Disruptive Innovation in AEC: The Case of Artificial Intelligence Applied to Project Management

Digitisation has gained industry-wide momentum and is changing how the sector operates. Emerging digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly implemented at the organisational, or most commonly the project, level. Notwithstanding, some industry leaders have failed to shape an environment of opportunity to disrupt; often used as a tool to pursue productivity, doing more of the same. We argue that there is an opportunity to disrupt the industry’s construct, rather than to replicate ancient habits at a faster pace. However, such a pursuit creates a complex paradigm. Leaders demand innovation that makes sense to humans, i.e., to themselves, creating an epistemological barrier that limits the aspirational goal of disruption. This is better classified as Sustaining Innovation (SI) as opposed to Disruptive Innovation (DI), as it does not displace the original ideals and fundamentals of the sector’s construct. A possible avenue to disrupt the current industry knowledge construct is to engage in a different level of consciousness, by generating insights through AI techniques at a size and speed impossible thus far. We present a case study in the field of Project Management and show results of disruptive insights in a portfolio of approximately US$ 20B, exploring the orthodoxies of such breakaway. We further discuss the leadership traits which could motivate DI in AEC, arguing that this requires an open engagement in an exploratory journey with limited certainty ex-ante, driven by awareness and vision. The realm of DI is not a replication of the observable world, rather an augmentation of it.