About 45 kilometers from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, construction is rapidly advancing on the largest purpose-built city intended to be an entertainment, sports and cultural destination.
Qiddiya City will cover 360 square kilometers (140 square miles), making it three times the size of Paris. With theme parks, shopping, sports venues, a Formula 1 racetrack, museums and more, it will also eventually house 500,000 residents in 20 neighborhoods. The massive project involves 700 companies and 22,000 workers. Microsoft 365 Copilot is helping to keep track of Qiddiya City’s many moving parts.
“We’re building multiple assets, like stadiums, sports tracks, hotels,” says Abdulrahman AlAli, chief technology officer at Qiddiya Investment Company (QIC), which oversees the city’s construction.
To keep track of what all the contractors are doing – from project plan, to paid, pending or on-hold invoices – the information goes through different tools and then into a dashboard created by Microsoft Power BI. Copilot then allows QIC employees to ask questions and quickly dig out relevant information from the megaproject’s mega-pile of data.
Managing a megaproject’s workflow
In addition, AlAli explains, a team of about 200 people is building the plans, while a different team of about 100 people is tracking and executing the project, using 20 different systems among them that use different programming languages – and don’t understand each other. On top of that, assets such as shopping centers or amusement parks may each encompass dozens of buildings, and each building has an ID of 20 to 30 characters.
“We found that the naming of assets – the buildings, the roads, the streets – is different between the two teams,” he says. “It’s a nightmare” to try to match up the asset names across the different systems. “So, we’re using Copilot to summarize the differences and give us the best options to unify the design standards for our city,” he said.
“That’s one use case that we came up with just last month, and we are executing this as we speak,” he added.
Scaling Copilot across teams
QIC’s real estate development and construction teams have been using Copilot for about a year through the Power BI dashboard, and the rest of the workforce has adopted it only in the past few months, mostly for productivity, such as summarizing emails or writing reports. Copilot has autogenerated about 250,000 email messages and chat interactions a month for QIC, summarized more than 50,000 meetings and created more than 13,000 documents based on corporate data in four months, AlAli says.
Copilot provides more than efficiency to QIC. “Because we have massive, massive programs, and technology is embedded in every asset we build, whether it’s a theme park or a museum or a stadium, we’re using Copilot for research, how to find the best ways to enhance customer experience, to understand the actual usage of attendees, for example, for theme parks,” AlAli says. “And we’re using Copilot to interrogate databases related to customer sentiment overall.”
AlAli sees a big role for Copilot in any aspect of the project that involves mountains of data – and with a megaproject, almost every aspect has too much information to humanly sift through. “You can imagine the number of invoices and payment certificates we get every day. Thousands of payment certificates,” he says. Copilot provides the ability to “interrogate all this massive data with a prompt: ‘Give me invoices that are more than 60 days late and there are no comments from the engineers.’ Certain invoices will have a snag listed on them that has been delayed for payment on purpose and the dashboard will not know that.”
But Copilot can look for comments on the payment certificates and invoices and say that, for example, 600 invoices are more than 60 days late, and that out of those, 10 percent have comments, or snags, that need to be addressed. “That’s very, very helpful,” AlAli says.
“It’s about the right way to adopt Copilot and AI in general. If you spend time in planning and designing the implementation, you would get the best out of it,” AlAli says. “I’m a big believer that technology is an unfair advantage for companies that use it.”
