The term operating system gets thrown around a lot. It makes sense if you work with AI every day, less so if you're in construction and super busy.
The benefits of having one are very real though. At its core it's bringing your business context, projects, history and processes together so the AI knows what you want, where to find it and how to use it every time.
Think of a new site engineer. With no walkthrough, no SharePoint access and no past examples, their first site report is going to be pretty bad. Give them all of that and they'll do a pretty good job.
It comes down to four parts:
- The tool, usually Claude or ChatGPT
- Context, so it knows your business, projects, team and where everything lives
- Memory, so what happens on Friday is known on Monday
- Workflows, how your business actually runs, captured in skills
You're still doing the thinking, the AI just pulls out the information and drafts it up.
I go through what it looks like for construction in this video.