Democratising project controls and delivery: Sizewell C's AI vision

On Thursday the 5th of February, nPlan held the Winter edition of its twice-yearly AI Day event - a showcase for what we've been building, and a chance to hear from top project leaders who are actually implementing AI on large-scale construction projects.

As followers of this blog will know, this time round our guests were Tommy Clarke, Head of Programme Controls, and Carolyn le Roux, PMO Director, at Sizewell C - both of whom spoke candidly about how AI is influencing the direction of Sizewell C - and how they see it influencing the direction of infrastructure projects of all shapes and sizes in the near future.

In the first blog in this series, we examined how Sizewell C is strengthening decision integrity through faster, forward-looking controls. In the second, we explored how leadership and culture shape the responsible adoption of AI and create the conditions for transparency under pressure.

The final theme that emerged from the discussion moves beyond governance and culture into accountability. It concerns who owns the schedule, who truly understands it, and how insight is distributed across a complex programme.

At its core, this is about democratising project controls. Let's dive in!

Towards a world where everyone owns the schedule

As the discussion wound towards its end, nPlan CEO Dev Amratia asked Sizewell C's Tommy Clarke to expand on an intriguing comment of his regarding ownership of the project schedule - let's take a look:

Tommy is clarifying how he believes projects should run.

Project controls structures and sequences the work, but ownership of execution strategy must sit with project managers, directors and executives. When schedules become overly technical or difficult to access, people naturally look to the planner for answers. Over time, that can create unnecessary dependency.

Making schedules easier to access and understand supports clearer ownership. If project leaders know the schedule inside out, they are better positioned to challenge it, adjust it and take responsibility for delivery decisions. The schedule becomes something they use, not something that is interpreted for them.

Towards a world where delivery teams of every size have elite project controls capabilities

Dev's next question raised the spectre of a different kind of democratisation; he asked Tommy and Carolyn what advice they had for project deliverers considering or just getting started on their AI-powered journeys - let's take a look:

Tommy and Carolyn both see tools like nPlan as having the potential to democratise high-quality, high-productivity project controls. Carolyn highlights Schedule Studio’s ability to generate detailed schedules directly from scope documents. Tommy emphasises that nPlan works straight out of the box, with a short time to value and no need for heavy customisation before insight begins to flow.

For smaller project teams, features like these change the equation. Large programmes often rely on multiple specialists to interrogate schedules, challenge assumptions and compare alternative pathways. Leaner organisations do not always have that luxury. By supplementing internal capability with AI-powered scheduling, forecasting and risk management, nPlan enables smaller teams to access insight that would otherwise require a sizeable project controls department.

In that sense, AI does more than accelerate existing processes. It reduces the capability gap between organisations with large, mature controls functions and those without them.

The last word: where next for nPlan?

The theme of AI-enabled democratisation came up again in Carolyn's answer to Dev's final question to Tommy and Carolyn at AI Day: what should nPlan build next?

While Tommy used the opportunity to make a light-hearted joke (no tool can remove uncertainty completely on complex infrastructure projects), Carolyn's answer was more revealing. Her wish? More features to engage and empower project managers - a call, you could say, for using AI for further democratisation of insight.

With Carolyn's message well and truly received, that's it for our recap of nPlan's 2026 Winter AI Day.

The only thing to do now is register for our Summer AI Day, which is due to take place on Thursday the 25th of June. I sincerely hope to see you all there!