Malaysia’s Gamuda is empowering its employees with access to generative AI (GenAI), enabling them to be more efficient and innovative in delivering engineering, construction, and public infrastructure projects in the region.
The new tool is availed through its collaboration with Google Cloud.
According to John Lim Ji Xiong, Group Chief Digital Officer of Gamuda, GenAI is another step forward in the engineering and construction company’s continuous digital innovation journey to transform a highly traditional industry.
“Through the Gamuda Innovation Hub, we’re breaking new ground with a digital and data-driven approach for construction while upskilling talent in Google Cloud competencies to set them on new career paths in our industry,” he said.
Unified data cloud platform
Gamuda has developed the Gamuda Digital Operating System (GDOS) to give employees enhanced operational visibility and lay the groundwork for GenAI adoption. This is a standard ecosystem of tools for every Gamuda project where enterprise data is consolidated and underpinned by a unified data cloud platform. It includes data from mission-critical systems such as Autodesk Construction Cloud and SAP S4/HANA.
“Moving all our compute workloads, including SAP S4/HANA to Google Cloud, allowed us to harmonise our compute and data in a single cloud platform, thereby enabling the team to focus on driving value-creating use cases and shifting the focus away from managing infrastructure,” said Lim.
Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse and workload-optimised infrastructure delivers cost savings, is easy to use, and helps Garmuda derive more value from its data footprint.
A unified data cloud provides Gamuda’s design, engineering, finance, supply chain, and field operations teams with a holistic, integrated, and real-time view of all project workflows. This enables agile, data-driven decision-making throughout the process of delivering complex, long-term projects in Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, and Taiwan.
To safeguard its enterprise data and core digital systems, Gamuda has implemented Google Cloud’s Security Command Center Premium platform, which is powered by machine learning, for advanced threat detection and prevention, attack path simulation, and upholding regulatory compliance.
Safer and faster tunneling
Gamuda uses Google Cloud’s Gemini models on the Vertex AI platform to build and integrate a GenAI-powered conversational agent into its cloud-based Tunnel Insight platform, with support from CloudMile, a Google Cloud partner,
Powered by Google Cloud, Tunnel Insight ingests, presents and analyses sensor data from the world’s first autonomous tunnel boring machines (A-TBMs) developed in-house by Gamuda.
Guided by sophisticated algorithms to automate repetitive operational tasks such as machine steering, and advance and muck excavation, these machines are being used for better tunneling in construction projects such as the Defu and West Coast Mass Rapid Transit stations and tunnels in Singapore and the Sydney Metro West-Western Tunnelling Package in Australia.
The vast amount of data that is continuously generated by such operations can make it challenging for staff to extract insights at pace for timelier responses to geological changes or maintenance needs. The gen AI-powered conversational agent is therefore being used by staff to quickly extract relevant summaries and instructions from a vast repository of machine documentation to ease the maintenance process, and easily interpret data charts on machine performance in natural language.
Better insights
Gamuda has also been using Vertex AI Search and Conversation to build generative search and chat applications for its market intelligence, design, and technical teams. These employees can now synthesise thousands of pages of research documentation into crisp summaries within minutes and query data from hundreds of past projects for insights to inform new project tender proposals.
This marks the start of Gamuda’s efforts to empower more employees to build customised generative search and chat applications to support their specific role or function, and make them accessible to the rest of the workforce through an internal BotUnify marketplace.
With Vertex AI Search and Conversation, Gamuda and its employees retain full control over what information sources their generative applications access, ingest and index. This allows them to ground these applications’ outputs in enterprise data and implement features such as source citations, boosting user confidence in the relevance and quality of their responses.
“Google Cloud’s enterprise AI stack has accelerated our GenAI innovation cycles, allowing us to go from concept to impact much faster than we had hoped. With Vertex AI’s out-of-box capabilities, even employees with zero specialist AI knowledge can build, deploy, and gain value from functional generative applications in a matter of weeks,” said Lim.
Noting that construction has traditionally been a labour- and process-intensive industry with lengthy project cycles, Patrick Wee, Country Manager, Malaysia, Google Cloud, pointed out that Gamuda has swiftly transformed this paradigm by embracing digitalisation and GenAI at scale on Google Cloud.
“They’re merging diverse data streams to solve real-world challenges, while saving time and costs — and they’re setting a powerful example for enterprises seeking rapid innovation through the convergence of modern infrastructure, data analytics, security, and AI,” he said.
Entelechy Asia 