With 27,000 employees and major construction projects in its portfolio – Sizewell C, Rolls-Royce non-fissile, Lower Thames Crossing, Net Zero Teesside, to name but a few – Balfour Beatty is an infrastructure powerhouse embracing the latest AI technologies to stay ahead of the game.
Balfour Beatty is on a mission to transform how Britain builds, enhance productivity across the industry, and enable smarter, faster, safer outcomes across hundreds of projects and sites nationwide, says Jon Ozanne, the firm’s Chief Information Officer (CIO).
“We know that rework has a cost – it takes time, it takes money, and it carries health and safety implications by requiring our people to return to work at short notice,” he explains.
A recent global construction report tells us that 40% of safety incidents take place during rework activity, while avoidable errors are estimated to cost in excess of £10bn a year in UK construction.
“AI is enabling us to aggregate and use data to understand how we can benefit the environment around us“
Jon Ozanne, CIO, Balfour Beatty
These startling figures illustrate the need to cut inefficiency without cutting corners.
In Ozanne’s world, inefficiencies lead to inaccuracies, and inaccuracies increase safety, operational and sustainability risks.
Balfour Beatty believes technology can help.
Copilot construction
“This is about how we make sure we build things right first time” he says. “It’s about how we can use technology to make sure that we’ve got the right test plans, inspections and people in place before starting work.
“If we eliminate waste, we’re going to make such significant gains.”
This thinking has fuelled Balfour Beatty’s recent roll-out of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the generative AI toolset, to the Group’s workforce across the UK.
“We’re a long-time partner of Microsoft,” Ozanne explains, “and we already use a large suite of products across all areas of our business – from Power BI and Power Apps to Office365 and Azure.”
Now AI has laid the groundwork for brand new ways of working throughout the company.
Automatic, for the people
Let’s start on the ground floor, where Balfour Beatty’s Copilot programme has delivered immediate results.
“Finding information is now so much easier,” Ozanne says. “Copilot has proven itself hugely effective in mining our suite of Microsoft software to find and unify our data.”
This is as useful in forward planning as it is in retroactive issue resolution, he says.
“Sourcing information that relates to historic jobs and presenting it to a customer wanting assurance that all due processes were followed and everything built correctly, has been hugely time consuming in the past, but very necessary.”
Now? It’s near instant.
Employees are already experiencing these productivity boosts. In an internal survey of early adopters, Balfour Beatty found that:
- 75% felt Copilot had improved their work
- 77% had spent less mental effort on mundane tasks
- 78% agreed Copilot had helped with communication
- 66% would be more likely to take a role in the future where Copilot was available.
Neurodiverse members of the team have also reported feeling more at ease in their roles.
“Some of our people have said that Copilot has made them that little bit more confident to be able to communicate or present,” says Ozanne.
“For me personally, Copilot is transcribing meetings; it’s capturing my actions; it’s prompting and making me more productive.
“This isn’t about eliminating 100% of what people do – but it definitely gives them a launchpad to move forwards from.”
These boots-on-the-ground wins become business-wide benefits, with AI driving efficiency gains in everything from logistics and planning to wildlife conservation.
“AI is enabling us to aggregate and use data to understand how we can benefit the environment around us. Lots of our projects bring with them opportunities for local employment; AI-enabled data streams can help us identify schools and areas that will benefit the most.”
Meetings that work
On site and in the office, Copilot is already changing how teams meet, plan and solve problems. Martin McGough, Project Director, says: “Copilot has completely changed the way we run planning and problem-solving and meetings.
“By handling the note-taking and action tracking, it frees everyone up to focus on discussion. It has saved hours of manual review.”
Joe Chastney, Head of Digital Transformation, says he relies on Copilot to help with monthly portfolio reviews.
“Copilot supports my preparation by intelligently surfacing key insights from a wide range of data sources,” he says.
“It highlights areas that require attention – such as safety, risk and cost – enabling me to focus where it matters most.”
Strong foundations
And this is just the start for Balfour Beatty. As the result of offsite Hackathon days, cross-functional teams have also identified a raft of new ways to use AI:
- Inspection-and-test plan review: AI can receive and review inspection-and-test plans from subcontractors, assessing quality and compliance at scale.
- Route optimisation for highways maintenance: Fuel, resources, and time are all up for grabs in route planning – especially for teams that maintain highways.
- Ecology survey automation: Balfour Beatty is combining satellite photography with AI to assess the ecology of a construction site before beginning work, reducing human risk by avoiding dangerous site surveys.
Agents of change
These are hyper-focused use cases that speak to AI’s agentic future, Ozanne explains.
“Within 12 months, I think we’re going to start to see the rise of AI agents for what I’d call the ‘middle office’ of construction, which deals with how we estimate, plan, design and manage quality assurance.”
He’s excited about task-specific agents that evolve from tools that find and present data, to ones that actually act on what’s there – saving time, resources, and even lives in the process.
“An AI tool might say ‘there’s been an unexpected event on-site and it’s changed the plan. Would you like me to reorder your equipment, or would you like me to change your actions moving forward?’
“Ultimately,” Ozanne says, “this technology is going to expand on what we’ve already started. We’re going to put fewer humans in physical danger, drive reduced cost-of-delivery, and experience fewer errors in construction.
“That’s only going to make projects safer and more sustainable.”