The construction industry is experiencing an unprecedented information explosion. If we think of business as a knowledge tree (Fig.‎ 1.2-5) fed by data, the current stage of digitalization can be compared to the rapid growth of vegetation during the Carboniferous period, an era in which the Earth’s biosphere was transformed by the rapid accumulation of biomass (Fig.‎ 1.3-1).

With global digitalization, the amount of information in the construction industry is doubling every year. Modern technologies allow data to be collected in the background, analyzed in real time and used on a scale that seemed impossible just a short time ago.

According to Moore’s Law, formulated by Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel®), the density and complexity of integrated circuits and the amount of data processed andstored doubles approximately every two years (Wikipedia, “Moore’s law,”).

While ancient megalithic structures such as Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) did not leave behind documented knowledge suitable for reuse, today digital technologies make it possible to accumulate and reuse information. This can be compared to the evolutionary transition from spore plants to seed plants (angiosperms): the emergence of the seed gave rise to the widespread spread of life on the planet. (Fig.‎ 1.3-2).

Similarly, data from past projects become a kind of “digital seeds” – DNA knowledge carriers that can be scaled and used in new projects and produces. The emergence of modern artificial intelligence tools – machine learning and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, LlaMa, Mistral, Claude, DeepSeek, QWEN, Grok – allow data to be automatically extracted, interpreted and applied in new contexts

Just as seeds revolutionized the spread of life on an initially lifeless planet, “data seeds” are becoming the basis for the automatic emergence of new information structures and knowledge, allowing digital ecosystems to evolve independently and adapt to changing user requirements.

We stand at the threshold of a new era in construction, where the explosion of data and the active dissemination of “data seeds” – structured information from past and ongoing projects – are forming the foundation of the industry’s digital future. Their “pollination” through big data language models (LLMs) allows us to not just observe digital change, but to actively participate in the creation of self-learning, adaptive ecosystems. This is not evolution – it’s a digital revolution in which data is becoming the main building block of a new reality

The amount of data in the construction industry is increasing dramatically due to information from various disciplines throughout the life cycle of construction projects. This huge accumulation of data has pushed the construction industry towards the era of Big Data (Accenture, “Building More Value With Capital Projects,” 1 January 2020).

– Prof. Hang Yang, Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan

The growth of data in the information age is reminiscent of evolutionary processes in nature: just as the development of forests changed the ancient landscape of the planet, the current information explosion is changing the landscape of the entire construction industry.

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