Stuttgart, Germany, January 30, 2025. There are still very few companies in the construction and real estate sector, which systematically use artificial intelligence. The consulting group Drees & Sommer SE, headquartered in Stuttgart, is different. The company, which specializes in construction, real estate and infrastructure, has a global workforce of 6,500 employees and is among the 30 firms selected by Microsoft in Germany as test customers for the AI tool Copilot 365. 100 companies had applied for each of the available places in Germany. In the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual factory planning, Drees & Sommer also closely works with the industry leader Nvidia and cooperates with startup enterprises like aedifion and madaster. However, the Stuttgart-based company goes a step further: the proprietary AI – named ‘Dreso AI’ – has been in its test phase since August 2024. Raffaela Schneid heads Drees & Sommer’s AI team. She reports on first results of the test group: “We see gains in efficiency of up to 90 percent in some automated operational day-to-day processes.”
Anyone who has been involved in procurement for a construction project knows the laborious process only too well. Invitations for tender are often several hundred pages long, and it seems to take ages to decide whether the project is a good fit for the company. This is where AI comes into play and shows promising results: “We have used Dreso.AI to analyze many such acquisitions. The results were pleasing right from the start, and we have further optimized them with the experts from Drees & Sommer’s test team. There was no case in which the AI was completely wrong,” Raffaela Schneid explains. But what makes the proprietary AI so exciting? And how is it different from conventional systems?
When Dreso.AI goes live for the whole Drees & Sommer group, the employees will be free to decide whether they want to use AI in their daily work or not. “Nobody will have to work with AI,“ says Drees & Sommer’s expert and adds: “However, the demand for it is very high. Our test users give us useful feedback regarding improvements that can be made to the platform, and they have a wealth of suggestions for further applications making work even more easy.” The test cycles show that it is not a lack of motivation which prevents AI from being made available to everyone. “Rather, there is a lack of the necessary computing power and the essential data records,” the expert for innovation comments. One reason: artificial intelligence is still in its infancy in the often very specific cases which arise in the construction and planning sector.
AI Platform for End-to-End Processes
In order to tackle this problem, Drees & Sommer’s Innovation Center and the IT department have jointly developed the Dreso.AI platform. The Innovation Center acts as a powerhouse for creative ideas, a support center for innovative projects and a development laboratory for strategic visions within the company. It lays the foundation for artificial intelligence, and the AI Ideathon, which was organized by the Innovation Center, provided the decisive impetus for Dreso.AI.
Rafaela Schneid comments: “Dreso.AI is a cutting-edge platform. This means that we are already working on the implementation of full end-to-end processes. And this is exactly what distinguishes our approach from that of competitor systems, which just have integrated AI assistants and agents.” She refers to the automated acquisition of construction projects as a typical example of end-to-end processes: “At first AI analyses the tender documents and, based on the information gathered, prepares a summery, proposes a course of action and prepares the first verification of NDAs and prequalification questionnaires. Interfaces with Drees & Sommer’s systems are intended to optimize data transfers and create new data records for future AI applications. Reliable data sources are vital for artificial intelligence. When we use a proprietary platform, we can optimize and enrich our database.
There are different use cases on the platform, developed with the participation of Drees & Sommer’s experts. “These use cases are aimed at facilitating, or completely taking over, routine tasks in order to enhance efficiency. First of all, this leaves more time for strategically handling our clients’ needs,” Raffaela Schneid points out.
By Employees for Employees
Dreso.AI is an innovative in-house platform, which has been developed specifically for the company’s staff members. The platform helps to share expertise and knowledge. The input comes only from the company’s internal experts. “This not only ensures the relevance and quality of information but also enables the observance of the company’s corporate culture and the requirements of the construction and real estate sector,” says Patrick Theis, Partner at Drees & Sommer and Head of the Innovation Center. The focus is primarily on security and privacy. For this reason, highest cyber security standards have been implemented in a protected environment: “The stored data is often strictly confidential. The use of AI with insufficient security standards would be much too risky – both for us as a company and for our clients,” Patrick Theis explains. This platform thus enables the staff to work in a protected environment and to use innovative AI-supported tools which facilitate the handling of time-consuming routing tasks.
From150 to 900 Test Users
The sophisticated AI system will be extensively tested before it is made fully available to all of our employees in the course of 2025. In a soft launch specialists from our Innovation Center and IT department successfully tested the tool for the first time. Patrick Theis comments: “Subsequently we formed test user groups who use Dreso.AI as a trial version at an early stage.“ Initially, a group consisted of 150 members from all areas – from international communication up to construction planning. “Very quickly we were pleased to notice that there is great interest in the system, so in November we increased the contingent to almost a thousand test users,” the expert adds. Expertise and feedback from test users help to further develop Dreso.AI.
“The days have long passed when AI was regarded as a future trend which we could accept or decline; in fact, it will change our sector and our working processes in ways that we cannot yet imagine, ”Patrick Theis concludes. That is what makes it so important for our employees to have an early awareness and positive expectations of the new technology. Patrick Theis and also Raffaela Schneid are more than confident that it will be extremely worthwhile.