Bricks and Bytes

This week’s briefing covers three things every construction leader should understand before they sign off on anything this year. David Gal from Samsara makes the argument that three quarters of construction hasn’t even started the thing that comes before AI. Not behind on AI. Behind on the step underneath it. He lays out a four stage journey, and most firms are at stage zero, still on...

“Real AI is way more about how you do change management than picking the right technology.” That is Dr. Sarah Buchner, founder and CEO of Trunk Tools, on this week’s Bricks, Bucks & Bytes. A year on from her $40M Series B, she joined the roundtable to explain why the hardest part of construction AI is not the model. It is getting people to trust it. ✅ Why Trunk Tools will no...

You can vibe code software in a weekend. You can’t vibe code a decade of safety data. That was the throughline with Ben Leach and Andrew Barron of HammerTech. In an AI era obsessed with what’s actually defensible, their answer wasn’t features. It was data. Ben built the company out of his own frustration on site: “what’s the point of sitting in there making sure that...

“How much money did we spend last year on small equipment?” That’s the one question David Gal, VP of Product & Engineering for ConnectedEquipment at Samsara, says stops most construction leaders cold. Most of them can’t answer it. And that blind spot is exactly why so many still can’t use AI. On today’s episode, David walks us through the data maturity curve...

This month’s recap covers what June 2026 actually meant for the industry, and it was not what anyone had pencilled in. The cheaper borrowing that stalled schemes were relying on did not arrive. The European Central Bank raised rates. The Fed held. The Bank of England held. And a spike in oil above 125 dollars a barrel, triggered by fears over the Strait of Hormuz, made central banks nervous...

$95M raises, Palantir’s sovereignty play, and a debate that nearly boiled over. This one had everything. This week on Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we sat down with Alain Waha (CTO, Buro Happold), Marc Minor (CEO, Higharc) and Jeevan Kalanithi (CEO, OpenSpace), alongside Owen, Patric, Martin and Dustin, for one of our most heated roundtables yet On the table: → Palantir’s new sovereign AI...

“Even the most digitized job sites still have a binder and a filing cabinet in the trailer.” — Juliana Richard Butler, Procore We sat down with Procore’s Director of Product for Quality, Safety, and Media as part of our ongoing series on the state of construction safety technology. Her take cuts through a lot of the AI hype: paper isn’t going anywhere soon, and the real unl...

“We don’t see the real costs of AI.” That’s Jean-Marc Frangos, ex-BT in Silicon Valley, now running AI at Shimizu, one of Japan’s “Big 5” contractors, founded in 1804. We sat down with him to unpack how a 220 year old builder actually rolls out AI across a 20,000 person workforce. The playbook, not the hype: ✅ Start with your data, not the model ✅ 5,000+...

This week’s briefing covers three conversations every construction leader should sit with. Ryan Maibach runs Barton Malow, a five billion dollar builder with over a hundred years of history. He is turning work away in the best market his firm has ever seen, and that is not the surprising part. The surprising part is what worries him most. A large chunk of what builders get paid for is knowin...

Ukraine’s reconstruction has been estimated at $588 billion by the World Bank’s Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA5), although our guest argues the true figure is likely higher. In this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we speak with Oleg Demydenko, Chair of Ukraine’s National ConTech Cluster, about the technologies, engineering approaches and digital systems emerging du...

“WhatsApp’s the most successful construction technology tool ever built.” Half a joke, but only half. That’s what Prakash Senghani, Co-Founder and CEO of Navatech, told us on the latest Bricks & Bytes. His point: the workers who most need safety tech are the ones it never reaches. So instead of forcing them onto another clunky app, Navatech put its AI inside the tool th...

“I don’t see this as a technology problem. I see it as a human problem.” That’s Rob Painter, CEO of Trimble, on what’s really holding back AI in construction In this episode he made the case that: ✅ Task productivity is largely solved, system productivity is the real unlock ✅ AI is overhyped and underhyped at the same time, the difference is industry context ✅ The...