Business Finland has allocated co-innovation funding to a €20 million initiative addressing productivity challenges in building services engineering. Coordinated by Tampere University, the project involves a consortium of companies collaborating on real-world applications. Dubbed AI Champion, the initiative aims to investigate the reasons behind delays and cost overruns in building services engineering projects and explore whether “human-like” AI agents can streamline data transfers across the supply chain.
Business Finland, the country’s public innovation funding organization, will facilitate the project, with Tampere University managing a research budget of approximately €5 million. Piia Sormunen, an Associate Professor and project coordinator at the university, noted that the preparatory phase lasted 20 months and aligns with Finland’s broader vision for a data-driven economy.
Sormunen remarked, “The application process and preparation for this unique AI project, which will revolutionize the building services engineering and civil engineering field, took 20 months. I am very pleased that we have secured funding that will enable Tampere University to conduct interdisciplinary research and build an AI hub in Finland. The project is one of the most significant data economy pilot projects of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland.”
The initiative highlights a persistent issue within building services engineering: fragmented data and inconsistent formats that result in problematic handoffs between parties. Sormunen elaborated on this, stating that design documents are often in PDF format, which contractors print on-site. She raised concerns about why data is not transferred electronically, thereby creating gaps in information between different stakeholders during construction processes.
AI Champion is set to develop 100 AI agents aimed at enhancing automation and information flow within building services engineering supply chains. These agents are intended as “human-like” entities that support processes and operating models once information bottlenecks are identified. When disruptions in data flow occur, information will be directed to a GPT laboratory, a virtual AI lab at Tampere University where researchers will synthesize relevant data and build agents tailored to specific workflow stages.
Sormunen anticipates a transformative impact on work organization, suggesting that while certain tasks may be eliminated, new ones will emerge as workflows increasingly rely on data. She stated, “Certain work stages will disappear in the processes, but new ones will be created at the same time. More data-driven and AI-controlled processes and services will be developed during the project, improving the competitiveness of the consortium companies both nationally and internationally. In addition, Finnish companies focusing on artificial intelligence can find new business opportunities in the civil engineering industry.”
The consortium encompasses various stages of the building services engineering lifecycle, from design to maintenance, with a focus on testing the new AI agents in real company settings rather than in isolated lab environments. Tampere University will contribute multidisciplinary teams specializing in Built Environment, Management and Business, and Information Technology and Communication Sciences, with a focus on construction workflows, information management, and AI agent development.
In collaboration with the University of Oulu, the project will leverage expertise in product management and business digitalization, led by Professor Harri Haapasalo. He emphasized the importance of creating a seamless “data flow” that is continuous and usable in real-time without manual interventions. Haapasalo stated, “The project is extremely important and involves many interesting stages. Our main expectation is that we will be able to achieve genuine data flow. Data flow means more than just transferring data from one system to another. Our expectation is that data will flow continuously, automatically, and in the right format through different processes and systems so that it can be utilized in real time without manual intermediate processing.”
The project commenced at the end of this year and is slated to run until June 2028, positioning itself as a pivotal initiative in addressing long-standing inefficiencies in the building services engineering sector. As the industry increasingly adopts intelligent systems, the implications for productivity and operational efficiency could be substantial, potentially reshaping how civil engineering projects are executed in the future.
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