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 the clipboard, still ringing round to find out where the excavator is. One firm he works with lost twenty million dollars of equipment in a single year without knowing it. The cost of not digitising is not zero. You just cannot see the bill yet.

Then KPMG surveyed over two thousand senior executives across twenty countries. Nearly a third said they had no idea where their growing AI costs were coming from. MIT looked at corporate AI projects and found ninety five percent of them fail, not on the technology, but on the groundwork nobody did. The AI worked. The organisation around it did not.

And the data centre boom, the thing keeping order books healthy while housing sits flat, is starting to slip. Not because the money has dried up. The four biggest tech companies are spending north of six hundred and fifty billion dollars this year alone. It is slipping because the wait for transformers and switchgear has stretched from two years to five. You can have the land, the funding and the chips and still not be able to build.

The same problem is underneath all three. And construction, the industry everyone calls backward, already knows what it is.

Drop your answer in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

"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 not sell you agents unless you let them train your team first

✅ The shift from point solution to a "system of action" that sits on top of Procore and Autodesk

✅ Why a new AI takeoff startup seems to launch every week, and why most break on the last 20%

✅ Her blunt line on vibe coded tools: "Don't come on the market with something that Claude can already do."

Plus: a structural engineer breaks down the Midtown column buckling, and SubBase's Eric Helitzer on why a fintech led his $7M Series A.

🎧 Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:55 Introduction and Welcome

03:55 Trunk Tools Update and Series B Insights

06:46 Evolution of Trunk Tools: From Co-Pilot to System of Action

09:53 Challenges in Understanding Construction Drawings

12:52 Integration with Systems of Record

15:44 Building Trust in AI Agents

18:44 The Landscape of AI Startups in Construction

27:01 The Surge of AI in Outreach

28:07 Innovation in Construction Technology

32:35 Collaboration vs Competition in AI

34:44 Efficiency Gains in Construction

39:28 The Shift in AI Adoption

43:48 Future of Construction Tech and AI

47:58 Innovations in Construction Technology

49:33 Challenges in Construction Tech

50:16 The Future of Construction Tech

53:29 Structural Integrity and Engineering Insights

01:01:19 Funding and Growth in Construction Startups

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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 all your compliance is up to scratch if people are getting hurt out in the field"

In today's episode of Bricks & Bytes, we got into the real competitor (paper and spreadsheets, not rival software), why data centres are raising the safety bar for everyone, and what a solved job site looks like in ten years.

Full episode out now. Link below

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vcChapters

00:00 Intro

01:16 Introduction to HammerTech and Safety Technology

08:59 The State of Safety in Construction

15:25 The Transition from Manual to Digital Safety Processes

24:20 The Future of Reality Capture and Data in Construction

33:34 Customer Onboarding and Implementation Process

42:20 Navigating the Competitive Landscape

48:13 Future of Safety Technology in Construction