How real-time AI and standardized workflows are transforming construction productivity

Albert: This feedback loop is currently very large. You have the worker doing the act, maybe digitizing it days later, then it goes through approval, extraction to a data warehouse, visualization on a dashboard for the C-suite, and finally back down to the foreman. We’re like three weeks out.

This loop needs to be reduced to minutes. The goal of AI is precisely to shorten that loop so you can rectify an issue instantly—like an incident, a delivery problem, or a concern about a worker—without having to wait six weeks for a web report to come out.”

Albert: I think that the industry’s biggest Achilles heel is two things: workarounds and custom fields. Those two things are really going to destroy this industry. A salesperson will say, ‘We don't have this feature, but you know what? Put equipment here, or rename this field to ‘building’,’ just to unblock the sale.

Albert: They win the business, but now I’m looking at the data from 350 different customers, and I have no idea what I’m looking at. They’re using an employee as equipment, or an RFI as a change order. I have no clue what I'm even reading. What we’ve done — and this comes from my 11 years of hardcore construction — is we do not customize anything. We have zero custom fields. We are the most stubborn company.

Albert: If I approached it like that, I would be out of business in two weeks. What we say is: 'In order to deliver the highest quality of accurate data and information in real time, we suggest you do it this way.'

This resonates, especially when I talk about payroll. They say, ‘You know what? You're winning. If you can give me accurate real-time visibility on my workers and payroll, I’m willing.’

Albert: We never built a solution top-down. We built it bottom-up, meaning the solution looks like it was built for a construction worker that the foreman can actually use. You have to build the dumbest, simplest solution you’ve ever thought of. For hardware, we ship a device to the foreman. It's magnetic. It has built-in LTE. It can even be powered through a Milwaukee or a DEWALT power tool battery. It’s up and running within like three minutes.”

Once you have this intuitive DNA, you start getting 280 of the 300 adopted in like five days. Now you have the 20 laggards. Then it becomes a very awkward conversation. Then it’s not, 'Why is it not working?' It’s, 'Why do you not want to use it?'. We are doing all our marketing for the field, because we know at the end of the day what makes us or breaks us is the ground up.

Albert: Exactly. We’re building it from the ground up. The office is here to support the field, but nobody seems to get it. They see the office as an overhead or a burden.

The industry has been relying on metrics of averages. That skews a lot of reality. Like, if you’re driving and your speedometer is accurate, you know how fast you’re going. But if it’s averaging the last seven days, I don’t know if you’d even look at the speedometer. We’re trying to strip this to get a speedometer. Can you see where you are at now?

Albert: Advanced technologies like putting a camera on your head or sending a robo-dog are impractical for most sites. That dog costs $50,000 to $75,000 and needs an operator making over $100,000 a year.

Albert: Exactly. So what do you do with the 85%—the regular drywaller, the concrete contractor? They’re doing high-rises, but they’re not BIM-modeled, so I have nothing to even compare the robot’s pictures to.

Albert: There’s a big chance that we are exactly where we are now. But one version is that AI has really taken over, and Procore is not even a user interface; it’s a lot of agentic workflows. You have a virtual foreman, virtual superintendent, and virtual estimators assigning tasks.

Albert: That’s the future. But getting there requires a shift now, because what I’ve learned is that everybody loves change, but nobody wants to change.

If you want to win the next 10 years race, you have to switch the gear in your head. Stop viewing the workforce with a ‘survival mindset’ where they are a burden. This is a team. This is core. This is shared profit. Invest in them. Grow them. Change the mindset.