Bricks And Bytes

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...

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 describ...

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. "D...

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 hous...

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...

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 als...

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 s...

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 fi...

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 Hi...

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 wi...

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 Inf...

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...

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 agent...

"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...

This week's briefing covers three things landing in the same week that construction leaders need to understand before they plan anything for the rest of the year. First, interest rates. The European Central Bank raised rates for the second time this year on the tenth of September, to two and a half percent, with markets now pricing more than three further rises over the next twelve months. The...

Anthropic's own alignment lead says there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills us all within a decade. He was backing up a researcher who'd just quit the company over exactly that. On this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we read the entire doomsday scenario out loud: the data centres, the autonomous research, the whole thing. Then we picked it apart. Martin's take: it's a...

"I think what dies is when you have someone show up and they don't actually understand the problem they're solving and they can't relate to a builder." That's Brett Dahmer, CFO of Performance Contracting Group, on what actually kills a vendor pitch inside a 60+ office, employee owned specialty contractor. We sat down with Brett for a rare finance side view of ConTech deci...

This week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping industrial construction, supply chain efficiency, and margin health on the ground. For decades, European legacy builders insisted you couldn't make adequate margins delivering whole buildings from start to finish. Now, German construction powerhouse Goldbeck is breaking into America through a massive joint venture with Mortenson, bringing...

700 AI agents hacked Hugging Face. They built a secret notice board inside OpenAI's own infrastructure, swapped over 70,000 messages on it, split the work between them and then tried to cover their tracks. The headlines called it a warning shot for humanity. So we asked two people who actually deploy this stuff inside construction what it means for us. Alain Waha, CTO at Buro Happold: "It...

"If you're considered a feature, you're dead." Klas Berghede has spent nearly twenty years at Boldt, a 100% employee owned contractor that has been building since 1889. We asked him whether there is still room for point solutions in construction tech. He said the door is closing. Adoption of AI across the industry is high. Measured improvement is close to zero. McKinsey's lat...

This week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping jobsite technology, supply chain security, and risk on the ground. For five thousand years, construction has relied on chalk lines and measuring tapes to decide where walls go. While robotic total stations arrived twenty years ago, adoption has stalled near 16%. Now, layout automation is splitting into two clear approaches: printing robots that pa...

Bill Gates says robots will take construction jobs by 2030. Dustin DeVan offered to bet his entire net worth against it. In this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Owen, Dustin and Martin pull apart the 6,000 word essay Gates published this week and ask the question nobody in construction wants to answer out loud: if AI is making everyone so much more productive, why has nobody's headcount actu...

Four founders competing in construction layout walked into the same room. Nobody expected them to agree on much. But across the conversation, all four revealed the same thing about who they are really up against. Not each other. Tessa Lau, CEO and co-founder of Dusty Robotics: “Pretty much our biggest competitor is chalk lines and measuring tape.”William St-Pierre, CEO of Mechasys: “Our biggest co...

“We never use the word AI anywhere. You’re saying we’re an AI company, not me.” Mo Akbari-Hochberg built HoloBuilder and sold it to FARO. Now he is back with BuildCrew, a preconstruction platform backed by Khosla Ventures that uses digital workers to help contractors with estimating, trade scoping, bid levelling and preconstruction RFIs. In this episode, Mo explains why he believes 99% of construc...

This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same question. Where is the work going next. In the last five weeks more than two billion dollars has been poured into construction machines that drive themselves. TerraFirma raised 115 million. Travis Kalanick, the man who founded Uber, raised 1.7 billion for Atoms, which includes an autonomous mining d...