Our new AI chat understands natural language queries and quickly searches through thousands of datapoints to help you find the materials you need directly in the project. The AI will consider both the query and project information, such as country and tool being used to find the right data, as well as the history of queries and responses during the session.

The AI chat can only be accessed in the new user interface, so if you are not already using that, you can enable it from the Building materials query with this New interface button.

In the new interface, you can access the AI chat by first clicking the + Add resource button which opens the search overlay. From here, you can search for resources directly with text or using filters, as well as open the AI chat.

The AI chat is available as an ALPHA version. The following guidance will help you get the best results based on the cases that are currently supported in this version.

The AI will consider the project location if this is available, otherwise you can specify the location to search in the query. For more accurate responses, the more detailed the description of the material you need the better. For example, "Show me low carbon ready-mix concrete for foundations in France".

The different material types can also be seen in the Filters tab of the search overlay before you open Ask the AI. An example of why this information helps the AI is concrete. Below are two high level types of concrete, precast and ready-mix. Each also contains more detailed subtypes. If you are looking for Concrete slabs, there is a hierarchy of Concrete > Precast concrete > Concrete slabs. You could search for any of these, but using terms further in the hierarchy will return more relevant results and reduce time adding materials to your project.

Search using terms such as "sustainable" or "low carbon" and the AI will return a list of materials in ascending order of Global Warming Potential (GWP) value, based on benchmarks.

Search using terms such as "average" or "typical" materials and the AI will return a list of generic materials with an average GWP value, based on benchmarks. Results will be in ascending order of GWP value.

It's also possible to search for a specific material (like the Concrete slabs example above) from a specific country without specifying whether it needs to be low carbon or an average material, if you just need a locally produced material. In this case, results will be in descending order of best match to your query.

You can also search for materials from a specific manufacturer, and this can be a parameter for any of the above searches as well.