EARLY RELEASE EPISODES
INTELLIGENCE FOR CONSTRUCTION LEADERS
The GC That Built Its Own Procore
Twenty-two years ago, Colin Stoner joined Novo Construction. In 2011, he made a decision most GCs would call reckless: instead of buying Procore, Novo built its own system of record from scratch. Fifteen years later, that "half-witted decision" (his words) turned out to be the single best AI preparation the company could have made.
In this conversation, the Chief Innovation Officer of the 400-person Menlo Park contractor opens up the books on Sentinel, Novo's full-stack internal platform, and the AI layer now running on top of it. Certificate of insurance processing that once buried an admin in envelopes every quarter is now 99% automated, with no human review. RFIs drafted from a forwarded email chain. Three-week look-aheads generated on request. And a cost comparison against buying off-the-shelf that Colin describes in two words: massive savings.
In this episode, you'll:
Hear the real economics of building your own system of record versus licensing a platform and the honest test Colin uses to tell CEOs whether they should attempt it at all
Learn why fifteen years of structured, owned data became an unfair advantage the moment AI arrived, and what that means for firms whose data sits inside someone else's platform
Get three deployed AI use cases with real outcomes: automated COI extraction, AI-drafted RFIs trained on 14 years of Novo's own writing, and auto-generated three-week look-aheads
Understand why Colin says AI will not shrink his headcount and what he expects it to do to revenue per employee instead
Find out what he'd tell a CEO to do on Monday morning to get AI-ready (his answer is two questions long, and most firms can't answer either)
Discover the size of the ConTech pitch problem from the buyer's side, roughly 100 cold emails a week, and what actually gets a meeting
Hear the one construction workflow Colin believes should never be automated, and why he thinks relationships get more valuable as AI spreads
Chapters
00:00 - Quickfire: the tool Novo can't live without
03:02 - Inside Novo: 400 people, Menlo Park to Austin
07:26 - Why ConTech platforms come and go and horizontal tech stays
10:39 - Getting site teams to actually use what you build
13:59 - Building Sentinel: the 2011 decision to walk away from Procore
17:29 - Build vs buy: who should never attempt this
19:20 - Why owning your data paid off the moment AI arrived
25:05 - The coming wave of in-house engineering teams at mid-size GCs
26:11 - Use case 1: automating certificate of insurance tracking
28:21 - Use case 2: AI-written RFIs trained on 14 years of Novo's data
32:03 - Use case 3: Conduit and the auto-generated three-week look-ahead
34:03 - What Novo still buys externally and the integration rule
38:31 - 100 cold pitches a week: the view from the buyer's chair
41:20 - First principles: what to do tomorrow for better AI outcomes
45:17 - Why AI won't shrink Novo's headcount
46:24 - The one thing in construction that should never be automated
50:04 - Relationships, the generation gap, and closing thoughts
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