GHD Digital launches AI Centre of Excellence to accelerate innovation

The CoE team combines GHD’s deep industry expertise with state-of-the-art AI technology and data science supporting energy, water, communities, and transport markets.

GHD Digital, a leading digital transformation business, today announces the launch of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Centre of Excellence (CoE). The CoE is designed to empower clients to harness the full potential of AI and related technologies, building on extensive research, testing, and trialling in this space.

The architecture, engineering, and construction industry has been slow to adopt digital technologies, opting to focus on physical assets and complex, labour-intensive processes. However, in the last few years, there has been a growing pressure of using advanced analytics to connect people, processes, data, and assets. This digital transformation has been accelerated by new advancements in areas such as generative AI, which can sift through vast amounts of data, identify and explain patterns, suggest creative ideas, generate insights, and provide recommendations.

The CoE, a team of over 40 specialists, aims to help clients better understand the benefits and risks of using AI technologies and fast-track their use of AI to provide value for their customers, people and communities. The advanced algorithms developed by the team generate and mine data from documents, voice recordings, photographs, and videos using unique language processing and computer vision to unearth valuable insights and contextual details.

Working with GHD’s industry experts, GHD Digital’s AI team has already utilised AI technology to help multiple municipalities, energy clients, water utilities, and technology companies in areas including citizen engagement, safe water, and waste management. Recognising these capabilities, the team recently won the Australian Information Industry Association’s iAward for a project that helped a government agency reduce transport scenario planning time from three days to less than three minutes.

“We expect the CoE not only to increase awareness through thought leadership, but to assist in addressing some of the world’s most complex challenges related to water quality, climate change and environmental justice. AI alone cannot move businesses and society forward. The value is in the powerful combination of human thinking and AI – which is what our AI CoE in conjunction with our GHD technical experts offer,” added Parakala.

GHD is a leading professional services company operating in the global markets of water, energy and resources, environment, property and buildings, and transportation. GHD delivers advisory, digital, engineering, architecture, environmental and construction solutions to public and private sector clients. Established in 1928 and privately owned by its people, GHD’s network of 10,000+ specialists are connected across 200 offices located in five continents.