In order to track progress, workers with Samet Construction are using 360° cameras on their hard hats to record their work on a 670,000-sq-ft, 27-story mixed-use tower in Durham, N.C.

Using the twice-a-week reality captures, tech provider Buildots calculates project progress and makes recommendations based on its proprietary artificial intelligence technology. The Novus is the third project on which Samet and Buildots have worked together, and the second project with developer Global Holdings Group. While contractors and developers often tout the collaboration technology they use, they often aren’t working from the same data, which can limit just how much collaboration is really happening. With its AI analysis, Buildots aims to keep the whole team on a single source of truth.

“[Buildots] has the capability of doing comparisons to the schedule and the actual building information model that we use, to build a project and compare the two to ensure that things are on schedule,” says Chris Hargrove, construction manager at Global Holdings. Hargrove said the platform allows his team to sit in a room with Samet’s managers and see if individual subcontractors are tracking ahead or behind schedule as well as get an overall view of the project.

Clayton Simmons, senior project manager at Samet Construction, says that the team goes over project progress weekly with personnel from Global Holdings, and having one set of information has made the collaboration that much better.

“You have them in your model, you can track activities such as installing doors,” says Simmons. “Because usually we walk once a week and upload to Buildots, within a day or two, they analyze it and get it back to us, so we can use it for reporting and for quality issues. But it will even give you the pace of that week.”

Simmons says if 10 doors were installed that week, for example, based on Samet’s Primavera P6 schedule, that pace would be considered acceptable and the contractor and developer could focus their attention on other activities. All of Samet’s regular reality capture data is shared with Global Holdings.

“Most of our clients are general contractors,” says Aviv Leibovici, Buildots cofounder and chief product officer. Normally owners don’t bother getting involved, but the benefits of collaboration can be significant, he says. “It’s [the user’s] system. The owner has nothing to do with it, but they obviously can choose to share with the owner. Most don’t make that choice. The thing that is unique here, and that’s probably both to the credit of [Global Holdings and Samet], is these guys are really, really cooperative with this thing.”