Balfour Beatty Brings AI Hackathon to U.S. to Reimagine Construction

Balfour Beatty is taking its innovation efforts stateside with its first-ever U.S. artificial intelligence hackathon, designed to accelerate AI-driven solutions across critical areas of construction management.

The My Contribution AI Hackathon will be held September 8–9 at Microsoft’s campus near Dallas, Texas. Seventy employees from Balfour Beatty US will team up with AI experts from Microsoft, Answer Rocket, and AsBuilt to develop working prototypes for real-world construction challenges.

The hackathon will focus on six key business areas identified by Balfour Beatty leadership: preconstruction planning, safety/zero harm, quality, business development, internal efficiencies, and standard operating procedures.

Six ideas — one for each business area — were selected by the firm’s IT and executive leadership team in collaboration with Microsoft and a third-party AI specialist. The prototypes developed during the event could eventually become long-term tools within the company’s U.S. operations.

“Balfour Beatty’s MyC AI Hackathon is a catalyst for innovation,” said Kasey Bevans, Balfour Beatty US chief information officer. “We’re bringing together frontline and administrative expertise and technologies to reimagine how construction gets done.”

Building on Earlier AI Momentum

The hackathon builds on Balfour Beatty’s growing AI strategy. Earlier this month, the contractor invested $9.6 million in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI offering, to streamline workflows. The company also announced plans to create AI agents for quality, safety, and assurance processes.

These efforts align with CEO Leo Quinn’s 2024 commitment to harness AI across the business. That push included StoaOne AI, a search tool for navigating internal documents, and another project designed to mine billions of data points from safety observations and incidents to predict and prevent risks.

The U.S. hackathon also follows the success of the company’s “Big AI Challenge” in the U.K. in 2024, which produced winning concepts like highway repair clustering and auto-generation of inspection and test plans.

“This UK event laid the groundwork for the current U.S. initiative and demonstrated the company’s commitment to leveraging AI and data analytics to drive productivity and solve business problems,” Bevans said.

A Long-Term AI Strategy in Construction

For Balfour Beatty, the hackathon is about more than one event — it’s a stepping stone in a broader shift toward digital transformation in construction. By embedding AI into project planning, safety, and quality assurance, the firm hopes to address systemic industry challenges and boost efficiency.

If successful, the prototypes developed in Dallas could move into wider testing across Balfour Beatty projects in the U.S., marking another step in the company’s bid to modernize one of the world’s most labor-intensive industries.

Originally reported by Matthew Thibault in Construction Dive.