Understanding AI and ChatGPT for Construction Marketing

As technology continues to evolve, construction marketers are constantly seeking new ways to streamline their processes and improve their effectiveness. Tools based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ability of machines to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, are accelerating in user adoption. One tool that is becoming increasingly popular among construction marketers is ChatGPT. Construction marketers are beginning to use ChatGPT for a variety of applications from content creation to customer engagement.

At its core, ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence research organization. It is part of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series of language models that have been developed to understand and generate natural language. ChatGPT was developed using deep learning techniques and is based on a neural network architecture known as a transformer. The model was trained on a large corpus of text data, including books, articles, and web pages, using unsupervised learning techniques.

Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest growing app in history with over 100 million users. The development of ChatGPT and other GPT models has been made possible by the availability of large amounts of text data and the rapid advancement of hardware and software technology in recent years. This has enabled researchers to train models with billions of parameters, allowing them to generate natural language responses to a wide range of prompts with high accuracy.

With its ability to generate natural language responses to prompts, construction marketers are beginning to use ChatGPT in a variety of ways to improve their marketing processes. ChatGPT is being used for content creation including generating content ideas and topics, headlines, and articles. For search engine optimization, marketers are using the tool to generate keywords, tags, titles, and headings for the best possible search engine rankings. Customer engagement is being enhanced as ChatGPT is used for the creation of surveys, questions and feedback forms. Lead generation is being assisted by ChatGPT for the generation of headlines, subheadings, calls to action, and content for landing pages. Another area is proposal support, the tool can generate headings, subheadings, bullet points, and summaries. In addition, ChatGPT can be used for content review, editing and proofreading. ChatGPT can also be used to keep a tab on competitors by generating information such as competitor strengths and weaknesses, market share, capabilities, clients, news and thought leadership and even customer sentiment.

One of the key advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to learn from large amounts of data and generate natural language responses that are similar to human language. While not perfect, ChatGPT can produce relevant content in a fast manner. This has important implications for a wide range of construction marketing applications, including content creation, search engine optimization (SEO), and client engagement.

The development of ChatGPT, which is still in its infancy, is a significant achievement in the field of natural language processing and has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with machines and generate content in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.

AI has been around marketing circles for several years. Search engines, social media networks and ecommerce have been driven by machine-learning algorithms for years. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn have leveraged AI to drive content generation and personalization. AI’s power lies in its speed and ability to produce content almost instantaneously. AI-powered tools, while in their infancy, are beginning to transform the marketing landscape and helping businesses of all sizes to optimize their marketing resources, improve content quality, streamline efforts, and make data-driven decisions.

Brian Gallagher, CPSM, is the co-author of Leading With Marketing and Building Business With Social Media. He serves as Vice President, Corporate Development for Graycor, Inc., a national general contractor founded in 1921.