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

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

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

"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 everycontractor climbs, whether they realise it or not: Phase 0 : clipboards, spreadsheets, and hundreds of thousands of assets nobodycan locate

Phase 1 : digitise the fleet, drop accidents, cut fuel

Phase 2 : insights, utilisation, proactive maintenance

Phase 3 : agents making the phone calls for you

His warning: you can't buy your way into Phase 3. Skip the groundwork and the AIhas nothing to stand on.

We also get into stolen fleets, autonomous job sites, and why one pane of glassbeats another point solution.

Watch the full episode on Youtube and Spotify.

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

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

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:35 The Data Backbone Construction Never Built

02:57 Why Construction Operations Are So Hard to Digitize

05:18 The Phases of Digitizing a Construction Business

08:10 What Staying Analog Actually Costs You

09:51 Sponsor

12:52 The Real Cost of Analog (cont.)

14:09 Getting From Phase Zero to Your First Digital Win

17:01 What the Data Reveals Once You Digitize

20:00 Putting AI to Work in Daily Operations

27:32 How AI Is Reshaping Fleet Management

30:15 Where Virtual Assistants Actually Add Value

34:10 Getting Your Team to Adopt New Tech

36:22 What Autonomy Really Means for Construction

43:10 Where Contractors Should Start Tomorrow

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 about cutting at all. On the materials side, US tariffs on steel, aluminium and copper are sitting at 50 percent, with non-residential material costs rising at their fastest pace since 2022. One estimate puts 17,500 dollars of added cost onto a single new American home.

Both doors closed in the same month.

Then the split that was supposed to be temporary. Data centres are now a bigger construction category than offices. But the thing holding that work back is not money, it is power, and grid connections are running five to seven years behind the builds. The boom is real. The gate is megawatts.

Plus a full recap of the three June briefings you may have missed, on safety tech, the AI price war, what happens when AI hands your client the knowledge you used to charge for, and why the first piece of reconstruction technology in Ukraine is not a crane.

And some trivia. What Gustave Eiffel built inside the Statue of Liberty, and what a Boston World Cup pitch crew found ten inches underground that nobody had touched in twenty years.

The LinkedIn comment thread for this episode is where the conversation is happening. Come and tell us where you land.

$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 push with Nvidia, and whether "no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha" is real insight or pure marketing

→ Why Dustin thinks forward-deployed engineers "need to go away"

→ Higharc's fresh $95M Series C and the case for replacing AutoCAD in homebuilding

→ Whether the GC is really just an insurance company in disguise

→ Where OpenSpace is taking spatial AI eight months after acquiring Disperse

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

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

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

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:40 Alain Waha's Global ConTech Tour: India, US, Canada, UK

03:44 Why the West Underestimates India in Construction

06:36 India vs China: The $7 Trillion Construction Boom

09:25 Palantir vs Anthropic: The AI Sovereignty War

12:42 How Alex Karp Markets Palantir (And Why It Works)

23:47 Why Nobody Understands "Ontology": Palantir Buzzwords Decoded

24:51 Do You Really Need Forward Deployed Engineers?

27:55 Why Construction Is Really an Insurance Industry

29:14 Palantir in Construction: Cavtera, McCarthy and the Data Play

31:37 Higharc's $95M Series C to Replace AutoCAD (Marc Minor)

33:32 How Higharc Serves Home Builders at Scale

37:02 Higharc's Business Model and Home Building Challenges

40:00 Homes as Data: Inside the Higharc x USLBM Deal

46:02 World Cup Banter: US Football and Officiating

46:41 Is Football the World's Greatest Sport? The Debate

49:08 OpenSpace Spatial AI: Agents That See the Jobsite (Jeevan Kalanithi)

55:16 Data Centres and the AI Delusion Killing Startups

01:07:04 What 10 Years as CEO Taught Jeevan Kalanithi

"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 unlock is reducing friction, not adding more forms.

✅ NFC-enabled Studson helmets can surface certifications with a single tap, no wallet required

✅ Procore's newly acquired Datagrid AI is built to support human intuition on the jobsite, not replace it

✅ Healthcare's forced interoperability offers lessons for construction, but construction's openness to new tools is the advantage healthcare doesn't have

✅ The best safety tech buyers plan 2-3 years out, not around a single RFP

Watch now on Youtube and Spotify.

Our free Construction Safety Report. Download your copy here: https://bricks-bytes.com/downloads/construction-safety/

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

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:30 How to fix safety on construction sites

01:13 What construction can learn from healthcare safety

04:43 How mobile apps are changing construction safety

07:39 Is construction safety actually digitised yet?

10:23 What safety software really does on site

14:18 Why workers don't adopt safety technology

19:15 The real reason safety tech doesn't get used

24:20 Where Procore fits in construction safety

29:16 How AI will change construction safety

29:17 Will AI replace safety managers?

31:41 Using technology to prevent site accidents

35:08 How to build a safety culture on site

38:55 Why psychological safety matters in construction

39:50 How customers shape safety technology

45:28 Compliance vs productivity in safety tech

50:37 How to choose the right safety technology

"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+ staff on one AI platform in ~7 months

✅ When the subsidies end, undisciplined teams get hit "like a ton of bricks"

🎧 Full episode out now.

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

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

00:33 Inside Japanese construction and innovation

05:58 What is a "genecon"? Shimizu and Japan's super contractors

07:49 Sponsors

10:58 From telecom to construction: Jean-Marc's career path

17:11 Japan vs Silicon Valley: how innovation actually happens

22:49 How Japanese construction trains its workforce

27:21 How Shimizu adopts AI and new technology

33:26 Why AI adoption in construction is accelerating

36:11 Specialized AI tools vs general models

38:03 RAG explained: AI data retrieval in construction

41:34 AI model routing to cut costs

43:56 Rolling out AI across a large organization

47:55 AI governance: tracking ROI and real benefits

55:39 The future of construction robotics

59:19 The cultural roots of Japan's innovation mindset

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