Saudi mega-project Qiddiya turns to Microsoft AI to manage construction complexity
The entertainment city's technology chief said Copilot helps reconcile data across hundreds of contractors and thousands of invoices
Qiddiya Investment Company (QIC), the developer behind Saudi Arabia's planned entertainment destination, is using Microsoft's AI tools to manage the complexity of one of the Kingdom's largest construction projects.
The development will eventually house 500,000 residents across 20 neighbourhoods and currently involves 700 companies and 22,000 workers.
QIC said it is using Microsoft 365 Copilot alongside dashboards built in Microsoft Power BI, the business intelligence platform, to track contractors, invoices and project plans.
Abdulrahman AlAli, QIC's chief technology officer, said a key challenge has been reconciling inconsistent naming conventions between design and execution teams working across multiple systems.
"We found that the naming of assets, the buildings, the roads, the streets, is different between the two teams," AlAli said, describing the problem as "a nightmare."
He said the company is using Copilot to summarise the differences and recommend options for unifying design standards across the city.
AlAli said the tool also helps staff interrogate large datasets spanning customer sentiment and financial records, noting that QIC receives thousands of payment certificates daily.
He gave the example of a simple prompt that can surface invoices more than 60 days overdue where no engineer has added comments, calling the capability "very, very helpful."
Related reading
- End-to-end speech models cut voice latency by up to 70%, Deepgram says
- Square launches free AI assistant for UK businesses
- Google simplifies removal of explicit images from Search
AlAli stressed that planning is essential to getting value from AI tools.
"If you spend time in planning and designing the implementation, you would get the best out of it," he said, adding that he considers technology "an unfair advantage for companies that use it."
The Recap
- Qiddiya City uses Copilot to manage construction data.
- Project covers 360 square kilometers with 500,000 eventual residents.
- QIC is executing asset-naming unification use case now.
