Generative AI in the Construction Industry: Opportunities & Challenges
Prashnna Ghimire Kyungki Kim Manoj Acharya
In the last decade, despite rapid advancements in artificial intelligence
(AI) transforming many industry practices, construction largely lags in
adoption. Recently, the emergence and rapid adoption of advanced large language
models (LLM) like OpenAI's GPT, Google's PaLM, and Meta's Llama have shown
great potential and sparked considerable global interest. However, the current
surge lacks a study investigating the opportunities and challenges of
implementing Generative AI (GenAI) in the construction sector, creating a
critical knowledge gap for researchers and practitioners. This underlines the
necessity to explore the prospects and complexities of GenAI integration.
Bridging this gap is fundamental to optimizing GenAI's early-stage adoption
within the construction sector. Given GenAI's unprecedented capabilities to
generate human-like content based on learning from existing content, we reflect
on two guiding questions: What will the future bring for GenAI in the
construction industry? What are the potential opportunities and challenges in
implementing GenAI in the construction industry? This study delves into
reflected perception in literature, analyzes the industry perception using
programming-based word cloud and frequency analysis, and integrates authors'
opinions to answer these questions. This paper recommends a conceptual GenAI
implementation framework, provides practical recommendations, summarizes future
research questions, and builds foundational literature to foster subsequent
research expansion in GenAI within the construction and its allied architecture
& engineering domains.