Glossary

Glossary: construction AI from pilot to product

The terms used across this site, in plain language.

23 terms

Autonomy stage: How much the tool may do alone: read, suggest, act with approval, act alone.
Buyer-side review: A preview of how an owner or contractor will judge a vendor’s product.
Contech vendor: A company selling technology to the construction industry.
Field adoption: Use by site and project staff, not only head office.
Fractional product lead: Part-time, ongoing product leadership on a monthly retainer.
Human oversight: A person who can check, override or switch off the tool.
In-house AI tool: An AI tool built by a firm’s own staff rather than bought.
Keep, kill or productise map: A one-page decision for each tool in a firm’s inventory.
Named owner: The one person accountable for a tool’s accuracy, cost and incidents.
Pilot: A time-limited trial of a tool on one project or team.
Pilot purgatory: A pilot that is neither cancelled nor bought, because nobody has to decide.
Pilot-to-Rollout Sprint: Three-week engagement for vendors whose pilots stall.
Product: A tool with an owner, users, a metric, upkeep and a roadmap.
Productise: Turn a one-off tool or service into a repeatable product.
Promotion threshold: The measured error rate a tool must meet before moving up an autonomy stage.
Real users: People who use the tool in their daily work without being asked to.
Rollout: Use of the tool across projects as normal practice.
Rollout template: A repeatable plan for taking the tool to the next project.
Success metric: One number the business already tracks that the tool must move.
Teardown: A short free review of a tool list or pilot plan.
Tool: Something that works for the person who built it.
Tool sprawl: Many internal tools with no inventory, owner or upkeep.
Tool-to-Product Sprint: Three-week engagement for firms building AI tools in-house.