How Cameras and AI Are Transforming Construction Intelligence
In early June, our UK Managing Director, Simon Thompson, took to the stage at Digital Construction Week 2025 to talk about this potential scenario. To a crowd of industry professionals leading the charge for innovation and technology in the built environment, Thompson presented the potential impact that Cameras + AI will have on the way construction projects are run.
The $870 Billion Dollar Problem
The construction industry operates within tight margins, without taking into account the plausibly avoidable cost of rework, delays, and disputes. One study estimates rework at between 6.4% and 5.9% of total contract value. The S&P estimates that global construction contracts were worth $14.5 trillion in 2024, which equates to around $870 billion in rework last year.
Disputes are also incredibly common and immensely costly, eating away at those narrow profit margins. The average global dispute value in 2021 was $52.6M dollars, with the average resolution time hovering around 16 months.
Delays due to rework and conflict resolution cut further into potential profits, with the USA alone spending more than $177 billion annually to address these problems. These costs reveal a disconnect within the industry, largely caused by miscommunication and data opacity. But the numbers are symptoms of an even deeper disease: information scarcity in an industry that relies upon detailed, precise information to succeed.
Construction visibility is like a light that can show construction teams exactly where communication, coordination and compliance need help, and it all starts with a fairly old technology: cameras.
Well Beyond Surveillance
Construction cameras are still the backbone of visibility, because they provide constant capture in a world where 30 seconds can make the difference between a near miss and a mortal injury. Your construction project managers can make proactive decisions with confidence when they have irrefutable context for every weather delay, materials delivery, and incident that occurs on site.
Even more importantly, when a team can access intelligence tools within one platform, they are able to adapt to new technologies without feeling forced. That’s what happened for Mark Paulton’s team at Global Mining Giant South32. Given the chance to adapt slowly, and seeing the benefit of various channels in one platform, the mining crew elected to use the new visibility technology themselves.
Tools that are essential to a visibility platform like Evercam, include fixed position cameras, BIM integration, drones, 360 camera capture, gate reporting, and mobile capture.
But the question remains: what good is a continuous visual record if you don’t know where to look?
The Revolution: Strategic AI for Construction
Enter CoPilot, an AI-powered assistant that transforms raw visual data into strategic intelligence. Project managers can ask, "Were there any safety incidents last week?" and receive instant, detailed responses with precise timestamps and visual evidence.
The unique platform we are building at Evercam records everything, all the time, creating an unbroken visual timeline that serves as a project's permanent visual memory. Add to this comprehensive camera system the power of AI, and project managers can easily track critical activities throughout the project lifecycle so there are no missing details, and no disputes about what “really” happened.
Moreover, the timeline identifies visually and chronologically when strategic events occurred, so stakeholders and project managers aren’t faced with the burden of remembering make-or-break details during a busy work day. Avoiding disputes on a project is like putting money in the bank. Add to that the time you get back from dispute-related delays, and the savings begin to multiply exponentially.
Real-World Impact
The savings achieved with an integrated visibility platform are already being realized. When a major concrete pour dispute arose on one of our biggest clients’ projects, our continuous camera footage provided irrefutable evidence that resolved the conflict quickly and fairly. Weather delay documentation helped another client recover 12 critical days on their project timeline by proving legitimate weather-related stoppages. Remote monitoring capabilities have also transformed site management, with some projects reducing physical site visits by 80% while maintaining complete oversight.
These aren't hypothetical scenarios. Each case study demonstrates how the difference between profit and loss comes down to having the right information at the right moment.
The Future is Intelligent Construction Visibility
The future of construction will consist of project managers and decision makers having relevant information at the moment of decision. It is about being more proactive, and less reactive. And we finally have the technology, old and new, to make the shift. When AI becomes your interface, relying on the visuals from cameras, your team can go from putting out fires to preventing them entirely. Intelligent monitoring lets you see problems forming and solve them before they become expensive disasters.
In an industry where margins are razor-thin and mistakes are expensive, comprehensive visibility is essential for survival. Construction cameras are the black box recorders for an industry that’s ready to learn from its data.
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