Practical AI for Workforce Planning Without Losing Judgment

When ENR ran its Top 400 contractor coverage in May, Chris Long, president and CEO of Kaufman Lynn Construction, gave the most useful answer on AI and the labor squeeze. His firm is making "meaningful investments" in AI. He still says "AI cannot replace the need for our people to know how to build buildings." He goes further than that. "If someone doesn't understand construction, he or she won't know when the software is wrong, and it will be wrong," he says.

Crew planning is a good place to test that warning.

Let a model sort inputs and draft scenarios. The person who has actually run work in the field decides who shows up on which day. Contractors plainly want the help. In the AGC and NCCER 2026 Workforce Survey, released Sept. 3 with 1,830 respondents, 62 percent picked scheduling and planning as an area where they expect AI to have the greatest impact inside their own firms, and 81 percent of firms with electrician openings reported trouble filling them.

Give the model work a planner can check in minutes

The good early uses are narrow. Cleaning up trade names, areas and dates from approved records is one. Comparing a proposed crew curve against a simple baseline is another, and so is drafting a second scenario when a drawing release or a switchgear delivery moves a week, or listing which fields in the labor plan are blank or contradict each other.

Hiring is a different matter. Summarizing two 2025 reports from ELECTRI International, Jared Christman, director of innovation and technology at Big State Electric, wrote in Electrical Contractor that contractors should "treat A.I. like a high-potential apprentice." He also wrote that A.I. is "not well suited to replace decision-making in areas like recruitment or finance." The law is moving the same way. Illinois Public Act 103-0804, in effect since Jan. 1, 2026, reaches AI used in "selection for training or apprenticeship" and makes it a civil rights violation to fail to give employees notice of that use. California's Civil Rights Council rules, in effect since Oct. 1, 2025, require employers to keep automated-decision data for at least four years. Keep personal and client-restricted records out of any tool the company has not approved.

Build the plain baseline first

Somebody should be able to do the crew math by hand before any model runs. Stan Shook's 2008 Electrical Contractor estimating column starts with total man-hours divided by working days divided by eight hours. His example is 4,000 hours over 120 days, which comes to 4.17 electricians. His "better formula" divides by six productive hours instead, and the count rises to 5.5. He also warns that a bid carrying 30 percent apprentice labor can end up with only 10 percent, and the other 20 percent "might be billed at higher journeyman, or worse, foreman rates." We walk through the same arithmetic in how many electricians a project actually needs.

Jennifer Daneshgari, vice president of financial services at MCA Inc., and Hannah Durant, a business operations analyst there, wrote in EC&M in August that "A labor plan is not just a chart with an estimate of number of people over time." Their firm's research division studied "30 years of data and several million labor hours" and found roughly six shapes of non-linear labor curve. They want foremen, general foremen, superintendents and project managers feeding the plan, because "the field understands installation sequence, access issues, crew capabilities, and real site constraints." If the AI curve and the hand baseline disagree, the planner should be able to find the reason in an afternoon.

Electricians are not interchangeable

A headcount column treats one electrician as equal to the next. OSHA's electrical definitions do not. Note 1 to "qualified person" in 29 CFR 1910.399 says it is "possible and, in fact, likely" for a worker to be qualified on some equipment and unqualified on other equipment.

State ratios put hard limits on the mix. Washington's RCW 19.28.161(4)(b) allows not more than one noncertified individual per journey level electrician on journey level work (trade school students get a separate ratio), and under subsection (3) a certified electrician has to be on the same jobsite for at least 75 percent of each working day. California Labor Code 108.4(a)(3) limits each certified electrician to supervising one uncertified person, and an employer found to have failed to supervise can be barred from employing trainees under that section. A model that balances a peak by adding six trainees to four journeymen has broken the ratio in both states.

Skill mix can stall a big job. In 2023 TSMC chairman Mark Liu said its Arizona fab was short of "skilled workers with those specialized expertise required for equipment installation," and Construction Dive reported the opening slipped to 2025.

Burns & McDonnell staffs for this directly. Brett Poulos, national director of preconstruction and estimating, told Construction Dive that 17 of the roughly 100 people on his preconstruction team came straight from the trades, without a college degree. People like that know "the crew sizes it would take to install this type of work," he says. "That's how you correctly challenge AI outputs."

Make unknown an acceptable answer

Tell the tool to return "unknown" when a required fact is missing. It will not always obey. The reviewer still gets a rule to test against. Shelley Copsey, founder and CEO of the field software firm FYLD, wrote in an ENR opinion column that an agent working from incomplete information "should say, 'I can't confirm this.'"

NIST has a name for the failure. Its Generative AI Profile, NIST AI 600-1, defines confabulation as the production of "confidently stated but erroneous or false content," and it warns about automation bias, which it calls "excessive deference to automated systems." Its suggested action MP-2.3-001 is to compare output to known ground truth data, using evaluation methods that include human oversight. In a crew plan, ground truth is the released drawing set, the badging office roster and the credential records. OSHA's Outreach FAQ says a plastic Outreach card is verified by scanning the QR code on its back. A chatbot cannot do that check.

Large firms have missed confabulated content too. Deloitte refunded more than A$97,000 of a contract originally valued at about A$440,000 after a report it wrote for Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations turned out to contain a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to nonexistent research papers, CFO Dive reported. Jack Castonguay, who teaches accounting at Hofstra University, told CFO Dive that AI output "must be reviewed as if it were prepared by an intern or new hire."

One general contractor took the model wholesale

At New York Build in March, Anthony Hartke, a VDC director at Turner, described what happens when nobody checks. "We had a bad experience with a certain GC, didn't check anything, and just took our model wholesale, all kinds of problems with layout," he says in Construction Dive's coverage. His blunter line is about process. "If you take an old broken process and jam it into a new tool, all you've got is a new shiny tool with an old broken process."

Generic output misses local facts too. Toby Mitchell of Classic Electric and Consulting in Nipomo, California, told Electrical Contractor that his old safety software suggested topics like "hypothermia in July living in California."

Write down who released the plan and when it gets rechecked

Every model-assisted crew plan should come with a short record. It lists the question the tool was asked, the inputs it used with their owners and dates, the baseline it was compared against, the tool version and the named person who released the plan. Add a recheck date. Daneshgari and Durant suggest re-evaluating the labor plan at a minimum at 25, 50 and 75 percent complete, or every few months depending on the length of the job, and they list shifted schedules with overtime constraints and material delivery sequence among the reasons to adjust it in between. Lead time matters most. "If a project needs a larger crew in four weeks, that information is much more useful today than it is three days before the need arrives," they wrote.

When a staffing agency supplies part of the crew, OSHA's coordination guidance has host employers, contractors and staffing agencies coordinate on work planning and scheduling. It also asks host employers and staffing agencies to make sure "adequate lead time is provided to train and equip workers." OSHA's Protecting Temporary Workers page says the host employer and the staffing agency "share responsibility for ensuring worker safety and health." No forecast can confirm that orientation happened or that a workfront is safe to release. The supervisor on site confirms that, and it goes in the record.

After the plan runs, compare it to actual starts and accepted quantities, and count the overrides. Poulos says Burns & McDonnell keeps people in that loop for its own AI tools. "We still have human oversight to be able to vet it and review it," he says.

Sources

1. Top 400 Contractors Hit Craft Ceiling as AI Boom Strains Skilled Labor Resources, ENR, May 20, 2026.
2. 2026 Workforce Survey Analysis, Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER, Sept. 3, 2026.
3. Developing Realistic Expectations for A.I., Electrical Contractor, May 28, 2025.
4. Public Act 103-0804, Illinois General Assembly, effective Jan. 1, 2026.
5. Civil Rights Council Secures Approval for Regulations to Protect Against Employment Discrimination Related to Artificial Intelligence, California Civil Rights Department, June 30, 2025.
6. Calculating Manpower, Electrical Contractor, May 15, 2008.
7. Staying Ahead of Electrical Job-Site Changes, EC&M, Aug. 17, 2026.
8. 29 CFR 1910.399, Definitions applicable to this subpart, eCFR, up to date as of Sept. 25, 2026.
9. RCW 19.28.161, Washington State Legislature, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
10. Labor Code Section 108.4, California Legislative Information, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
11. Labor shortages delay Arizona chip plant opening until 2025, Construction Dive, July 21, 2023.
12. Burns & McDonnell taps tradesworkers for preconstruction, AI vetting, Construction Dive, May 20, 2026.
13. Supervisors, Field Managers are Overworked, Can Agentic AI Supervision Help, ENR, Sept. 24, 2026.
14. NIST AI 600-1, Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile, National Institute of Standards and Technology, July 2024.
15. Outreach Training Program FAQs, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
16. Deloitte refunds over $60K for report with AI errors, Australian government says, CFO Dive, Oct. 21, 2025.
17. Construction data woes hold back robot use, Construction Dive, March 30, 2026.
18. Advancing Through Emerging Tech: How ECs can successfully use A.I. in business, Electrical Contractor, Jan. 15, 2024.
19. Communication and Coordination for Host Employers, Contractors, and Staffing Agencies, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
20. Protecting Temporary Workers, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.

Featured image: U.S. Forest Service, via DVIDS (public domain).