Building resilience at scale through AI-powered planning for a Saudi Giga-Project

JLL’s Technology Solutions was brought on to support the delivery of a giga-project city under construction in Saudi Arabia. In its infrastructure and early vertical construction phase, the development required precise coordination across hundreds of interdependent activities, multiple contractors, and extensive supply chains.

Given the scale and complexity of the project, combined with the inherent uncertainties of global supply chains, the mandate was to help proactively build resilience into the delivery plan and maintain schedule integrity throughout the programme's execution, ensuring that potential disruptions could be managed efficiently without compromising overall timelines.

The solution implemented was an AI-powered planning technology to enhance construction lifecycle management. Recognising the intricate dependencies inherent in projects of this scale and complexity, the team deployed ALICE Technologies—a platform that runs millions of simulations to identify optimal and resilient delivery scenarios.

The approach centered on building proactive resilience in the programme. By modeling multiple possible execution paths, the platform enabled the team to identify potential schedule vulnerabilities and develop contingencies before challenges materialized. This created the flexibility needed to navigate real-world disruptions while maintaining project momentum.

The value of this approach became evident when a key supplier of specialized components reported a multi-week shipping delay. In a traditional planning environment, this would have triggered an intensive manual rescheduling effort - a process that industry benchmarks suggest reduces planning productivity by over 70% as teams spend days or weeks coordinating subcontractors, updating dependencies, and reallocating resources across the affected areas.

Instead, project managers input the new timeline constraint into the AI platform. Within hours, the system processed the downstream effects of the delay and generated a revised, optimized plan. It re-sequenced adjacent tasks that could be completed sooner, adjusted resource allocations, and updated schedules across the supply chain to work around the constraint.

This allowed the project team to absorb what could have been a significant disruption with minimal impact. The platform transformed a major logistical challenge into a manageable, data-driven schedule adjustment, maintaining momentum across the broader development.

The implementation transformed the client's approach to programme delivery, revealing new possibilities for managing large-scale complexity. Schedule adjustments that once required weeks of manual coordination now happened in hours, allowing the team to maintain strategic focus rather than reactive firefighting. By modeling scenarios before challenges arose, potential disruptions became manageable variables rather than threats. Alternative paths forward were ready when needed, minimizing cascading delays. The platform's analytics also revealed opportunities to optimize resource deployment, with industry data showing similar implementations achieve an average 17% reduction in project duration and 14% savings in labor costs.

Perhaps most valuable was the strategic confidence gained through enhanced visibility into programme dynamics. The client could now make informed decisions about resource allocation, procurement priorities, and risk management based on data-driven insights rather than reactive assessment. For a development of this scale and ambition, the collaboration demonstrated that complexity need not mean compromise. Thoughtfully applied technology, integrated within experienced delivery frameworks, can transform challenges into competitive advantage.