Bricks And Bytes

This week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same underlying question. Are construction businesses actually prepared for what is coming at them?

First, the productivity number nobody wants to say out loud. Buildots Intelligence Lab published its first global construction benchmarks report this week, built on data from over 200 live projects across housing, offices, hospitals and data centres. On a typical project, crews deliver 63% of their planned production rate. The best quarter of projects reach 79%, which still means losing a full day every single week. But here is the part that should change how you run your jobs. Every project in the dataset has four consecutive weeks where crews nearly double their output. Same people, same building, nothing new on site. The report cannot tell you why it happens. But it can tell you it happens on nearly every job. The question is whether you are capturing those conditions and repeating them.

Download the full report at buildots.com/lab/global-construction-benchmarks-report

Then Aramco. One of their pipelines was hit by a drone. The next morning bulldozers were already cutting a new route. They recover from catastrophic events more than six times faster than the industry average. Not because of one thing, but because of a system. Zero hour response teams on site within minutes. Damage assessed before the incident is contained. Ninety percent of repair materials already warehoused locally. Multiple redundancies so no single failure stops the operation. The lesson for construction businesses is not about oil pipelines. It is about whether your contingency plans are a system or just a list.

Then KPMG surveyed 400 American CEOs on what keeps them up at night. The answer was not labour, not tariffs, not interest rates. It was cybercrime. 85% say it will affect their company within three years and it ranked above every geopolitical risk. Construction had it ranked 10th. Turner, Kiewit and AECOM have all reported unauthorised system access since July. The lawyers say the most common attack is a fake invoice from a hijacked email with a different bank account number, and after 24 to 48 hours the money is gone.

Drop your answers to this week’s questions in the comments of this week’s LinkedIn post.

Manufacturing in Europe runs 267 robots per 10,000 workers. Construction runs close to zero.

That gap is why we are hosting Groundworks on 11 November. It is also why Origin exists.

Yogesh Ghaturle joined Bricks, Bucks & Bytes the day Origin came out of stealth with $20M to put autonomous robots to work on interior construction.

• Why the last wave of drywall robots failed, and what has changed since

• The throughput question every contractor asks before anything else

• US contractors want to rent. European contractors want to buy the outcome.

Martin's verdict: commercially viable on big jobs, hard to see on small and medium sites.

So, a business or a science project?

Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments.

#constructiontech #ai #aec #bricksbucksandbytes #bricksandbytes

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:21 Bricks, Bucks & Bytes Podcast

03:07 Groundworks Summit: Construction Robotics Event in London

10:43 AI in Engineering and Construction: Productivity Gains for Small Firms

13:19 OpenAI Recording Device Case and AI Cybersecurity Risks

17:39 Origin Raises $20M: Autonomous Robots for Construction

20:19 Interior Construction Automation: Wall Finishing Robots

21:34 Construction Action Models: How Origin's Robot AI Works

26:13 Commercialising Construction Robots: Pilots, Customers and Throughput

31:29 Hardest Challenges in Building Interior Construction Robots

33:08 Construction Robotics Business Models: Rental vs Outcome-as-a-Service

Which construction tech is the industry wasting money on?

We put that to Stuart Drahota at DPR Construction and he didn't dodge it: progress tracking and deviation analysis. In his words, "we're not quite there yet."

His reasoning: there's a real gap between what project teams expect from these tools and the effort it takes to make them work on a live job.

Agree, or are we being too harsh? 

We also got into:

• The digital dig board his team is now piloting across 15 DPR projects

•  Why he thinks progress tracking isn't quite there yet

•  The Sharpie layout robot DPR patented in 2013 and later licensed to Dusty Robotics

•  The one tool he'd keep if the whole tech budget vanished

Full Episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments.

#constructiontech #realitycapture #aec #construction #bricksandbytes

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:55 Introduction to Stuart Drahota and DPR Construction

03:07 Innovation Metrics and Impact in Construction

04:43 Technology Adoption and Challenges in Construction

08:23 The Digital Dig Board: Enhancing Job Site Communication

13:56 Reality Capture and Drone Technology in Construction

17:23 ROI of Drone Technology and Its Applications

20:25 Common Reasons for Technology Failure on Job Sites

20:57 Sponsors

24:48 Embracing Failure as a Learning Tool

25:38 Winning Support for Technology Adoption

27:34 The Evolution of Layout Technology

29:46 Building a Technology Roadmap

32:22 The Role of AI in Construction

35:32 Innovations in Robotics

39:09 The Future of Construction Technology

45:07 Advice for Newcomers in Construction

Startups are paying thousands for AEC conference booths and asking what they actually got for it.

AEC conference season is here, and almost nobody we talk to is coming home from these events happy.

On this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Dustin told us where Ediphi's event budget is going next year:

 "I don't think we're gonna be spending money on these conferences."

Also on the episode:

• Why startups are skipping booths for side events and hyper-local customer hosting

• Autodesk promotes its Media & Entertainment lead to EVP of AEC

• Schneider Electric buys PTC for $22.6B in cash

• Data centre planning slows while institutional work grows, and the $4.2T question hanging over AI infrastructure

• Andrés Mitnik, CEO of Strong by Form (€5.8M Series A), on timber floors that compete with concrete

• Alex Michalatos, CEO of Buildcheck ($12M Series A), on AI design review for GCs

Is the big vendor conference still worth it, or is the side event the real event now?

Episode out on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments.

#aec #constructiontech #bricksbucksandbytes #bricksandbytes

Our Sponsors:

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:23 Event season is here

02:18 How to survive conference season

05:57 Are construction conferences still worth it?

09:08 Autodesk's new head of AEC, Diana Colella

11:12 Schneider Electric buys PTC for $22.6B

17:01 Is data centre construction slowing down?

18:23 Is AI a bubble? The $4.2 trillion question

23:13 Help to Buy and the housing affordability problem

24:04 Strong by Form calls in from Berlin

24:24 Can wood replace concrete floors?

27:14 Timber vs concrete: the real cost comparison

31:08 Is mass timber sustainable? Reuse vs recycling

34:15 Why new building materials struggle to scale

36:24 Buildcheck calls in

37:27 How AI checks construction drawings for errors

42:21 How Buildcheck prices AI design review

46:04 AI design review vs BIM clash detection

48:40 How construction tech startups win over GCs

This week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same uncomfortable gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers.

Suffolk, one of the biggest contractors in the US, published a white paper with MIT’s Center for Real Estate and MIT Media Lab this week. They took a real building, a 118,000 square foot multi-family block in San Francisco that finished in 2024 at 179 million dollars, and ran six AI levers across it simultaneously. Design automation, offsite manufacturing, permitting, scheduling, labour and subcontracting, and supply chain. The model took 28 million dollars out of 128 and seven months out of 30 on the construction phase alone. The unlevered return to the developer goes up by 5 to 6 percentage points, which the paper says can be the difference between housing getting built and housing not getting built at all.

Then the authors themselves. The per lever gains come from early stage pilots and should be treated as directional rather than construction validated benchmarks. The six levers only compound if data flows between them, and the paper says that needs a shared data infrastructure layer the levers themselves do not provide. The practitioners in the room ranked robots last despite academic studies being the most optimistic about them, because the studies measure performance in controlled conditions and practitioners are pricing in what it costs to create those conditions on a live site. Suffolk calls its own model a first pass. The work to prove it runs in 2027.

Then the market as it actually stands. Gardner and Theobald describe it as selective not cheaper. 69% of contractors say they are more selective than a year ago. MEP is the pinch point with 68% reporting tighter availability. In the US, contractors have absorbed roughly half the material cost rises from this year and JLL expects the rest to land in bids before year end. And on labour, UK right to work rules extended to the self employed and subcontractors from October 1st with fines of 60,000 pounds per worker. In the US, immigration enforcement is discouraging legal workers from reporting to sites in a workforce already 300,000 to 400,000 short.

Thank you to our sponsors, Buildots: https://buildots.com/

Drop your answers to this week’s questions in the comments of this week’s LinkedIn post.

Can a CEO tell you what their company bought last year?

In today's episode we have Eldar Sadikov, CEO of Field Materials. He says most contractors can't, and he estimates 15 to 20% of materials spend gets lost to the mess.

• Around 25 to 30% of purchases are will calls, bought on the fly with no planned buyout behind them

• He reckons 50% or more of contractors still pay suppliers by cheque

His bar for a good CEO: "the CEO should be in the position to go and query this."

Episode live on YouTube & Spotify. Link in comments.

#aec #constructiontech #ai #bricksandbytes

Our Sponsors:

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:48 Why Is Material Procurement Broken in Construction?

04:50 What Are the Hidden Problems Behind Construction Material Procurement?

09:05 How Much Do Material Procurement Issues Cost Construction Projects?

14:27 How Does the Construction Material Procurement Workflow Work?

16:22 Sponsor Message

24:36 How Does Field Materials Solve Construction Procurement Challenges?

34:59 Who Are the Key Stakeholders in Construction Procurement?

36:12 How Will AI and OpenClaw Change the Future of Procurement?

36:26 How Does Onboarding and Implementation Work for Procurement Software?

38:47 What Does a Day in the Life of a Project Manager Look Like With Procurement Software?

40:39 Who Are the Customers for Construction Procurement Software?

42:59 How Do You Measure ROI on Procurement Software in Construction?

46:43 What Role Will AI Play in Construction Procurement?

49:38 How Do You Evaluate Construction Procurement Software?

53:05 Why Do Procurement Software Implementations Fail?

56:57 Where Do Major ERP Players Fit in Construction Procurement?

1:00:48 What Is the Future of Construction Tech?

This week's briefing covers four things that landed in the same week, starting with a story about an intern, a spreadsheet and eighteen thousand snags.

Gene Hodge is Vice President of Innovation at Mortenson, a family owned American builder with 11 billion dollars of revenue and the tenth biggest contractor in America. He started his career printing off punch list items and walking the site with a pen. Twenty three years later, someone still walks the site with a list. His answer to why is that the industry is structurally fragmented, and the way past it is trust, collaboration and simplifying what it takes to build. Mortenson's data centre built the industrialised way, with precast duct bank, prefabricated wall panels and as much made offsite as possible, uses half the on-site labour hours of a non-industrialised one. It took seven years of failures and a 90,000 square foot research and development facility to get there. On AI on site his answer was blunt. It is not making a big impact yet.

Then your software bill. Alain Waha, Chief Technology Officer at Buro Happold, was at Autodesk University in Las Vegas and came away with one takeaway. The week was about how Autodesk plans to charge more. The shift he is describing is from per seat licensing to per token, paying for how much thinking the machine does on your behalf. His example is adding a floor in Revit. Today that takes a day of your time. Tomorrow the AI does it and the vendor charges accordingly. The question is whether you would know what you actually bought.

Then the quickfire. Diesel hit two pounds a litre on Monday, a record, up 42 percent since January, adding roughly 590 million pounds a year to UK infrastructure costs. Accenture has launched a construction business, 5,000 people built from 11 acquisitions, aimed at owners of airports, grids, data centres and factories. Turner, Kiewit and AECOM have all reported unauthorised access to their systems since July, and 48 percent of construction firms said they are not big enough to be a target. And Bricks and Bytes has announced Groundworks, a robotics event on the 11th of November in London.

Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

Autodesk now runs from the first sketch to the maintenance ticket.

So who is left to compete?

We got back from Autodesk University and put that question to three people this week:

• Connor Watumull on Miter's $40M Series B, and why payroll was the way into the whole contractor back office.

• Lea Scherer on Kuro's €10M seed, and how a two year old startup ended up working with Goldbeck and Hochtief Infrastructure.

• Alain Waha, CTO of Buro Happold, on why AI could push software bills up from here.

Episode is live!

#aec #constructiontech #ai #bricksbucksandbytes #bricksandbytes

Our Sponsors:

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:12 Autodesk University 2026 recap

02:45 Autodesk's plan to own design, construction and operations

04:49 Can startups compete with Autodesk?

07:23 Most internet traffic is now AI bots

08:49 Miter raises $40M Series B

11:15 What is Miter? Construction payroll and workforce software

14:01 Why construction payroll is so hard

16:28 From payroll to field operations and safety

19:04 How construction software startups win customers

20:37 Replacing the construction Franken Stack

22:08 Kuro raises €10M seed for AI for general contractors

23:12 How AI reads construction documents and tenders

26:01 Why Kuro targets Europe's biggest general contractors

28:22 How AI startups stay defensible against ChatGPT

33:09 Building construction tech in Europe vs the US

34:12 Kuro's growth and hiring plans

38:11 Jevons paradox: why software keeps costing more

38:37 Can Autodesk be disrupted?

39:53 Why construction is slow to adopt new tech

41:57 Why switching away from Revit is so hard

43:47 AI as a generational shift in design

46:04 Will AI replace Revit? Snaptrude, Motif and AI design tools

48:11 Should you build your website for AI agents?

52:41 Humans plus AI: the chess grandmaster lesson

53:43 Autodesk AI pricing: from seats to tokens

59:34 Is AI actually creating value in engineering?

A few years ago, Mortenson's own leadership group told them they were treating innovation "kind of like a hobby".

This year they're No. 10 on ENR's Top 400, running a 90,000 sq ft R&D facility and about to launch a joint venture with Goldbeck.

So we asked Gene Hodge, their VP of I4 and Innovation, how he proves the ROI on all of it:

"I think anyone asking what's the ROI on innovation is not interested in innovating, most likely."

CFOs, we'd love to hear you push back on this one.

#construction #constructiontech #aec #ai #bricksandbytes

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

00:00 - Teaser

00:43 - Intro

01:36 - Who is Gene Hodge & Mortenson Overview

02:31 - Quick-Fire Questions: Builder vs Technologist

03:10 - Sponsors

06:19 - Is Most Construction Tech Worth the Money?

06:49 - How Has the Jobsite Changed Since 2005?

07:43 - The Reality of AI on the Construction Site

08:29 - Autonomous Equipment & Robots in 5 Years

09:30 - What Actually Moves the Needle on Projects

10:04 - Mortenson's In-House R&D & Innovation Spending

11:39 - Data Sovereignty: Which Tech Mortenson Refuses to Buy

12:33 - Goldbeck Joint Venture & Industrialised Construction

14:57 - Real-Time Jobsite Visibility vs Manufacturing

16:03 - Standardisation vs Bespoke Client Architecture

17:27 - Data Centres & the Hyperscaler Effect

18:56 - Industrialised Construction Across Resi & Defence

21:19 - Day-to-Day Role & The ROI of Innovation

23:04 - 30 Years After VDC: Why Has Productivity Stagnated?

25:35 - Lessons from 2003: 18,000 Punch List Items on Paper

28:29 - Precast Duct Bank Innovation

30:24 - Building a Corporate Culture of Innovation

32:38 - BLUvera: Scaling Offsite Manufacturing

34:38 - Redesigning the Jobsite Trailer & Field Wellbeing

36:41 - AI Hype vs Real Jobsite Workflows

38:46 - Machine Learning in Pre-Construction & Estimating

40:44 - Measuring AI ROI & Enabling Growth

41:49 - How to Pitch Tech to Mortenson

42:57 - What Keeps an Innovation VP Up at Night

45:19 - Cross-Industry Collaboration & The Future Contractor Model

48:19 - The #1 Tech for 2035: Generative Design & Real-Time Costing

Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back.

This week's briefing comes straight from Autodesk University in Las Vegas, the biggest technology conference in the AEC industry, where Owen was invited as part of the media and analyst cohort.

Three things stood out above everything else.

First, agents. Autodesk showed agents checking submittals against specifications, comparing subcontractor bids against scopes of work, and tracing the impact of a single RFI through a building model and into the project schedule. But the more important point came from Andrew Anagnost, CEO of Autodesk. He said the agents will get so smart that the whole concept of an RFI gets erased over time. His aim is to spot the problem while the design is still being made so the RFI never happens. His line on what comes next was direct. Transparency is coming for AEC whether AEC likes it or not. The catch, and it is the same one we keep coming back to, is that every demo on that stage worked because drawings, model and schedule all sat in one connected place. Most firms listening to this are not there yet.

Second, the platform war. In a live keynote demo a planner, an architect and a civil engineer each worked on the same project from one set of data, carried all the way through from design into construction. That is Autodesk Forma's core argument against Procore. If the design already lives in Autodesk, why move it somewhere else to manage the build. The MaintainX acquisition for 3.6 billion dollars closes the final gap. Design in Autodesk, build in Autodesk, operate in Autodesk. Once an owner is on the platform they can mandate it across their entire supply chain. Several Procore customers at the event said they were looking at making the switch.

Third, the master builder. Anagnost said Autodesk set out over a decade ago to automate the making of the model and they are very close. His line was that the act of creating a model is not where the value is created. More people at this year's conference than ever before said the industry is heading back to the master builder, the model where one firm both designs and builds, before architect and contractor became separate jobs. Owen argued that exact point on the show back in April. It is no longer a fringe view.

Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.