Balfour Beatty plans stateside AI hackathon

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Dive Brief:

• Balfour Beatty hopes to get employees’ creative juices flowing with an artificial intelligence hackathon, designed to create AI prototypes for solving common construction problems, the company told Construction Dive via email.
• The first-ever event of its kind for Balfour Beatty US, known as My Contribution AI Hackathon, will take place from Sept. 8-9 at software giant Microsoft’s campus near Dallas. It will feature 70 employees tackling issues in six key business areas: preconstruction planning, safety/zero harm, quality, business development, internal efficiencies and standard operating procedures.
• Six ideas — one for each business area — were selected by the builder’s IT and executive leadership team, Microsoft and a third-party AI specialist. During the event, Balfour Beatty personnel will work to prototype the AI solutions in conjunction with experts from Microsoft, Answer Rocket and AsBuilt.

Dive Insight:

The event seeks to build on Balfour Beatty’s recent momentum in the AI space and its relationship with Microsoft — earlier this month, the company invested $9.6 million into Microsoft 365 Copilot, the tech giant’s AI offering. The contractor also plans to develop AI agents that will aid its quality, health and safety and assurance processes. 

“Balfour Beatty’s MyC AI Hackathon is a catalyst for innovation,” said Kasey Bevans, Balfour Beatty US chief information officer, told Construction Dive. “We’re bringing together frontline and administrative expertise and technologies to reimagine how construction gets done.”

These pushes didn’t crop up overnight. In March 2024, Balfour Beatty CEO Leo Quinn announced that the company was working on AI-based tools for its teams, which included StoaOne AI, a tool for searching internal documents. 

Another was an unnamed project, which would mine billions of data points from health and safety observations and past incidents to predict, prevent and mitigate risks.

For these tools, Quinn said that Balfour Beatty and Microsoft, alongside other tech firms, were working together to develop solutions in-house.

The contractor has put together similar innovation initiatives, most notably the Big AI Challenge in the U.K. in 2024. Two winning ideas came out of that competition and made it to further development, per Bevans — highway repair clustering and auto-generation of inspection and test plans.

“This UK event laid the groundwork for the current U.S. initiative and demonstrated the company’s commitment to leveraging AI and data analytics to drive productivity and solve business problems,” Bevans said.