If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know anything about residential construction. The problems that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues, corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.
The first 2 are very LLM amenable, the last 3 are very mathematical-solution amenable (optimising around issues like that is basically what Ops Research does). I don't see what your argument is here.
The list of people claiming that maths won't work who then get bulldozed by mathematicians is long.
Because they make it much easier to audit what decisions are being made and how reasonable they were. Corruption relies on not being too well known - once people can start pointing to specific decisions rather than a general "we know there is corruption here somewhere" it is hard to sustain.
It's not like people don't know who they are though? It's not some secret formula of who is corrupt. It's everyone that's been in position for any length of time. If you don't yield to the corruption you won't be in your job long. The degree of corruption is variable and perhaps the LLM could find the most efficient wheel to grease and person to lean on but then you just have the next company doing more of the same.
