Dedicated to helping AEC professionals find the information they need faster, AVAIL has been experimenting with custom chatbots that can read firm-specific materials such as onboarding documents or historical RFPs (requests for proposals) and answer questions about them quickly. Discover more about the project and how you can test your own custom chatbot with AVAIL below.
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As a technology company dedicated to helping architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) professionals find the information they need faster, we believe artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will drastically change the way we think about “search” and interact with information.
Thus, we have spent a lot of time thinking about how AEC firms can leverage these technologies in a platform like AVAIL.
In fact, we recently hosted an AEC technology leader event, Confluence New York 2024, that focused specifically on AI and ML.
Some of our most compelling AI and ML experiments AVAIL has run so far have centered around a custom chatbot that can chew through the curated data in a firm’s AVAIL Channel and answer questions about that information.
First custom chatbot tests
We first began experimenting with our own data, training a simple AI chatbot on information from our AVAIL Help Center. We’ve implemented the Help Center chatbot directly in the AVAIL Desktop and plan to deploy it broadly in the next major release of AVAIL. It successfully responds to questions about AVAIL’s platform features, even referencing source documents where it finds the information.
Learn more about AVAIL’s AI and ML experiments in our CEO and Founder’s blog “Not-So-Sexy AI That Will Transform the AEC Industry.”
Confident in the structure of feeding a customized chatbot information, we have now turned our attention to the various use cases for this technology among our customers. What other groups of text-based data would make good candidates for the chatbot functionality?
One use case we’ve begun experimenting with is retrieving building product manufacturer information efficiently. Thanks to the AVAIL Select MEP Channel, we already had a bank of manufacturers’ documentation in AVAIL to begin testing. We are able to “talk to” information rich documents such as product catalogs, reference manuals, and specification documents related to manufacturer-specific products providing an efficient, more natural way of interacting with those documents.
AVAIL’s custom chatbot can query any text-based data in an AVAIL Channel, including manufacturer’s documentation.
Beyond querying Help Center information and manufacturers’ product documentation, we can imagine many scenarios where a focused, custom chatbot would be helpful for AEC industry firms.
By connecting the chatbot functionality to AVAIL Channels, our goal is to empower teams to create tools that specifically meet their firm’s needs.
Feeding the chatbots text-based content—like the materials listed in the left-hand column of the table below—will drive the use cases on the right-hand column, helping AEC industry teams find answers to firm-specific questions quickly and efficiently.
| Fill AVAIL Channel with | AEC chatbot use case |
| A firm’s onboarding materials | Helps train new hires |
| Historical responses to requests for proposals (RFPs) | Helps members of the firm respond to future RFPs |
| “Lessons Learned” databases | Helps team avoid “avoidable” mistakes |
| Historical specification documents | Next generation specs |
So, how can an AI custom chatbot help your firm?
We would love help testing use cases like those listed above and are currently accepting requests to build AVAIL-hosted chatbots for firms’ specific needs.
Fill out this form to register interest in an AVAIL custom chatbot.
Founded in 2016 as a solution for architectural firms to find the information they need faster, AVAIL creates software for the global architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. AVAIL’s content management system (CMS) platform and Revit application tools help designers and engineers take control of their intricate network of files in one visual, streamlined solution. Spun out of ArchVision, a provider of Rich Photorealistic Content (RPC), AVAIL’s customers include industry leaders like Gensler, Perkins&Will, IMEG, LEO A DALY, and Populous.