. And the sorts of things that you can do with some of the really advanced estimating software today are a lot of auto takeoff capabilities. So for example, being able to simply upload a floor plan of an entire building and telling that software that you want it to do automated area takeoffs for you.
That software will go in and similar to almost like a dynamic fill but way more advanced, it will give you automated area takeoffs for each of the different rooms on the plans automatically. If you have a floor plan of a commercial building with you know 30 different offices on one floor plan, all you would do in a software like a Toggle AI is press automated area takeoff and the software will automatically take off the areas of each of those different rooms for you. So really strong advancements when it comes to automated takeoffs.
There have been a ton more of improvements when it comes to optical character recognition. So being able to tell a system that I want the system to take off all of the toilets on the whole project, simply just draw a box around a toilet, tell the software what plan sheets or what set of plans you want it to do the takeoffs on, click a button to do the auto takeoff and it will automatically do all of those takeoffs for you. So those are just a couple of examples of how artificial intelligence and machine learning are really transforming the way that construction estimating happens today.
And the result of that is that estimators can be more effective with their time, they can get more plans estimated, their company can pursue more work, they can likely bring in more business for their company with the same amount of time spent. So these technologies are truly transforming the game in construction estimating and we will only continue to see more and more development in this field as the technology continues to advance. So thank you very much everybody for sticking with us and thank you guys all for making it to the end of this course.
