TAMPA, Fla. – A construction company in the Tampa Bay area is using AI technology to help expedite projects and cut construction costs.
Coastal Construction is using Togal.AI to help measure, plan and design some of its major projects.
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The backstory:
Pendry Tampa and Pendry Residences Tampa are being built on Ashley Drive in Tampa. The luxury hotel and condominium tower will be a 38-story building with residential space, hotel space, parking, retail and dining.
The project broke ground in late 2023.
How It Works:
Coastal Construction’s Chief Investment Officer Patrick Murphy founded Togal.AI to specialize in the construction industry. Murphy said they can input measurements, materials counts and other blueprint and design information to calculate what they need for a construction project.
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“So, what an estimator would have to do, is go through printed-out plans, right, whether looking at them on paper or a computer screen, and count how many doors, how much drywall, how much baseboard, electrical sockets, and windows and doors, right?” Murphy said. “Everything that goes into it in order to come up with a price to show that to the owner.”
These tasks that might take several weeks of manual planning can be done almost instantly.
“We’re able to upload blueprints or detailed plans that show floor plans, elevations, anything that helps communicate to our guys what they need to build, and it’s able to read that and give you a really detailed, you know, wall center line, wall perimeter, wall area, gross area, net area,” Nate Ripkey, a senior project engineer with Coastal Construction, said.
Companies and construction workers can also use Togal.CHAT to ask questions about things like building materials or other project specifics. Ripkey said they can ask the ChatGPT-powered technology about window types, for example.
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“It tells me that there’s 24 different exterior storefront windows,” Ripkey said. “It gives me the labels for all of them, it gives me the link to where it found those labels at, and then it tells me that there’s three different kinds of interior storefront windows.”
Instead of flipping through a stack of paper with project plans, they can make changes through the AI system.
What they’re saying:
“Most jobs are about two to three years of planning,” Murphy said. “And then, the construction can be anywhere [between] two, three, four years.”
Murphy said the AI technology is designed to cut down on the pre-construction and planning time, which can often be tedious.
“Can compress the amount of pre-construction time, which is around 20, maybe even 25% of the cost and time of a typical job,” he said.
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He said the technology doesn’t eliminate the need for workers and managers, though.
“You’re still the pilot,” Murphy said. “Togal.AI is the co-pilot, right? You are still in control. I think, honestly, that’s the case for all AI that’s out there. You’re not just uploading the plans and going to the beach to relax. You are still in control. What this allows the humans to do, though, is do the higher value tasks.”
Murphy said the long-term goal is to make construction costs more affordable, which will get passed down to the consumer.
“You can’t change the land cost, you can’t change the material cost, right?” he said. “They’re sort of outside our control. But, you can use technology to reduce the amount of time in pre-construction, saving money.”
Murphy said they hope AI will become more broadly used in the construction industry to build faster and more affordably, and help solve the affordable housing crisis.
What’s next:
Construction of Pendry Tampa and Pendry Residences Tampa is expected to be finished in 2027.
The Source: The information in this story was gathered by FOX 13’s Kylie Jones.Â