Malaysia-based engineering firm Gamuda is expanding its long-standing collaboration with Google Cloud to make enterprise-grade generative AI capabilities accessible and useful to its employees.
John Lim Ji Xiong, group chief digital officer of Gamuda, said that through the Gamuda Innovation Hub, they are 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 the engineering and construction industry.
“Google Cloud is our cloud provider of choice because of their vast expertise in planetary-scale data management and cutting-edge AI, coupled with the intuitiveness of their developer platforms and tools,” said Lim.
“These make it very easy for our workforce to even build their own gen AI tools to address challenges in their work—in a manner that is private and secure,” he added.
To give employees enhanced operational visibility and lay the groundwork for gen AI adoption, Gamuda developed the Gamuda Digital Operating System (GDOS), which is a standard ecosystem of tools for every Gamuda project where enterprise data is consolidated and underpinned by a unified data cloud platform.
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.
One initiative that digs deep into the core of Gamuda’s tunneling competencies is the use of Google Cloud’s Gemini models on the Vertex AI platform to build and integrate a generative AI-powered conversational agent into its cloud-based Tunnel Insight platform.
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 like machine steering, and advance and muck excavation, these A-TBMs are being used for better tunneling in construction projects like the Defu and West Coast Mass Rapid Transit stations and tunnels in Singapore, and the Sydney Metro West-Western Tunnelling Package in Australia.
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 synthesize 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 customized generative search and chat applications—with just a few clicks—to support their specific role or function, and make them accessible to the rest of the workforce through an internal marketplace called BotUnify.
Patrick Wee, Country Manager, Malaysia, Google Cloud, saidconstruction has traditionally been a labor- and process-intensive industry with lengthy project cycles, but Gamuda has swiftly transformed this paradigm by embracing digitalisation and generative AI 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,” said Wee.
