Skip to main content

Cornell University

Unlocking Institutional Memory

Unlocking Institutional Memory

Over 200 project managers, engineers, and staff in FCS navigate Cornell’s increasingly complex building systems. Institutional knowledge stored across 60 PM Checklists, 47 Guidance Documents, 26 Templates, and 1,000+ pages of Design Standards across 24 trades. The challenge is making this vast, multimodal knowledge base accessible. When a user asks a question, the AI tool retrieves relevant sections and then provides a detailed answer along with links to relevant documents from the knowledge base. For image-heavy documents, the tool generates textual descriptions to bridge image-based and text-based retrieval. The result is prompt and comprehensive answers; enhanced accessibility to knowledge; substantial time efficiencies. Over the longer term, this effort supports faster onboarding, prevention of costly construction mistakes, and improved compliance with design standards.