One of the most common complaints about new construction projects – from housing to office blocks to leisure facilities – is that "everything looks the same nowadays".

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This gripe against contemporary building design has some justification, but what if – as is becoming increasingly common practice in the construction industry – we outsource more of this task to artificial intelligence?

Once the predictive capability of construction modelling technologies becomes near-perfect, and digital memory effectively permanent, optimisation, prediction and data-driven governance may significantly reshape the construction industry's professional judgement, contractual responsibility and creative agency.

The first and most significant impacts of AI in construction are likely to occur at project inception.

In time, perhaps just a few short years, it is plausible that, rather than beginning with a brief authored by an architect or developer, construction projects will instead emanate from AI systems trained on decades of economic cycles, climate modelling, demographic movements, behavioural data, and asset performance, which can generate briefs autonomously.

In such a scenario, AI identifies the statistically optimal use of a site, its scale, configuration, material palette, carbon profile and anticipated lifespan, while human involvement is scaled back to reviewing and approving the system's outputs.

Deviation from the optimised, system-generated proposal is not prohibited but will demand justification.

And as predictive accuracy improves, the evidential burden of departing from AI-generated recommendations is likely to increase, with implications for professional liability and decision-making.

As AI systems converge on shared datasets and optimisation criteria, the built environment itself may start to look increasingly uniform – even more so than critics of today's new office blocks and housing estates regularly complain about, but in subtly different ways.

Rather than regulatory mandates, such homogenisation would result from economic and risk-based incentives, which are harder to argue against.

Buildings may not appear identical but might seem recognisably related as proportions repeat, layouts converge, and building materials become ubiquitous across cities and regions.

Over time, experimentation could become exceptional and local character may fade as built environments become more efficient, coherent and interchangeable.

The economic and risk-based incentives of using AI to determine construction projects are exacerbated by the priorities of insurers and funders who prefer predictability, while regulators place greater trust in solutions that have already been proven at scale.

While design may remain a human profession in many respects, the role of architects may evolve to one that curates, refines and validates the outputs of autonomous systems, rather than one that originates ideas and forms.

As systems become increasingly accurate, resisting their recommendations begins to feel irresponsible.

Cities may become safer, greener and more efficient, but they may also become less expressive.

More positively, AI-driven automation and robotics are likely to transform construction sites into quieter, more controlled environments.

Human involvement is likely to increasingly centre on supervision, compliance and exception handling, which should improve site safety.

When it comes to deciding what is built, humans will still make these calls, but AI will likely define what is acceptable and defensible.

In such a world, attempts at creativity must constantly justify themselves against an ever-present model of optimisation.

In that world, the central question moves from what and how we decide to build to what we are prepared to lose from our built environment in the process.

Mark Macaulay is a partner in the Projects practice at Dentons.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

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