An Operational Example for Velocity Builders

powered by Palantir

Executive Summary:

In the dynamic world of construction, where deadlines are tight and unexpected challenges can arise, Velocity Builders relies on BuilderChain ConstructOps Tools along with ConstructOps Templates, powered by Palantir, to navigate through complexities efficiently.  Let’s delve into how ConstructOps Tools and AI + Construction plays a crucial role in ensuring successful project delivery for Velocity Builders:

Foundry: Used for integrating diverse data sources from project management tools, supply chain information, and workforce data into a cohesive platform. It enables Velocity Builders to access real-time insights on project progress, material availability, and workforce efficiency. Foundry's analytics capabilities allow for predictive modeling to identify potential project delays or cost overruns, enabling proactive measures to mitigate risks.

Integration Hub: Foundry acts as an integration hub, seamlessly bringing together diverse data sources. It combines information from project management tools, supply chain systems, and workforce data into a cohesive platform.

Real-Time Insights: Velocity Builders gains real-time insights into project progress, material availability, and workforce efficiency. This visibility allows them to make informed decisions promptly.

Predictive Modeling: Foundry’s analytics capabilities enable predictive modeling. By analyzing historical data, it identifies potential project delays or cost overruns. This foresight empowers proactive risk mitigation.

Holistic View: The Foundry ontology provides a comprehensive view of the operational landscape. It enhances leadership and team responses during disruptions, allowing quick identification of impacted projects.

Resource Optimization: By leveraging Foundry, Velocity Builders can optimize resource allocation, ensuring materials and workforce are efficiently distributed across projects.

AI + Construction:  Employs machine learning algorithms to optimize resource allocation, schedule management, and supply chain logistics, ensuring that construction materials and workforce are optimally distributed across projects. AIP can predict potential bottlenecks and suggest the best course of action to avoid them, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency.

Machine Learning Algorithms: AI + Construction employs machine learning algorithms to enhance decision-making. It optimizes resource allocation, schedule management, and supply chain logistics. Predicting Bottlenecks: AI + Construction predicts potential bottlenecks, allowing Velocity Builders to take preemptive action. Whether it’s material shortages or workforce constraints, AIP suggests the best course of action.

Efficiency and Innovation: By leveraging AI + Construction, Velocity Builders ensures projects are delivered on time, within budget, and with high-quality standards. It drives efficiency and fosters innovation in construction project delivery.

By leveraging these tools, Velocity Builders can ensure projects are delivered on time, within budget, and to the highest quality standards, driving efficiency and innovation in construction project delivery. In summary, the combination of Palantir Foundry and AI + Construction equips Velocity Builders with the tools needed to tackle disruptions head-on, maintain operational excellence, and explore viable solutions when challenges arise.   Whether reallocating resources or adjusting schedules, these tools empower Velocity Builders to stay ahead in the construction industry.

Our Example Scenario:

In a scenario where "Velocity Builders," a general contractor, encounters unexpected challenges during the delivery of construction projects, they turn to BuilderChain ConstructOps Tools to navigate through these complexities efficiently. Imagine Velocity Builders working on several high-profile projects with tight schedules and facing a sudden shortage of critical materials due to a supplier disruption. This hiccup threatens project timelines and customer commitments. The combination of Foundry and AI + Construction equips Velocity Builders with the tools needed to tackle disruptions head-on, maintain operational excellence, and explore viable solutions when challenges arise.

Velocity Builders leverages its Foundry ontology for comprehensive view of the operational landscape, real-time visibility across its construction operations, enhancing both leadership and team responses to disruptions, enabling quick identification of impacted projects and the exploration of viable solutions, such as reallocating resources or finding alternative resources, without compromising other projects. This system integrates critical data—from resource management to project delivery are all synthesized into semantic objects and links, which reflect the language of the business, enabling quick identification of affected areas, such as specific construction projects at risk due to resource shortages or other issues.

In a few clicks, the operations team can swiftly identify impacted projects, trade contractors and suppliers, ensuring a coordinated response. The ontology also features a robust and granular security model, safeguarding sensitive data as the response scales enterprise wide.

AI-driven tools within BuilderChain's platform, akin to digital team members, analyze vast amounts of data to propose optimal reallocation strategies. These strategies are then evaluated through simulations, allowing the Velocity Builder’s team to foresee the impact of each decision before implementation.

AI-powered copilots, which leverage both open-source and proprietary LLMs, can fluidly navigate across trade contractor and supplier information, trade crew capacity and material stock levels, real-time project metrics, shipping manifests, and feedback all contained within the organization’s ontology. Critically, all AI activity is controlled with the same security policies that govern human usage — ensuring that Velocity Builders will always have precise control over what the LLMs can query, recommend, and act upon. Each constructed and deployed AI copilot can be considered a new team member, who is gradually granted a wider purview as Velocity Builder’s team members gain confidence in its performance.

Situational awareness is only the tip of the ontological iceberg.

Velocity Builders will need to rapidly identify solutions to deal with the trade contractor and supplier disruption and explore the tradeoffs inherent with each possible decision. Fortunately, the diverse set of forecast models, allocation models, production and project optimizers, and other logic assets have been connected into Velocity Builder’s ontology, alongside the data sources. This enables the Velocity Builder’s analysts to quickly run a battery of simulations that detail the consequences of the different possible material substitutions.

The connected, real-time nature of the Ontology is key at this stage, since substituting resources will potentially have downstream implications for the other resources being produced from the same source. As the simulations are run, the simulated outputs are staged as ontology scenarios, which safely package the proposed changes into a sandboxed subset of the Ontology — enabling teams to safely explore and analyze the implications of the decision before committing to it.

The true game-changer for the Velocity Builder’s team is that AI-driven copilots and automations can securely leverage the full range of logic assets, and the same scenarios framework. The Ontology enables LLMs to go beyond the data-centric limitations of retrieval-augmented generation, and instead interface with the interconnected data, logic, and action primitives in the Ontology through an extensible “tools paradigm”. This means that as Velocity Builder’s teams, which includes outsourced analytics and data science services from Construction Industry Resources (CIR), are fine-tuning LLMs using Palantir’s open model building framework, the Ontology securely surfaces all of these logic assets as AI-ready tools.

In this case, Velocity Builders has created a tuned AI copilot, “Construction Bot,” that is able to use a set of Ontology-driven tools to scan across the full range of enterprise data sources, the after-action reports on prior courses of action taken in similar situations, and the potentially applicable material reallocation models. Because of the rich, dense context provided through the Ontology, the Construction Bot can surface a novel reallocation plan, which uses a newer model that the supply chain analysts had not yet considered. With the consequences of the plan safely staged in a scenario, the AI’s proposed decision is handed off to a human analyst for final review.

Once a strategy is selected, Foundry and AI + Construction facilitate the execution of corrective actions, such as rerouting supplies, adjusting project schedules, and reallocating labor. These tools ensure that updates are communicated seamlessly across teams and stakeholders, maintaining project momentum and minimizing disruptions.

Given that the enterprise has grown through acquisition and contains a diverse and delicate mix of critical operational systems, the Velocity Builders' team is vigilant about which processes can write back to these systems, and under which conditions. Fortunately, the Ontology applies the same rigorous control and validation to actions as it does to data and logic; enabling fine-grain control over who can invoke a given action, test-driven frameworks for publishing changes, the ability to stage and review changes in batch, and detailed logging for every event.

In this case, the execution of the resource reallocation plan automatically orchestrates a set of writeback routines, each tuned for the receiving system: the warehouse management system receives an API-driven update; the three ERP systems each receive updates via native Ontology-driven connectors, which abide by the safeguards in each system; and the production planning system receives a consolidated flat file, which it ingests asynchronously. As actions are executed, the Velocity Builders team can monitor system responses, and always has the power to audit past activity.

The Ontology provides the guardrails needed for AI to safely take action within permitted boundaries. Alongside data and logic, actions can be automatically surfaced as tools for AI-driven copilots and automations. The scope of an action can be limited to simply reflecting a given change (e.g., an edit to an object, or the creation of a new object) in the Ontology itself; or can write back to single, or multiple systems. In Velocity Builder’s context, they have granted Construction Bot and the handful of other production AI copilots access to a handful of actions.

In the default case, these actions (e.g., changing the status of a work order, or pushing a reallocation plan) can only be staged by the AI, and are then handed off to a human for final review. However, with the granular logging and operational instrumentation provided by the Ontology (and the wider Palantir platform), Velocity Builders is able to surgically choose which trusted, well-worn AI processes can automatically close the action loop without human review. As conditions evolve, the latitude given to AI can be expanded or contracted — and instantly reflected across all Ontology-driven workflows.

In the post-crisis phase, Velocity Builders, leveraging Palantir Foundry and AIP, undertakes a comprehensive review of the crisis management steps. This involves analyzing the data and decisions made during the disruption to identify what was effective and where improvements are needed. They use Foundry to collate and visualize data from the crisis, including supply chain adjustments, project delays, and financial impacts. AIP algorithms then analyze this data to derive insights on crisis response effectiveness, identifying patterns that can predict future disruptions and suggest preemptive actions.

The aggregate decisions made by thousands of users throughout Ontology can be securely leveraged as training data when fine-tuning models and can be distilled into targeted principles that are called upon during LLM prompting. The tribal knowledge that has been traditionally trapped in the seams of workflows can be illuminated by AI, in order to improve the application of AI.

This iterative learning process enhances Velocity Builders' resilience, enabling more robust planning and execution for future projects by refining risk management strategies, optimizing supply chain logistics, optimizing project scheduling and costs, and improving stakeholder communication.