BAM is adopting AI in a bid to manage risks to project schedules.

The contractor is adopting new software called nPlan Portfolio across an initial trial of 50 projects.

The technology from nPlan allows BAM to analyse a whole portfolio through an AI lens for the first time and provides unbiased insight into potential risks to schedule and costs enabling prompt preventive action.

David Bunn, Portfolio Director at BAM, said: “As our clients are increasingly moving towards outcome-focused capital programmes we are seeing a shift in our leadership focus to the risks to delivery of those outcomes rather than just the risks to project delivery.

“Applying nPlan’s AI capability at a portfolio oversight level allows us to quickly target our leadership interventions to the right areas across a large portfolio of projects, to mitigate risks to outcomes being delivered when they are needed.

“In this initial deployment we are assessing the capability in parallel with our existing approach to offer an additional view of schedule risk without the influence of typical human biases.

“We expect this to enable greater optimisation of integrated portfolio schedules, which will ultimately benefit our clients.”

Dev Amratia, CEO of nPlan, added: “Accurately forecasting and effectively de-risking a single large-scale project is extremely challenging – doing the same for a whole portfolio of projects is an order of magnitude more difficult.

“It is also arguably an order of magnitude more important, because unrecognised portfolio risk has led to the demise of many contractors–and the loss of the jobs they provided–over the years.”