Artificial Intelligence in the Construction Industry: A Comprehensive Review of Benefits and Challenges

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the construction industry by providing transformative tools that increase efficiency, improve safety, and facilitate rapid and smart decision making. Despite potential benefits, AI integration into construction industry faced several challenges like, high implementation costs, lack of experts, and resistance to change. Additionally, the concern of data security against the cyberattacks, high volume of data and matching data from various sources (other AI tools) are significant challenges. Although, numerous studies have been conducted on this topic, but none have comprehensively reviewed the benefits and challenges of integrating the six technologies integrated with AI of specific benefit to the industry: the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, machine learning (ML), building information modeling (BIM), digital twins (DT), and drones. The goal of this study, therefore, was to identify, categorize, and rank the benefits and challenges of each of the tools. To achieve this goal, a comprehensive review of 230 relevant publications from the existing literature was conducted. The results revealed 30 benefits and 27 challenges corresponding to six AI technologies that were ranked according to the frequency of their occurrence in the literature. The findings of this study will help construction decision-makers, project managers, practitioners, and company owners address the challenges of integrating AI into their projects so that they can reap the benefits thereof.