game really changed with the growth of generative AI. Every single business has changed because of it.
CALIFORNIA CONSTRUCTOR: AI is now a major focus of your speaking engagements and work with clients. What are your primary objectives in your work helping businesses and individuals better utilize it, and what is the impact?
JAMES SPELLOS: Te key goal other than just education in general is to get people comfortable with it. So helping to take away the fear. How do you get from hearing the noise and the fear mongering and everything else that is out there, to understanding that this is a tool. People don’t realize that we’ve been using AI for 50 years, but I explain how generative AI is different. So it’s giving them those flashes of opportunities, just setting the stage for them to say how can we now use this in other ways. To me, it was just a no-brainer to focus
on how generative AI is impacting every single business out there. It is giving small and mid-size construction businesses the opportunity to use tools that sort of level up the playing field. But because there is so much misinformation, and so much lack of time dedicated to figuring out how to use these tools, they often go unused.
CALIFORNIA CONSTRUCTOR: Can you provide a recent example of how you have helped a company save time and improve productivity using gen- erative AI?
JAMES SPELLOS: I’m working right now with a construction company in Washing- ton, which is constantly needing to refer to a 500-page PDF from the Washington Department of Transportation’s manual on bridges. So I loaded the manual into
ChatGPT, and now the company has it as an accessible resource to ask a question and get an answer from a 500-page PDF instantaneously. Tink about how much time that is going to save!
CALIFORNIA CONSTRUCTOR: How do you engage with audiences like the one you’ll have at 2025 CONSTRUCT and ensure they take away valuable tips and information?
JAMES SPELLOS: I like to inject a lot of humor in my conversation, because I need to get defenses down, to get people to see this as something they can use and not something they need to be terrified by. So we play. We do things in there that will be kind of funny. But at the same time they see how I’m using construction examples to be able to feed information through these large language models (LLMs), so that it can provide content that they never had access to before at that rate of speed or in that quantity. It’ll be a completely different AI presentation than they’ve ever heard before. People need information that allows
them to jump into it right now. If you give them that, show them what they can use immediately, then the “aha” moments start happening.
CALIFORNIA CONSTRUCTOR: Will you be tailoring your CONSTRUCT session specifically for construction professionals?
JAMES SPELLOS: Absolutely. So when I talk about prompting, which is the first starting point of the session, I’ll intro- duce a prompt about some challenge in construction they may be having and how the LLM would handle it. And we talk about images, such as using less Excel for your work, analyzing data and all that stuff, and the models are always
“To me it was just a no-brainer to focus on how generative AI is impacting every single business out there. It is giving small and midsize construction businesses the opportunity to use tools that sort of level up the playing field. But because there is so much misinformation, and so much lack of time dedicated to figuring out how to use these tools, they oſten go unused.” – James Spellos
CALIFORNIA CONSTRUCTOR JULY/AUGUST 2025
11
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32
