Toward Agentic AI-Ready Workflows in Built Environment Organizations: Knowledge Structures and Interoperability Challenges
Ahmet Bahaddin Ersoz, Justin McHenry, Yevgeniya Kovalchuk, Edward Barrett, Mandana Sarey Khanie
Abstract
The rise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) in the built environment is shifting attention from isolated AI tools toward autonomous systems that reason, plan, and act across project and organizational workflows. The effectiveness of such systems depends not only on large language model capabilities, but also on the readiness of heterogeneous data environments across the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector. These environments combine structured sources, such as CAD and BIM models, schedules, cost databases, and asset registers, with unstructured ones, including technical reports, design narratives, planning and policy documents, contracts, meeting minutes, and risk registers. This paper reviews how built environment data can be organized to support agentic AI-ready workflows, focusing on knowledge structures, interoperability, and access and integration mechanisms such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Drawing on existing literature, it examines approaches proposed to organize structured and unstructured data and considers how such data can be contextualized and made accessible to AI agents in a reliable manner. The paper synthesizes current perspectives, highlights challenges around fragmentation and interoperability, and identifies open questions for future research on AI-compatible information management in the built environment.