BusinessEntrepreneurship

Bricks And Bytes

A show about construction technology, business, and entrepreneurship.

Welcome to the Bricks and Bytes Podcast, where we bring together the worlds of construction, technology, and entrepreneurship. We explore the innovative ideas and groundbreaking advancements that are shaping the future of the industry.

Play

Open in

38 episodes
a few times a week
Avg 42 min
English

Episodes 38

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

Yesterday · 48 min
“Manual Quantity Takeoffs Are Dead”: Accenture Construct CEO on AI Replacing Traditional QS Work, Why Megaprojects Fail & the $2.5 Billion Construction Bet
Six vendors can all deliver their scope successfully, and the project can still fail. That is the problem Accenture Construct says it was built to solve. We sat down with CEO Adam Shaw to ask why Accenture has put $2.5B into capital projects, and what “one accountable partner” means in practice. Why the industry buys effort when owners want outcomes Why owners end up owning the gaps between their vendors 73 to 77% of senior leaders say they positively influence cost, planning and schedule. Only 13% of workers say those decisions consistently shape their daily work. Where AI is already changing project decisions Adam’s view is that the talent is already there, and fragmentation is what holds projects back. Full Episode live on Bricks and Bytes YouTube and Spotify. Link in comments. #construction #capitalprojects #contech #AI #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors: This episode is brought to you by our friends at Miter. If you haven’t heard of Miter, you’re missing out. Today, 2 of every 100 construction workers in the U.S. are paid through their AI-powered platform that connects payroll, HR, field operations, and job costing. And that number is growing fast. Miter is on a mission to defeat what they call “the Frankenstack”, the tangle of 1980s software, spreadsheets, and paper that every construction back office is familiar with. Learn why thousands of contractors are running everything from prevailing wage payroll to time tracking to per diems on Miter at miter.com (M I T E R .com) https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=bb-podcast 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 00:42 How Owen and Adam first connected 10 years ago 02:30 Quick fire: "Manual quantity takeoffs are dead" 05:25 Why Accenture launched Construct 07:40 Sponsors: Miter, Aphex and Archdesk 10:45 Owner's rep, contractor or something new? 14:40 The research: why capital projects fail 18:36 Is fragmentation a data problem? 21:41 Build or buy: how Construct thinks about technology 26:25 Does Accenture build its own tech? 27:51 What AI makes possible now 29:26 AI use cases inside Accenture Construct 33:28 Leaders vs the field: the 13% gap 37:00 What "one accountable partner" means 39:45 $2.5B and the acquisitions behind Construct 41:56 Integrating acquired firms without destroying them 45:44 Capital project delivery in five years 47:46 Closing thoughts
Monday · 23 min
Microsoft Cut $5 Billion From Data Centre Spending, MEP Contractors Lost 15% in a Day, and Accenture Just Entered Construction With 5,000 People.
Microsoft Cut $5 Billion From Data Centre Spending, MEP Contractors Lost 15% in a Day, and Accenture Just Entered Construction With 5,000 People. This week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at whether the data centre boom is about to change shape. This week’s episode is sponsored by Buildots, the construction intelligence platform turning site data into actionable insights for over 100 of the largest owners and contractors including Turner, Multiplex and Vinci Construction. Find out how to join them at https://buildots.com First, Microsoft. A generator fire in Texas, late hardware deliveries, cabling problems, and a $1 million fine for running generators without permits on a New Jersey site. At the end of October Microsoft’s finance chief cut this year’s data centre spending forecast by $5 billion, citing third party capacity delays. Microsoft has now tightened oversight on three neo-cloud companies, walked away from a $3 billion deal in Texas due to grid delays, and cancelled a letter of intent for 1.35 gigawatts in West Virginia. The day after the American midterms, where voters passed 40 of 41 ballot measures putting new restrictions on data centre construction, Comfort Systems fell 15%, Quantum fell 12% and the NASDAQ dropped 5.5%. On the same day Skanska matched its all time record for new orders, with roughly a third in data centres, and its CEO said the company is turning some of that work away because it cannot find the right electrical subcontractors. Then Accenture Construct. In September Accenture launched a new global business with more than 5,000 people aimed at the owners of big projects. Accenture puts that market at $260 billion a year. Owen interviewed CEO Adam Shaw this week. His argument is that on a large project an owner might hire six different firms, all of whom could complete their own scope successfully, and the project could still fail because of the gaps between them. Today the owner carries all of those gaps. Accenture’s pitch is to sit on the owner’s side of the table as one accountable partner. Between 73 and 77% of senior leaders in Accenture’s research said they were having a positive influence on cost and schedule. Only 13% of workers agreed. Then the market numbers. US construction fell 1.9% in September when economists expected a small rise. Excluding data centres and power, private non-residential work was down 7.8%. UK housebuilding PMI came in at 35.1. The Bank of England raised rates to 4%, its first increase since August 2023. The forecasters agree on which parts of the market are growing and which are shrinking. They do not agree on what any of it means. Also sponsored by Miter, the AI-powered operating system built for construction that connects payroll, HR, field operations and job costing in one platform. Today 1 in 50 US construction workers is paid on Miter every week. Learn more at https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=executive-briefing Drop your answers to this week’s questions in the comments of this week’s LinkedIn post.
Friday · 1 hr 18 min
AI Redesigns a 244,000 Sq Ft Hospital in Four Days, Are Architects at Risk? & Snaptrude’s AI Agent Launch
Can an owner be their own architect? Altaf Ganihar says owners and developers are now asking Snaptrude exactly that. Alain Waha's answer: the design team's deliverable "ain't a set of drawings" anyway. Also in this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes: Dustin DeVan on why takeoff isn't the hardest problem in precon Autodesk University and Groundbreak in the same week of 2027 Nomadic Drones, whose drones land and recharge on live power lines So who moves first, the architect or their client? Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments. #aec #construction #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 00:46 Dustin calls out a competitor's testimonials 09:42 Autodesk University and Groundbreak in the same week 12:02 Why VCs are piling into MEP design 18:41 Why use AI to read drawings when the model exists? 23:04 Outsiders, Katerra and uninformed capital 25:39 The gap for an AI first MEP firm 29:11 The return of the master builder 38:35 Construction is like Asia 40:32 Dustin's read on Groundbreak 2026 41:51 Altaf Ganihar on the Snaptrude Agent launch 45:12 Will owners bring design in house? 50:22 What architects really sell, and the stamp 53:31 Altaf's AI hospital redesign test 57:46 Value engineering is not value engineering 1:00:37 Andreas Moldskred: drones that live on power lines 1:05:22 What grid operators do with the data 1:08:05 Where the idea came from 1:11:06 Range, air rights and scaling up 1:17:25 Wrap up
November 3 · 1 hr 1 min
90% of AI Takeoff Companies Could Disappear, The $3M AI Opportunity & Why Washington Is Broken
“Show me you can use these tools to 10x your productivity and you got a job. I don’t care how old you are, I don’t really care what college you went to.” In today’s episode of Bricks & Bytes we have Patrick Murphy. Youngest member of Congress at 29, now founder of Togal.AI and chief investment officer at Coastal Construction, a $7.5bn pipeline contractor in Miami. Here’s what we cover: Why one click takeoff doesn’t exist, straight from someone selling AI takeoff How many of the AI takeoff startups raising money today are still around in five years (his answer: about one in ten) The estimator who uses AI gets hired on the spot. The one who doesn’t, less so What winning a congressional race by 2,429 votes teaches you about winning work Why Washington is broken, in his words, and what short term incentives do to any business Where US construction costs go next and who is really being priced out of South Florida Full episode out on Youtube and Spotify. #constructiontech #ai #aec #construction #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors:This episode is brought to you by our friends at Miter. If you haven’t heard of Miter, you’re missing out. Today, 2 of every 100 construction workers in the U.S. are paid through their AI-powered platform that connects payroll, HR, field operations, and job costing. And that number is growing fast. Miter is on a mission to defeat what they call “the Frankenstack”, the tangle of 1980s software, spreadsheets, and paper that every construction back office is familiar with. Learn why thousands of contractors are running everything from prevailing wage payroll to time tracking to per diems on Miter at miter.com (M I T E R .com)https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=bb-podcastAphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.coArchdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com Chapters 00:00 Teaser 00:51 Intro and quickfire 01:31 Washington is broken: Patrick's three words 02:11 Why hundreds of millions are going into AI takeoff 03:03 Will AI replace the estimator? 04:44 Would he go back to Congress? 06:08 Where US construction costs go next 08:11 The K shaped construction market 09:50 Who is Patrick Murphy 11:19 One click takeoff: does it exist? 15:34 Why so many startups are chasing takeoff 17:02 Productivity and pay: the estimator who uses AI 19:55 What Togal.AI customers actually saw 21:51 Sponsors: Miter, Aphex and Archdesk 24:33 Bricks & Bytes newsletter 24:56 Winning Congress by 2,429 votes at 29 28:10 United Solutions and the night the bill died 31:05 Getting a room of people twice your age to take you seriously 32:33 The jet engine killed democracy 34:43 Immigration enforcement and the labour market 36:09 Coastal Construction and the next three to five years 37:40 Florida's affordability crisis 38:57 Infrastructure underwater 42:39 RENCO: the fourth way to build 43:44 Robotics, prefab and controlled environments 47:18 The frat house, the family business and the CIO role 49:44 Buyer and seller: sitting on both sides of the table 51:48 The greatest revolution in history 53:01 Togal.AI today and the roadmap 58:18 How AI disrupts the general contractor model 01:01:24 Wrap
October 31 · 18 min
$600 Million Into Self-Driving Excavators, Harvard’s 10,000-Leader Study, and a $13 Billion Contractor Opens a $50 Million Innovation Lab.
This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at where construction is actually heading. First, Boston. Suffolk, a 13 billion dollar privately held contractor, opened a 50 million dollar innovation facility called 100MAG in Roxbury this week. Inside it sits their in-house design and engineering team, a materials sourcing arm, a venture fund, an accelerator, and AI engineers embedded directly into live project teams. John Fish, who founded Suffolk and has run it for four decades, built the evening around one line. The cost to build a building today is now higher than the value of the finished building. He said it is the first time in his career that has been true. From that he gets to his argument that the next five years will be the most pivotal the construction industry has seen, and that Suffolk intends to be the one doing the disrupting. Then Bedrock Robotics. On Monday the company announced a 600 million dollar raise at a 4.1 billion dollar valuation. The company is two and a half years old, founded by engineers out of Waymo, and retrofits excavators so they dig without anyone in the cab. Total raised since launch is now just under a billion dollars. Kevin Peterson, Bedrock's co-founder and CTO, told Bricks and Bytes the strategy unlocked the round, not the other way round. The plan does not change. More customers, more capable machines, and next year fleets of different machine types working together overnight. The detail that struck Owen most: the data from the sensors is already paying for itself before the autonomy does. Site managers are seeing productivity dips at the start and end of shifts they had no idea existed. Then Harvard. A study covering nearly 10,000 leaders across 108 countries found that the organisations making the most progress on digital transformation are the ones engaging a specific type of employee. Harvard calls them digital wayfinders. They are frequently junior, they are already using AI without asking, and they challenge how things are done out loud. The companies getting somewhere are the ones that have found a way to use them rather than stop them. The authors have three recommendations: candid two-way communication, removing unnecessary bureaucracy while keeping clear guardrails, and giving wayfinders visible sponsorship and a seat in the room where real decisions get made. This week's episode is sponsored by Buildots, the construction intelligence platform turning site data into actionable insights for over 100 of the largest owners and contractors including Turner, Multiplex and Vinci Construction. Find out how to join them at https://buildots.com/lab/global-construction-benchmarks-report/ Also don't forget to check out our other sponsor Miter, the AI-powered operating system built for construction that connects payroll, HR, field operations and job costing in one platform. Today 1 in 50 US construction workers is paid on Miter every week. Learn more at https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=executive-briefing Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.
October 30 · 32 min
Bedrock’s $600M Robotics Bet, 24/7 Construction Sites & Kojo Founder’s $50M Fund
Should founders take advice from investors who have never run a company? Owen's view on this week's Bricks, Bucks and Bytes was blunt: it's like hiring a personal trainer who has never stepped on a treadmill. Maria Davidson spent eight years building Kojo in what she calls construction's "hard mode". She has now launched Relational Capital, a $50M solo GP fund writing $1M to $5M cheques at pre seed and seed. Also on the show, Bedrock Robotics co-founder and CTO Kevin Peterson on how a company founded in 2024 just raised $600M at a $4.1bn valuation. Operator investors or career VCs. Which have actually been more useful on your cap table? Full episode live on YouTube and Spotify. #vc #constructiontech #aec #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 Inside Suffolk's 100MAG and why the next five years matter 03:59 Bedrock Robotics raises $600M 08:04 How a two year old company hits $4.1bn, and where the money goes 11:54 Deployment challenges and "the wolves at the door" 16:56 Maria Davidson's $50M fund and why operators make better investors 25:05 Where Maria is investing in construction tech 31:00 One piece of advice for every founder
October 27 · 47 min
How AI Agents Are Changing the Way We Work in Revit and Eliminating Hours of Repetitive Work
Architecture firms forget every project the day it finishes. The detail that caused an RFI goes back into the library unfixed, and turns up on the next job with the same problem attached. In today’s episode of Bricks & Bytes, Ross Wagner from Pirros joined us to unpack why it keeps happening, and what an AI project hub actually changes. What we learnt: * Why firms forget every project the day it finishes, and how a bad detail carries its RFI onto the next job * What Pirros does as an AI project hub, and how its AI agent Mira works alongside designers inside Revit * Why quality review belongs in the model as well as the drawing set * The shift in construction tech upstream into design, and the move from point tools towards connected platforms * Lessons from PlanGrid on hiring, building an AEC sales team and go to market through community Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in the comments! #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors: This episode is brought to you by our friends at Miter. If you haven’t heard of Miter, you’re missing out. Today, 2 of every 100 construction workers in the U.S. are paid through their AI-powered platform that connects payroll, HR, field operations, and job costing. And that number is growing fast. Miter is on a mission to defeat what they call “the Frankenstack”, the tangle of 1980s software, spreadsheets, and paper that every construction back office is familiar with. Learn why thousands of contractors are running everything from prevailing wage payroll to time tracking to per diems on Miter at miter.com (M I T E R .com) https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=bb-podcast 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 0:00 Teaser 0:38 Intro: Ross Wagner, Head of Strategy at Pirros 1:05 Quickfire: are contractors taking control of design? 2:53 Why Ross joined Pirros after PlanGrid and Autodesk 4:06 How to stop knowledge leaving your firm 4:40 What is Pirros? The AI project hub for architects 5:30 Why AEC firms forget every project the day it finishes 7:38 Sponsors 10:43 The biggest problems inside architecture firms 12:20 Startup vs Autodesk: the “say no with pleasure” advice 14:46 Builders vs optimisers: architect and engineer co-founders 16:17 How to measure the ROI of AI in design 18:31 Why AI shouldn’t design construction details 20:15 Mira: an AI agent that works inside Revit 21:55 What a Head of Strategy actually does 22:51 How to know if your strategy is working 25:00 Competitive moat in the age of AI: why context beats code 27:12 How to hire great people (the “no jerks” rule) 28:44 Growing 5x and lessons from PlanGrid 29:56 What’s the end game: acquisition or IPO? 31:02 Construction tech trends: the shift upstream to design 31:57 Platforms vs point solutions 32:46 The three eras of AI: chat, copilot and coworker 33:46 Is AI drawing review enough? Drawings vs BIM models 36:53 How to build a construction tech sales team 37:50 Hiring your first salesperson 38:34 Advice for founders: start with the boring workflow 41:11 Doug Leone’s startup orchestra lesson 41:37 Go-to-market that works in AEC: community 42:43 Software fatigue and change management 44:06 Lessons from Autodesk vs startups 45:49 What’s next for Pirros: quality review and MCP
October 24 · 24 min
What Construction’s Top Leaders Are Worried About Behind Closed Doors, the Knowledge Problem Nobody Has Solved, and Why Signed Contracts Are Falling.
This week's briefing covers three things that matter more than the headlines suggest. First, America. The Architecture Billings Index came in at 44.7 in September, down from 47.2 in August and the largest share of firms reporting falling billings since May. Signed design contracts fell to 43.7. Enquiries are still positive at 53.2, which means clients are asking but not committing. AIA describes the index as a leading indicator for non-residential construction nine to twelve months out. What architects are not signing now is work you will not be bidding next autumn. On the other side, JLL puts 317 million square feet of industrial space under construction in the US, up 28.7% on a year ago and the most since early 2024. Same country, same week, two completely different economies. Then the knowledge problem. There is a chief estimator somewhere who is 63 years old, 30 years in the job, and retires in 18 months. None of what he knows is written down. This week Owen sat down with Zaid Khan and Bogdan Arsintescu, who helped build the Google Knowledge Graph in 2011, to answer one question. What actually is a knowledge graph and why does construction need one. The answer starts with a three-hundred-page spec, an addendum in a different folder, and a door schedule that was never updated. A chatbot finds the spec and answers with confidence. A knowledge graph finds the conflict between all three and cites the clause. The pitch stripped of the buzzwords is this. Become the project historian. Keep the context when the people leave. Then the Bricks and Bytes Council. Last Tuesday Owen sat in a room with leaders from some of the largest design, engineering and contracting businesses in the UK and the US. Everything is confidential but five themes came through. Design teams are materially smaller than a decade ago for the same work. Contractors are now running AI across drawing sets before they go out, so designers are building the same checks into their own process to catch problems first. Door hardware schedules and lighting schedules, handed to the most junior person in the office, are driving more RFIs than structure on some jobs. Architecture may be going the way of book publishing, more buildings, more architects, a profession hollowing out in the middle. The line that came up more than once from more than one person in the room: we did not even need a tool to solve that. We just had to change the way we think. This week's episode is sponsored by Buildots, the construction intelligence platform turning site data into actionable insights for over 100 of the largest owners and contractors. Find out how to join them at https://buildots.com/. Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.
October 22 · 34 min
What Construction AI Is Missing: Connecting the Dots With Knowledge Graphs
Twelve months ago, Zaid Kahn said the words "knowledge graph" to us in a Boston office. We nodded. We had no idea what he meant. So we brought him back, with Bogdan Arsintescu, who sat on the original Google Knowledge Graph team and later ran graph systems at LinkedIn and Microsoft. The ask was simple. Explain it like we're five. A knowledge graph is a set of facts. Subject, predicate, object. "Door 105 has a 45 minute fire rating." An ontology is the rulebook. Everyone agreeing what every symbol on a drawing sheet means before anyone reads it. A chatbot context window is a drawing table. If the addendum is in the filing cabinet, it doesn't exist. Bogdan's line of the episode: "Knowledge Graph is just the bullet points." We still don't fully know what ontology means. But we're closer. #constructiontech #ai #aec #preconstruction #bricksandbytesOur Sponsors:Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.coArchdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com Chapters 00:00 Teaser 01:07 What Is a Knowledge Graph? (Explained Like You're Five) 04:10 Knowledge Graph vs Ontology: The Difference Explained 07:56 Sponsor 10:57 Why Construction Needs Knowledge Graphs (Spec vs Drawing vs Addendum) 14:58 Why ChatGPT Can't Do This: Context Windows Explained 19:11 Knowledge Graphs vs LLMs: Why You Need a Vertical AI 26:43 Preconstruction Risk: Why Bids Go Wrong 29:53 The Future of AI in Construction 32:10 How Neuron Factory Works With Suffolk and GCs
October 17 · 21 min
Construction’s 63% Problem, Aramco Under Attack & What Keeps 400 CEOs Awake
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.
October 16 · 40 min
Origin’s $20M Raise, Construction’s Robotics Problem, Anthropic’s AI Warning & Groundworks Summit
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
October 13 · 48 min
AI Robots, Construction's BIG Technology Problem, Drones & the Future of Jobsites
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
October 9 · 51 min
Autodesk’s New AEC Leadership, Schneider’s $22.6B PTC Deal, AI’s $4.2T Revenue Challenge & Construction Conferences
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
October 9 · 19 min
AI Could Take 20% Off the Cost of a Building According to MIT. Here Is the Caveat.
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.
October 6 · 59 min
Why Construction Procurement Is Broken: The 15–20% Cost, AI Agents & The Future of Buying Materials
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?
October 3 · 21 min
Accenture Just Entered Construction. Your Software Bill Is Moving to Per Token. And One 11 Billion Dollar Builder Stopped Innovating on Live Sites.
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.
October 2 · 1 hr 3 min
Autodesk’s Next Chapter: Design to Operations, AI Pricing, Miter’s $40M & Kuro’s €10M
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?
September 29 · 45 min
Inside Mortenson’s $10.8B Business: The Bet on In-House Innovation | Gene Hodge
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
September 21 · 13 min
Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back.
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.
September 15 · 38 min
Is Your Construction Data Ready for AI? | The Blueprint for Contractors
"My data is too messy for AI." We hear it on almost every call. Barry Chiu thinks it's the wrong way round. Consider this a contractor's guide to data and AI. Nobody has clean data at the raw level. Not one contractor. You can't know how bad yours is until it's all in one place and you can put the systems side by side. When you find that job numbers don't match across two systems, that's your first win, not a setback. His line on it: "you're already a step ahead of a lot of people, because people are not even aware of how bad the data is." Waiting until your data is clean means waiting forever. In today's episode of Bricks & Bytes, we sit down with Barry Chiu, CEO and co-founder of Kroo, to unpack why the obsession with "clean data" is holding contractors back from using AI. Full episode out on YouTube and Spotify! Link in comments. #construction #constructiontech #ai #aec #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 Intro 01:12 How the company grew and where it is now 03:39 What AI actually does in construction tech today 06:54 Why construction data is useless without context 09:13 Connecting data across your project systems 10:08 Sponsors 13:09 Real customer examples of unified project data 15:33 Why construction data management is so hard 18:05 AI readiness: what you need in place first 23:24 How to build a strong construction data foundation 24:37 Data permissions and security in construction software 26:24 Should you use third-party data tools? 28:41 Why subcontractors are winning with tech 29:59 Data sovereignty and competitive advantage explained 31:07 How to get real value out of your data 32:59 Questions to ask a software vendor before you buy 34:52 What's next for Crew and AI in construction

Showing 1–20 of 38 episodes