On 10th July, the Digital By Default group were delighted to be joined by Tom Jennings, BRE, to hear more about the BuildAudIt project.
BuildAudIt is a 12-month, Innovate UK-funded project, led by a consortium that includes BRE, Unit 9, Reusefully, Enable My Team, and Imperial College London. The project’s ambition is to revolutionise how existing buildings are audited through an AI-driven platform that streamlines the process of pre-demolition and pre-retrofit assessments.
The built environment, largely composed of aging structures, demands ongoing maintenance and sustainability interventions. Traditional auditing methods are manual, time-consuming, and resource intensive. BuildAudIt aims to make this process quick, accurate, scalable, and significantly more cost-effective.
The Challenge: Inefficiencies in Building Audits
Today’s audits require manual site visits, physical inspections, and hand-collected data—like photos and measurements. This is laborious and inconsistent across buildings and teams. The BuildAudIt project tackles the core issue: How can AI optimise building data capture and analysis?
Areas of inefficiency targeted by BuildAudIt include:
- Manual surveying of buildings
- Disorganized data collation
- Limited reuse of legacy documents like floorplans and maintenance manuals
- Time-intensive report generation
The Solution: BuildAudIt Platform and Toolsets
BuildAudIt developed an AI-enabled platform comprising several interoperable tools to automate and enhance the audit process:
- BRE Platform
The BRE platform serves as the central management hub for BuildAudIt projects. Designed for use by building owners, consultants, and surveyors, it provides streamlined control over the entire audit process.
Key features include:
- Centralised Project Management: Users can oversee multiple audit projects, register new ones, and manage all associated data within a unified interface.
- Automated Data Integration: Automatically imports and organises data from other BuildAudIt tools, enabling the automatic population of building zones, floors, and rooms.
- Platform Interoperability: Acts as the access point for the broader BuildAudIt toolset, ensuring seamless transitions between scanning, AI processing, and document analysis tools.
- Enable My Team Platform
A central interface for building scanning and audit data management. Key capabilities include:
- LiDAR Scanning: High-speed 3D scanning of building geometry.
- Data Capture and Object Recognition: AI tools detect and classify structural and architectural elements.
- Automatic Photography Tagging: Organizes photos by location and element for easy access.
- Imperial College Platform
A ChatGPT-style natural language interface trained on Operation & Maintenance Manuals (O&Ms):
- Able to load up an operation and maintenance manual and ask specific questions such as “How many air conditioning units are in the building?” or “Where is the boiler located?”
- Delivers accurate, structured responses by extracting data from complex documentation.
Key Benefits of BuildAudIt Tools
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- Faster Audits: Scans completed in minutes, saving significant time over manual methods.
- AI Automation: Automates element detection, data extraction, and report generation.
- Centralised Platform: Manages projects, imports scan data, and auto-populates building layouts.
- Accurate & Consistent Data: Reduces human error and standardises audit outputs.
- Smart Document Search: ChatGPT-style tool answers queries from O&M manuals instantly.
- Improved Planning: Optimises survey routes and material assessments for retrofits and demolitions.
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Proven in Pilots: Validated by industry partners including Equans, Northern Rail, Northern Rail, Mersey Rail, QSustain, Hacer Development
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Looking Ahead
The success of BuildAudIt’s pilot phase has opened the door for further development:
- BRE is working towards commercialising its platform in collaboration with Enable My Team.
- Interest has already emerged from heritage architectural practices, especially for capturing data from historically significant buildings.
As AI capabilities evolve, BuildAudIt lays the groundwork for:
- Real-time audits
- Scalable assessments of national building stock
- AI-powered decision-making for retrofits and demolitions
- Seamless integration with building lifecycle management tools
Conclusion
BuildAudIt represents a transformative shift in how building data is captured, analysed, and leveraged. With a blend of AI, scanning technologies, and user-centric interfaces, it brings the construction and property sectors one step closer to digital by default. The future of building audits is not just faster—it’s smarter.
Get Involved
This session was held as part of the Constructing Excellence Digital By Default group. To find out more about this group and their activities, visit the group’s page. Alternatively, find out about our other groups here or explore our upcoming events on the events page.
