Talk to your Architecture project database with AI

Sébastien Lucas -

Using AI to search public data is great, but what if you could use it to explore your own data? 🤔

What data architects have?

When I teach architects how to use AI, a common challenge that arises is how to give AI efficient access to their data so they can truly "talk" to it.

As an architect, you likely have a structured organization of data across project folders and subfolders, containing a mix of PDFs, Word documents, Excel sheets, and, of course, BIM models or CAD files.

Sound familiar?

But if you’re wondering if you can just tell AI, “Here’s my stuff, make something useful out of it,” unfortunately, it won’t work that simply.❗

There’s a principle in AI: garbage in 🗑️ > garbage out 🗑️.

What does this mean?

If you feed the system with documents that are poorly structured or low quality, the results will be equally poor and imprecise!

It’s similar to the noise-to-signal ratio: feeding AI too much unstructured data increases the noise, diluting the useful signal.🤖😤

But the problem isn’t that simple. What exactly constitutes “poorly documented” data? And how can you address this to unleash the power of AI with your data, like BIM data or project history?

Building an architecture database for AI

My suggestion is to break down the problem and start with small experiments. 🎯

As an architect, a straightforward experiment is to organize a list of projects and the associated metadata, such as:

  • People or companies you worked with
  • Locations of your projects
  • Materials or techniques used

With a well-structured base of project information—not scattered across lengthy, detailed documents—you’ll find it much easier to "talk to your data."

A new AI tool to manage your projects data

To facilitate this, I’m developing a new AI tool specifically for architects. This tool will make it easy to import your existing data and interact with it using AI, like ChatGPT, to:

✅ Research and query your data, e.g., "In which meeting did we decide on this specification?"

✅ Generate documents based on your existing records, such as a construction meeting report

✅ Maintain a single source of truth for your projects, allowing you to easily generate text for your website, submit proposals, and respond to tenders

If you're interested in using AI to search your project data or generate documents with project context, this tool may be what you need.

To join the beta version of this new AI tool for architect, please fill this form.