A 350-person Canadian contractor just did what most of the industry would call insane. They put their entire business inside the same software platform that powers the CIA. They've killed their paper time cards, their dispatch system, their safety software — and now they're killing their ERP.

This week, Owen unpacks the Cavanagh playbook with their head of digital strategy and asks the harder question: is this the future of construction software, or just an expensive bet on the wrong vendor? Plus: Procore just spent $11M acquiring an AI company in January. Are we watching the start of a platform war that ends with one operating system per contractor?

Then: the 2026 recovery story just died. US inflation hit 3.8%. Construction input prices rose at a 12.6% annualised rate. Every fixed-price bid in the market is a bet on Middle East de-escalation. And data centres aren't saving construction — they're hiding how weak the rest of the market really is.

Key resources

• Cavanagh Construction and Palantir partnership case study
• Procore Technologies acquires Datagrid for agentic AI capabilities
• US April CPI release
• Construction input price data, Q1 2026
• Hill County, Texas data centre moratorium
• Gallup poll on data centre vs nuclear reactor opposition
• IEA report on AI data centre power demand growth
• US construction spending and nonresidential contraction data