The tech industry thinks you are dinner.
Sub-$100M shops are about to have their insurance company tell them what tech to use. Construction should be driving this, not on the menu.
Tom is hungry. Are you Tom, or are you what's on the plate?
If you care about the trades, you need to be looking into what the founders of the heavily funded con-tech companies are about to do. Sub-$100M revenue shops, get ready to have your insurance company tell you what tech to use. It may be tech from a wonder kid who dropped out of Berkeley after spending three months on a construction site.
The CEO says, the workers go home at night. The crane is "annoying." Her husband looked out the window and asked why this is taking so long. You'll watch another one test a function on a large mechanical system and say we can change X, it updates the whole system, done, saves days.
The answer is construction is not simple. And neither are the people who install the work.
What they get wrong.
If you have installed big systems, you know engineers make mistakes all day long. We have someone who is not a mechanical engineer writing a program to think like an engineer, handing off a ton of compute to AI we don't really know how it works, and calling the output good.
That is not progress. That is risk.
If you have not worked in the trades, how can you build for the trades? Most of the design and engineering happens in the MEP shops two years before the build. Big tech does not care. They only care about growth, scale, raise the next round, and exit. They will never be on site with you. They will never lay off the shop when you lose the contract.
They will, however, build an app for you.
The 50-year pattern.
We have seen this movie for the last fifty years.
- Hype a technology.
- Scale it before it's tested.
- Give it decision-making authority it hasn't earned.
- When it breaks, the harm lands on ordinary people.
- The gains stay with a handful at the top.
The mantra in disruptive tech is build fast, break things, iterate.
In the field, that is risk.
Some twenty-year-old who dropped out of private school meets with a buddy's dad or uncle, raises ten million, and now people you have never met are pressuring you to use their tech.
The logic behind sequencing, load calculations, and trade coordination has been refined over thousands of years. We learned the hard way what happens when you get it wrong.
So we don't reject new technology. And we don't swallow it whole on someone else's terms.
Construction leadership, take the lead.
Construction should be driving this. Not riding in the back seat. And definitely not on the menu.
Are you Tom? Or is some faceless checkbook playing Tom for you? Are you the supper?
They want your margin.
Built by the field. For the field.
- More margin at the end of every project.
- Improved workflow for the talent who make your shop badass.
- Protects your intellectual property and shop knowledge.
- Shines a light on the teams that are thriving and the teams that need support.
We don't replace people. We don't replace your tech systems. We connect them. Your team interacts through messaging they already know. We are a force multiplier.
No more hiding. Take the lead.