Despite Labor Shortage, CEC Continues to Expand Footprint and Meet Tight Deadlines through AI and Technology

• Feature extraction cut to $17-$23/acre
• Completed 8-site project in one month
• Enabled parallel UAV + AI workflows

The line work quality and processing time met and exceeded CEC's expectations. To Sinclair, it was clear that AirWorks' feature extraction software would complement CEC's in-house UAV program and could be key to advancing the company's survey and geospatial branch.

Rob Sinclair, CEC's Corporate Design Technology Manager, said the decision came down to speed and quality: "From the time-savings to the quality level [AirWorks] had at that time, for us, it was a no-brainer to move forward." With more than 240 open positions across the firm, expanding capacity through software rather than headcount alone made AirWorks a natural fit for CEC's growing survey and geospatial practice.

CEC's survey and geospatial team faced a persistent labor shortage, with more than 240 open positions across the firm at the time of this project. That made it difficult to staff purely manual surveying and feature-extraction work, especially for a fast-turnaround, multi-site deadline.

The university campus project required completing planimetric linework, buildings, parking lots, pavement markings, sidewalks, and vegetation across eight sites in just one month, with staff from eight different CEC offices involved. Relying on licensed surveyors to manually trace all of those features threatened to consume nearly all the available time before the deadline.

They planned to involve staff from eight offices. Yet, even by replacing manual surveying with UAV data collection, the hours of tracing dense, urban features plus the time required for the standard title work and other tasks meant the project would still be a tall order for such a short deadline.

Before adopting AirWorks' AI-powered feature extraction, CEC's survey and geospatial teams relied on licensed surveyors manually tracing linework from UAV imagery, a process that could run $100 or more per hour at a rate of only one to two acres per hour. With 240 open positions across the firm, finding enough staff to complete that manual tracing on a one-month deadline was a significant constraint.

Bringing in AirWorks allowed CEC to meet an almost unthinkable deadline and then secured additional work as a result of their outstanding performance. Additionally, CEC is enjoying a host of benefits from AirWorks’ AI feature extraction software beyond just completing quality deliverables on time.

For CEC, AirWorks has proved to be a cost-effective option for creating planimetric linework from in-house UAV aerial imagery, with feature extraction breaking down to an average of $17 to $23 per acre. Comparatively, having numerous open positions means CEC might otherwise have to rely on a licensed surveyor with a billable rate of $100 or more per hour to complete manual feature extraction at a rate of just one to two acres per hour, as Don Groesser, PLS, CEC's Vice President and Corporate Survey and Geospatial Practice Lead, explained: "Survey staff is so difficult to find. Why do you want to bog them down with tracing parking stalls? If you're under the gun trying to push out a deliverable and you spent 95% of your time drafting what we could have used AirWorks to draft, it gives you less time to focus on the things that are critical, like the dimensions, spot elevations, finished floor elevations, and inverts of manholes."

Don Groesser, PLS, CEC's Vice President and Corporate Survey and Geospatial Practice Lead, and Rob Sinclair, the firm's Corporate Design Technology Manager, are internally promoting AirWorks for ALTA surveys and other large-scale projects with numerous features and tight turnarounds. Groesser sees potential in using AirWorks to streamline preliminary design workflows, while Sinclair is interested in AirWorks' à la carte option for customizable layer extraction.