Construction tech is sexy? That’s not something I ever expected to hear. But these days, I hear it more often than you would think. Whether the market is heating up the way we think it is or not, construction tech focused conferences are a great reminder that things are happening on many fronts across the industry. I recently attended the Builtworlds Construction Tech conference in Chicago. Coming up to 20,000 feet out of the startup trenches always enhances my thinking.

Here are some of my take-aways:

41% of the construction workforce will leave the workforce by 2031 according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research. Ironically, this came up in a conversation over wine #conference with some industry veterans. I half jokingly said, “so who is going to drive the ship when you retire?” I’m not sure anyone had clarity around an answer. To be honest, I hadn’t heard this statistic and 2031 is not very far away. I would argue at the macro level, we don’t have a plan and robots are far from dominating job sites. In fact, on the residential side, we know we still need a LOT more housing. Therefore, we need to do more with less, especially in the roles where we can improve workflows and save time. Need I mention Bundle handles your materials management for you, saving you hundreds of hours per project?

Maybe we don’t need to cross the chasm…twice…at least not exactly. (One of the best and most spot on pieces I have read about contech and the concept of this double crossing here). Adoption across many layers of a construction project, company and team, is a major challenge in the industry. Talk to any industry VC and you will very quickly understand that even with a revolutionary idea, the GTM for that idea is maybe more critical than the idea itself. 

Unsurprisingly, everyone at Builtworlds was talking about AI. For construction, we will always be outcomes based, but AI (and other tooling) presents an interesting opportunity as a tool to move forward. Adoption of software from what is painfully a pen, paper, phone call and spreadsheet industry can still be limited. But what if we leapfrog the adoption of digitized processes? Instead of getting users to move all of their workflows into software, we use technology to handle many of those processes and deliver the same (or better) outcomes. I was chatting with another founder recently who summarized this perfectly. Even though people in construction learned workflows with pen and paper, when they move to software, they don’t want to learn the same workflows. They want it to be an overall better experience. Also, as we all know, the reality of job sites is that people are not sitting behind computers all day. Smarter tools enable people on the move to accomplish more while never slowing down.

Data, data, data The site logistics panel I spoke on was one session of many that touched on another related topic - data. To use AI, automate workflows and improve processes, you first need organized data. For larger companies that data might exist somewhere, but much of it is not yet organized in a way for it to be most useful. For smaller projects, capturing data at all is the first step to being able to use that information to improve future processes. I expect the next year or two to bring to light the best examples of both capturing data and finding innovative ways to access data across different sources. Reach out if you want to talk more about easily accessing manufacturer and supplier data through a single API.

Sustainability is a topic, but adoption continues to be slow. This conclusion pains me as my early career was pushing for green and healthy buildings. Larger commercial projects typically have some environmental goals, and depending on the contractor, large teams to support those goals. What happens downstream with subcontractors and what is actually purchased continues to be a different story (I still have PTSD from my past life of subs showing up to jobs with a different set of materials than I approved in the environmentally friendly submittal process). I still hope to make this easier with Bundle as we move upmarket. 

Downmarket in the single-family and small multifamily space, we have seen few builders really lean into embodied carbon or healthier materials in any big way. These are often small teams who already have too much to do, so this isn’t surprising. There is a huge opportunity here, but the willingness to pay (not just by builders/contractors, but by their customers) to dig into some of these problems is still low for most projects.

Thanks again to the Builtworlds team for bringing together a great group of industry experts to dig into all things construction tech. Until next year!

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