AI is spurring a new wave of companies in construction tech that are transforming this $10 trillion-a-year industry. There’s substantial margin risk in construction when projects aren’t well planned, and this eats into economic growth, because construction represents 14% of the world’s GDP. The beginning of a project, known as “take-off,” is critical. Oleksandr Paraska, CTO at Togal.ai, discusses how some of the best machine learning and computer science experts are improving efficiency in construction. Oleksandr talks about his journey in guiding his startup by integrating domain experts (i.e. architects) and engineering skill sets when building models. He also explains how the nuances in floorplan (architecture) diagrams require object detection, classification, and segmentation to make sense of. He also shares the challenges of scaling up processing volumes, in spite of the limits of GPUs, inference times, infrastructure cost and MLOps resourcing.