Microsoft Copilot Doesn’t Understand Construction (Yet)

If you are a construction general contractor, subcontractor, or even an architectural engineer, and you guys are a Microsoft shop, you're going to want to hear this episode. I'm a former Microsoft and IBM employee, and now I've been in the AC industry for the last four and a half years, bridging the gap between the two worlds. You know, there's so many different models out there. There's ChatGPT, there's Perplexity, there's Cloud, there's Microsoft Copilot, and I'm finding that when I'm talking to customers that they're getting confused on which one they should use.

When Microsoft started thinking about this market, they're looking at that confusion that's in the marketplace as the problem that they're trying to solve. And so they really decided to embrace all the other models out there, including Claude and JATGVT and a number of other models, and basically allow you as the user to decide which model makes sense for you. Now, the challenges with Copilot, it's not a construction industry focused AI model, right? It doesn't have the deep industry expertise.

It can't read drawings or models and make sense of that. It's not very good at taking data that sits outside of Microsoft 365, like in the conversations on the construction site, for example. It's not able to really get access to that data and make sense of that data in a deep way to be overly useful in construction. It can definitely help with email drafting and those type of productivity tasks, but it just doesn't understand construction.

But how do we bring a construction AIEC lens to Copilot so it can actually help you do construction work more effectively? And that's really what we did with Smart E, being able to pair Smart E with Copilot together into a unified AIEC Copilot or a construction Copilot. Hello everyone, my name is Benet, I'm the Chief Customer Officer here at SmartVold and And welcome to this episode of the Contenders Edge. On the Contenders Edge podcast, we talk about a number of topics.

And one of the topics I want to talk about today is really around the idea of Microsoft Copilot and its AI solution for the construction industry. Now, I hear this a lot, particularly from our developers and from some of our customers that are using different AI models, that they believe that the Microsoft Copilot chatbot is not as strong as, I don't know, let's say, Claude or ChatGPT or whatever the case may be. And it's a common understanding when you compare them as a pure model.

But I think what's important and, you know, myself being a former Microsofter, I totally understand the way that Microsoft's looking at the AI market. And they're not really looking to be a model the way that Claude's a model or the way that, you know, ChatGPT as a model, they're looking to be like the harness that allows you as an individual, as an organization to manage all your models. And so you can actually access Claude and you can access ChatGPT and you can access all the models of your choice to help you with the task that you trying to do And so today I really wanted to talk about some of the misunderstandings that have come up in conversations I had with customers around Microsoft Copilot and really what we at SmartBuild are doing around our partnership with Microsoft and Copilot to be able to plug the gap that many people are experiencing today.

But all this is in the context of the idea that labor is getting scarce, right? Like, you know, in the US alone, I believe ABC put a report out in January about how there's about 350,000, you know, net new US construction workers that are needed in 2026. You know, in Canada, it's no different. Like, there's a huge talent gap.

And I've talked about this before on other podcasts about the productivity and the scarcity of labor resources. And so really, AI is meant to be that answer, right, for that productivity gap. AI is supposed to be the answer to that. And in the AC industry, it's a little bit harder because a lot of our work is not necessarily behind the desk.

It's sitting on the field, in construction sites. But there is a lot of paperwork that's associated with construction, even for the people in the field. And we know that the people in the field do not like paperwork. And so there's a huge opportunity here to leverage AI technologies in the construction sector to drive better productivity from our, not only our office workers, but our field workers as well.

Now we know that that opportunity exists, but you know, there's so many different models out there. There's ChatGPT, there's Perplexity, there's Cloud, there's Microsoft Copilot. And I'm finding that when I'm talking to customers that they're, they're, they're getting confused on which one they should use. Some of them, some more than others, some of them are using stuff that comes commercially or with their consumer technologies, such as their phone, such as Gemini and so forth.

And everyone's just using the models of their choice. And that creates a lot of confusion. So when Microsoft started thinking about this market, they're looking at that, you know, that confusion that's in the marketplace as the problem that they're trying to solve. And so they really decided to embrace all the other models out there, including Claude and ChatGVT and a number of other models, and basically allow you as the user to decide which model makes sense for you.

Because especially with the rise of tokenization costs, you might not need a Ferrari to do a task that you can get away with, or Toyota. And so the model costs also differ so much. And so you can use Microsoft as that kind of controller. You can use Microsoft as the remote control that helps you navigate the AI landscape.

Now, in addition to the ability to manage and secure the data that is coming and leaving your organization, one of the things that Microsoft Copilot has uniquely is the ability to have first-party native access to your files in Microsoft 365. So think about your emails, your team chats, your meetings, your documents, It's your hierarchy within your organization. It has first-party understanding of all that. And when you think about where a lot of the data sits within constructions, it's sitting in documents, it's sitting in emails, it's sitting in Teams messages, and it's not being harnessed.

I call it kind of free-range data. And there no way you can take that data that so valuable about your projects and actually structured in a way that you can actually get more intelligent about what happening in your business and act on it. And that's the problem in construction because our workers are not sitting necessarily in front of a computer all day. The data sits outside of a structured system, right?

And so one of the real advantages that Microsoft has with Copilot is the ability to harness that data, to access that data and be able to read that data and bring it into a way that you can understand it in a very effective way. Now, the challenges with Copilot is that it's not a construction industry focused AI model. Right? It doesn't have the deep industry expertise.

It can't read drawings or models and make sense of that. It's not very good at taking data that sits outside of Microsoft 365, like in the conversations on the construction site, for example, it's not able to really take, get access to that data and make sense of that data in a deep way to be overly useful in construction. It can definitely help with like email drafting and, and those types of productivity tasks, but it just doesn't, doesn't understand construction. And so that's really, you know, at SmartBuild, you know, we are, you know, we built our platform on the Microsoft stack.

And we did that for a reason, because we know that most of our customers are Microsoft shops, they're using Microsoft 365 every single day as their productivity layer. And as we started to build our AI strategy, and we started to monitor the way that Microsoft was coming to the market in this more, you know, strategic way, we decided, okay, well, how do we plug that gap, you know, between the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Copilot to secure and to manage your AI usage as an organization and have that first party access to your Microsoft 365 data.

But how do we bring a construction AIEC lens to Copilot so it can actually help you do, you know, construction work more effectively? And that's really what we did with Smart E and what we are rolling out is this idea of actually being able to pair Smart E with Copilot together into a unified AEC Copilot or a construction Copilot. And so how does that work? Well, if you really think about what Smart E does, it has a few capabilities.

Like number one, it has the conversational AI bot. This allows for people in the field to be able to to dictate their RFIs, dictate their daily reports, their change orders, their safety the inspection reports, all these, these paperwork items that most of the people in the field loathe and hate to do, we make it a lot easier for them by allowing them to have a conversation with Smarty and taking that unstructured data set and putting that into the systems so that the people in the office and the executives can actually make decisions and run their business more effectively.

So that's one definite advantage that Smarty brings to the table. Then you pair that with its partnership with Copilot. Now it has first-party access to your Microsoft 365 data. So think about all those RFIs and emails, all those budgets that sit in Excel documents.

Think about all the data that sits in the conversations on Teams meetings and Teams chat channels about projects Now you have to marry the wealth of information that sitting out in conversations in the field with the conversations that are happening within Microsoft 365 environment and being able to access all the information within your project management systems, whether that be smart build or your accounting system or whatever the case may be, and marrying all that data it together and applying some of the AEC language and the AEC best practices and industry knowledge so that you can actually take that and manage, you know, things such as, you know, your schedule and scope creep and get on top of costs and report safety incidents before they happen.

And so that's really the power of the Smart E plus Co-Pilot integration is the ability for you to to, to get that power of Microsoft Copilot, but with the industry knowledge of smart build. And so there's a number of examples where that comes to life. And you think about, you know, just how, you know, disorganized information comes in about projects. So you have, that's exactly, let's imagine a super that actually, you know, you know, in his, one of his site reports talks about having to like reroute a main around an obstruction, right?

And you know, oftentimes this stuff happens and it's reported, but it doesn't really get, it doesn't show up as a change order in any point in time. So you don't, you don't have a good visibility of your cost and the impact to cost as a result of that decision that was made on site. So now with Smart E plus Copilot, now you're gonna, you're gonna be able to, to take the information from the Supers voice report, where we talked about the reroute, and then basically pair that with looking to the different RFIs that are in the project management system that have been logged, but also the RFIs that haven't been logged within your Outlook, and be able to correspond that and realize, hey, you know what, this change happened.

There's no change order associated with it, and there's no RFI that was ever raised. And that's the kind of of thing that can be very valuable information to a project manager so they can actually rectify the situation and get ahead of their costs. And so there's a lot of situations like that that we're talking to customers about where we can use the power of Smarty and Copilot. For example, taking a super report and be able to extract insights out of the report and be able to put them and log them as separate incidents.

And that's the kind of thing that Copilot on its own cannot do. It's something that when you when you apply the AEC lens to Copilot, it starts to bring the expertise to the Copilot and the context to Copilot so that it can actually help drive excellence in the way you run your construction business. So this is something that's a big part of where we're focused on at SmartBuild with our Microsoft partnership, you know, really enhancing the capabilities and the power of Copilot, but bringing it to construction companies in a way that it can actually make a difference in the way they run their business.

So thank you for listening to today's episode of The Contender's Edge. If you have any questions or you're interested in actually hearing more about how we can use the power of Microsoft Co-Pilot and Smart E to build strategic advantage in the way you run your construction company, give us a holler. You can actually send us an email or reach out to me on LinkedIn and we'll be happy to help.