Ben Goodwin, director of policy & public affairs at the Civil Engineering Contractors Association (CECA), gives an overview of the state of AI in the UK construction industry
AI is everywhere at the moment, and for good reason: it is a technology that is increasingly recognised as transformative, and will likely remain so, irrespective of stock-market booms, media hysteria, or Silicon Valley hyperbole. For the construction sector, it has the potential to boost productivity, improve safety, and revolutionise decision-making across project life cycles, from conception to delivery.
Just over one year ago, CECA published Artificial Intelligence in UK Construction, which set out the early-use cases, risks, and recommendations for our industry and for policymakers. We highlighted that AI could “set UK construction on its next major leap in terms of performance” – while also creating new challenges around cybersecurity, ethics, workforce displacement, and intellectual property.
The UK wants to embrace AI fully
Everything around AI is moving at a bewildering pace – it seems just yesterday that most of us were curious to try the first iterations of Large Language Models (LLMs), while now they are integrated into our everyday lives, from search engines to online shopping and e-mail. So, it is worth asking: how much has changed since CECA published the UK construction industry’s first major report on the subject?
Since this time last year, the policy, regulatory, and technological landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. The UK Government has significantly expanded its ambitions for AI as a driver of economic growth and public sector reform, positioning it as a core pillar of its industrial strategy, through initiatives such as the AI Opportunities Action Plan and large-scale investment in national compute capacity, including the Isambard-AI supercomputer and related AI Growth Zones.
These developments are directly relevant to infrastructure delivery, with government pilots exploring the use of AI to reduce planning processing and automate elements of regulatory assessment, potentially speeding up project consenting and reducing red tape for clients and contractors alike.
Alongside this, the Government has increasingly emphasised the need to expand workforce capability, with commitments to expand access to AI skills training at scale – rightly recognising that productivity gains will only be realised if uptake is spread widely across businesses and roles, rather than being siloed to specialist teams. This direction of travel closely aligns with CECA’s recommendations last year on role-specific training, professional development, and the need to embed AI literacy across the construction workforce.
Progress has also been made on standards and assurance, including the establishment of new UK capability focused on AI measurement and evaluation, intended to support trustworthy adoption and complement the development of international standards through bodies such as ISO and the AI Standards Hub.
Uptake is slow in some areas
For civil engineering contractors and the wider built environment, this all counts as a positive backdrop towards addressing the fragmentation and lack of consistency we identified in our 2025 report, helping to create clearer expectations around governance, validation, and risk management. And yet despite this positive momentum, and as we identified last year, AI adoption in construction lags other sectors. Official data continues to show that our sector is behind the wider economy in AI uptake, even if adoption is increasing year-on-year.
Industry surveys suggest that optimism about the potential of AI is high in areas such as design optimisation, project scheduling, cost forecasting, safety analytics, and automated reporting, but that skills shortages, data quality issues, and integration with existing systems remain significant barriers. Since last year, the capabilities of construction technology platforms have advanced, with AI tools increasingly embedded in design, commercial management, site monitoring, and compliance processes, directly building on the use cases outlined in CECA’s report.
These developments bolster the view that AI is best understood as an enabling technology that augments professional judgement and expertise, and improves decision-making, rather than replacing humans altogether. Nonetheless, concerns about workforce displacement remain prominent in the public debate, with surveys indicating that a significant proportion of workers fear job losses linked to the roll-out of the robots.
Artificial Intelligence in UK construction: The way forward?
For a sector that employs around two million people, this underlines the importance of UK construction proactively engaging with the workforce, ensuring transparency about how AI will be used, and investing in retraining and transition support. The risks we highlighted last year remain highly relevant: cybersecurity threats continue to pose a challenge for businesses, while questions around the ownership and use of data for training AI models persist in raising intellectual property concerns. In safety-critical contexts – including design and site operations – the principle that AI must not displace or dilute human responsibility is increasingly reflected in regulatory thinking, which is emphasising human oversight, validation, and accountability.
There is also the risk that the uneven roll-out of AI creates a two-speed industry. Larger firms are better placed to invest in advanced, bespoke systems, while SMEs struggle to compete on a level playing field. Government-backed training and digital infrastructure initiatives may help to mitigate this risk, but targeting industry action will be required to ensure smaller businesses are not unfairly left behind.
Taken together, developments in AI in construction over the last year reinforce several strategic priorities for CECA, and our membership: the need to integrate AI thoughtfully into digital strategies, work-cultures, and professional development, so that the people we employ can use AI effectively and responsibly; to establish robust governance frameworks covering ethics, data, cybersecurity, and validation; and to engage actively in the emerging policy landscape so that the specific needs of all businesses working in the UK’s vital infrastructure sector are reflected in outcomes.
They also underline the continuing relevance of CECA’s 2025 recommendations on managing risk, supporting cross-industry collaboration, and developing a coordinated approach to implementing this new technology across our sector.
Artificial Intelligence is moving rapidly from a speculative technology to a core enabler of productivity, safety, and innovation. But one of the messages from CECA’s AI in UK Construction Conference last year remains relevant: AI won’t take your job, but someone better trained in AI might. It is up to us, as employers and as an industry, to ensure everyone working in UK construction has access to the best training available, putting people in the best position to roll out AI for the benefit of the wider industry and the economy as a whole. By accelerating the implementation of CECA’s recommendations and maintaining a focus on ethical, human-centred deployment, UK construction can harness AI to deliver better outcomes for clients and the workforce – and, in so doing, enhance the value of our sector to the UK economy and the British taxpayer.
