On behalf of NCSEA Foundation and the Innovation in Structural Engineering (ISE) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Grant Team, we are pleased to present our sample AI policy tailored for the structural engineering community, as well as a companion “Getting Started” summary guide. These foundational documents are intended to help you safely integrate AI within your firm operations and offer practical guidelines for responsibly adopting AI technology across firms of various sizes. They also represent the initial step of “Learning and Strategy” as outlined in the recently published NCSEA AI Roadmap, which details a phased approach to adopting AI technology in structural engineering firms. The policy includes the following items:
- AI Platform Considerations: The policy encompasses a range of AI platforms and considerations crafted specifically for our industry. This section will vary widely depending on a firm’s technology ecosystem, needs, and use cases. It serves as an example only (not plug and play).
- Guiding principles & Use Cases: This section addresses recommended use cases along with the inherent risks involved in using AI for these use cases, as well as guiding principles.
- Recommended AI Use Cases: A deep dive on helpful and appropriate ways to use AI.
- Risks of Using AI: Discusses potential risks such as accuracy issues (hallucinations), bias, security, confidentiality concerns, and legal liabilities.
- Ethics and Legal Considerations: Covers ethical responsibilities and legal issues related to AI in engineering, especially the need for transparency and avoiding bias.
- Reporting and Misuse: Outlines the procedure for reporting improper AI use and specifies inappropriate applications, including handling sensitive data.
- Confidential and Proprietary Information: Defines what constitutes confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information that must not be shared with AI tools.
This sample policy provides a starting framework and needs to be customized to fit your specific requirements. The details include examples from several firms that have successfully implemented AI in their operations.
Why Adopt a Comprehensive AI Policy?
In discussing AI adoption with engineers and their firm leadership, we have seen a wide range of implementation and policy around AI. While some firms have adopted strict policies ranging from ‘no AI allowed’ to ‘we strongly encourage its use’, others are silent on this emerging technology or don’t know where to start. This lack of clarity often results in employees using personal AI chatbot services, AI meeting transcriptions/summarization, and other related technologies that can compromise business security and put firms at risk. Adopting a strong AI policy does several things:
- Encourages leadership to make decisions on approved, responsible and restricted AI use for the firm, and communicate these decisions to employees clearly.
- Help position firms to set a budget and provide access to approved offerings to their employees.
- Inform stakeholders on the risks and benefits of the technology, considering data security, privacy and ethical adoption of AI.
- Educate and train staff to best leverage AI technology and corresponding investments.
As you customize the policy and the ‘getting started’ guide for your uses, spend time to understand your best use cases while considering the costs and risks associated. While Machine Learning and AI have focused on structural engineering problems in the past, some of the most accessible AI offerings today are focused more on project support, communication, organization and task management. This can help staff across the business, and especially overloaded project managers, manage the ever-increasing volume of information they are expected to process.
NCSEA Foundation expects this sample policy to mature as the AI landscape matures. Therefore, we welcome both positive and constructive feedback on how we improve this document for the industry. Please reach out to the NCSEA Foundation with any questions or comments about these documents.
How Can AI Help You and Your Firm?
Generative AI refers to tools that can access, create, and augment content like text, images, or programming code, as well as connect and leverage company data across various platforms. Think of AI like a personal assistant, idea generator, copyeditor, and expert coder at your side, which understands a great deal about what you do and your projects. However, AI solutions don’t automatically become effective assistants without some effort and customization. This may include crafting custom prompts, automating AI tasks to meet specific needs, integrating AI with your company’s data schema and knowledge base, and potentially training models for domain-specific tasks. AI can assist you by:
- Automate routine tasks to save time. Summarizing emails, chats, and other correspondence, distilling this information into summaries and actionable tasks. AI can also help you track and complete your work.
- Assist with coding for repetitive tasks, design and machine learning problems.
- Generate new ideas and approaches in presentations, emails, proposals, and other business development efforts.
- Help in learning new subject matter quickly, allowing you to ask questions about specifics.
- Interpret and guide the use of building codes, technical documents, and new research.
- Assist with editing and refining your work for tone, sentiment, and brevity.
- Quality control in engineering, BIM, specifications, and drawing outputs. AI can help find errors, and augment human efforts to increase accuracy and quality.
- Tap into siloed knowledge bases across your business environment.