THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
INTELLIGENCE FOR CONSTRUCTION LEADERS
PROCUREMENT IS THE NEW MARGIN
Of the ~$600bn US contractors spend on materials every year, an estimated $60–120bn is lost to inefficiency. On 2–3% margins, that's not a back-office problem. It's the business.
Inside: where the workflow actually breaks, what AI can do today, a vendor evaluation framework, and profiles of Field Materials, Kojo, and Parspec.
Bricks & Bytes Turns Four With Our First Live Event
We celebrated four years of Bricks & Bytes this week with our first in-person event and a conversation with Stanford's Martin Fischer. In the headlines: project abandonments hit their fastest rate since late 2025, and a humanoid robot is walking a live UK site. Plus, read on Apple's succession, supply chain AI, and the automation fork every CEO faces.
TOP HEADLINES
Bricks & Bytes Celebrates Fourth Birthday With First In-Person Event
This week, we celebrated our fourth birthday with our first-ever in-person event. We were joined by Martin Fischer, a professor at Stanford University, who has spent 40 years shaping the intersection of construction and technology. It was a privilege to have him in the room. Stay tuned for the full conversation, which will be shared shortly. (More)
Project Abandonments Surge 22.8% as Iran War Squeezes the Private Sector
ConstructConnect's Project Stress Index spiked 4.2% in March, with abandonments posting their largest monthly jump since late 2025. Disrupted oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz are pushing up diesel, steel, and aluminum simultaneously. Input costs climbed at a 12.6% annualized rate in the first two months of the year. Excluding data centers, commercial planning is down 12.7% since March 2025. (More)
Tilbury Douglas Deploys Humanoid Robot on a Live UK Site
A 30 kg robot named Douglas walks the site autonomously, captures 360-degree imagery, and feeds data into program, defect, and H&S systems. First tier-one deployment of its kind, saving 40 hours a month for $15,000. (More)
BEST MOMENT THIS WEEK
This week, Joe Schmidt, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joined us to defend his thesis that the $177bn design software market is finally up for grabs. When pushed on why practitioners should care, he didn't hedge:
"We are living through the most exciting technology advancement, like maybe ever. It's like one, two, or three in the history of all technology. That's the time that we are in right now."
His message to the MEP designers, GCs, and architects in the audience was simple: stop asking whether AI is coming for your job, and start asking how fast you can harness it to be 100x of yourself. The firms that move first, he argued, will run higher margins, grow faster, and make a heck of a lot of money doing it.
3 READS AND WATCHES
Fifteen years, one playbook, and the hardest handoff in tech: Tim Cook steps aside at Apple after 15 years. Thompson's Stratechery retrospective on the succession is sharp. Read on Stratechery
Predictive supply chain AI, backed by the same firm funding xAI: Loop raised $95M from Valor and Founders Fund for supply chain AI that predicts disruptions before they hit. Read on TechCrunch
Oxford and Stanford researchers on the AI fork every CEO faces: HBR on why augmentation beats automation long-term. Automation cuts costs early but erodes the people who compound value. Read on HBR
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