Bricks And Bytes

00:21:17

Accenture Just Entered Construction. Your Software...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/10/03

This week's briefing covers four things that landed in the same week, starting with a story about an intern, a spreadsheet and eighteen thousand snags.Gene Hodge is Vice President of Innovation at Mortenson, a family owned American builder with 11 billion dollars of revenue and the tenth biggest contractor in America. He started his career printing off punch list items and walking the site with a pen. Twenty three years later, someone still walks the site with a list. His answer to why is that

en-gb

01:03:50

Autodesk’s Next Chapter: Design to Operations, AI...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/10/02

Autodesk now runs from the first sketch to the maintenance ticket.So who is left to compete?We got back from Autodesk University and put that question to three people this week:Connor Watumull on Miter's $40M Series B, and why payroll was the way into the whole contractor back office.Lea Scherer on Kuro's €10M seed, and how a two year old startup ended up working with Goldbeck and Hochtief Infrastructure.Alain Waha, CTO of Buro Happold, on why AI could push software bills up from here.Episode is

en-gb

00:45:38

Inside Mortenson’s $10.8B Business: The Bet on...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/29

A few years ago, Mortenson's own leadership group told them they were treating innovation "kind of like a hobby".This year they're No. 10 on ENR's Top 400, running a 90,000 sq ft R&D facility and about to launch a joint venture with Goldbeck.So we asked Gene Hodge, their VP of I4 and Innovation, how he proves the ROI on all of it:"I think anyone asking what's the ROI on innovation is not interested in innovating, most likely."CFOs, we'd love to hear you

en-gb

00:13:42

Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/21

Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back.This week's briefing comes straight from Autodesk University in Las Vegas, the biggest technology conference in the AEC industry, where Owen was invited as part of the media and analyst cohort.Three things stood out above everything else.First, agents. Autodesk showed agents checking submittals against specifications, comparing subcontractor bids against scopes of work, and

en-gb

00:38:35

Is Your Construction Data Ready for AI? | The...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/15

"My data is too messy for AI."We hear it on almost every call. Barry Chiu thinks it's the wrong way round.Consider this a contractor's guide to data and AI.Nobody has clean data at the raw level. Not one contractor.You can't know how bad yours is until it's all in one place and you can put the systems side by side.When you find that job numbers don't match across two systems, that's your first win, not a setback.His line on it: "you're already a step ahead

en-gb

00:23:18

Three Central Banks, 20 Months of Contraction, and an...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/12

This week's briefing covers three things landing in the same week that construction leaders need to understand before they plan anything for the rest of the year.First, interest rates. The European Central Bank raised rates for the second time this year on the tenth of September, to two and a half percent, with markets now pricing more than three further rises over the next twelve months. The US Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday the sixteenth, with traders putting the chance of a rise at

en-gb

00:48:30

The Human Extinction by AI Debate, OpenAI's Astra...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/11

Anthropic's own alignment lead says there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills us all within a decade.He was backing up a researcher who'd just quit the company over exactly that.On this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we read the entire doomsday scenario out loud: the data centres, the autonomous research, the whole thing. Then we picked it apart.Martin's take: it's a fairy tale that conveniently justifies more regulation. Dustin's take: the AI can't even build its

en-gb

00:49:53

How A Specialty Contractor Became A ConTech Investor...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/08

"I think what dies is when you have someone show up and they don't actually understand the problem they're solving and they can't relate to a builder."That's Brett Dahmer, CFO of Performance Contracting Group, on what actually kills a vendor pitch inside a 60+ office, employee owned specialty contractor.We sat down with Brett for a rare finance side view of ConTech decisions. He walked us through:BarrierCube Ventures, PCG's own venture arm, and why a contractor started

en-gb

00:21:45

Unusual Partnership Between Two GC's Signals the...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/05

This week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping industrial construction, supply chain efficiency, and margin health on the ground.For decades, European legacy builders insisted you couldn't make adequate margins delivering whole buildings from start to finish.Now, German construction powerhouse Goldbeck is breaking into America through a massive joint venture with Mortenson, bringing 24,000 shared staff to deploy serial, Lego-like prefabrication across US jobsites.The timing isn't

en-gb

00:59:44

Why Software Costs Rise but Productivity Doesn't,...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/04

700 AI agents hacked Hugging Face.They built a secret notice board inside OpenAI's own infrastructure, swapped over 70,000 messages on it, split the work between them and then tried to cover their tracks.The headlines called it a warning shot for humanity.So we asked two people who actually deploy this stuff inside construction what it means for us.Alain Waha, CTO at Buro Happold: "It's PR gold and it's sales gold."Dustin DeVan, CEO at Ediphi: "I think that there's

en-gb

00:59:07

Boldt VP: The Labour Shortage Is Not Construction's...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/09/01

"If you're considered a feature, you're dead."Klas Berghede has spent nearly twenty years at Boldt, a 100% employee owned contractor that has been building since 1889.We asked him whether there is still room for point solutions in construction tech.He said the door is closing.Adoption of AI across the industry is high. Measured improvement is close to zero. McKinsey's latest numbers back him up.Klas reckons roughly half the cost of a complex American build is no longer labour

en-gb

00:24:02

Site Layout Faceoff, Chinese Hardware Warning, and...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/29

This week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping jobsite technology, supply chain security, and risk on the ground.For five thousand years, construction has relied on chalk lines and measuring tapes to decide where walls go. While robotic total stations arrived twenty years ago, adoption has stalled near 16%. Now, layout automation is splitting into two clear approaches: printing robots that paint permanent lines and text directly on the slab, and optical projectors that beam designs onto floors,

en-gb

00:53:46

Bill Gates Warns On Robots By 2030, Meta's AI Wrote...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/28

Bill Gates says robots will take construction jobs by 2030. Dustin DeVan offered to bet his entire net worth against it.In this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Owen, Dustin and Martin pull apart the 6,000 word essay Gates published this week and ask the question nobody in construction wants to answer out loud: if AI is making everyone so much more productive, why has nobody's headcount actually gone down? What they get into:Why Bill Gates thinks construction and hospitality roles shift to

en-gb

01:10:23

Robots vs Laser Projection: Who Will Win Construction...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/26

Four founders competing in construction layout walked into the same room.Nobody expected them to agree on much.But across the conversation, all four revealed the same thing about who they are really up against.Not each other.Tessa Lau, CEO and co-founder of Dusty Robotics: “Pretty much our biggest competitor is chalk lines and measuring tape.”William St-Pierre, CEO of Mechasys: “Our biggest competitor today is like DeWalt or Milwaukee with their tape measures.”Tomer Elran, co-founder of LIGHTYX:

en-gb

00:59:09

The Problem With AI in Construction Is “99% Have No...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/25

“We never use the word AI anywhere. You’re saying we’re an AI company, not me.”Mo Akbari-Hochberg built HoloBuilder and sold it to FARO. Now he is back with BuildCrew, a preconstruction platform backed by Khosla Ventures that uses digital workers to help contractors with estimating, trade scoping, bid levelling and preconstruction RFIs.In this episode, Mo explains why he believes 99% of construction AI teams do not properly understand the technology they are building with, why access to the same AI

en-gb

00:24:46

$2 Billion Into Self-Driving Construction Machines in...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/22

This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same question. Where is the work going next.In the last five weeks more than two billion dollars has been poured into construction machines that drive themselves. TerraFirma raised 115 million. Travis Kalanick, the man who founded Uber, raised 1.7 billion for Atoms, which includes an autonomous mining division. Komatsu signed a partnership to put autonomous bulldozers and excavators on American jobsites

en-gb

00:53:37

The Excavators Operating Without Drivers, Gravis...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/21

We spoke to Kevin Peterson this week. He runs the tech at Bedrock Robotics.He told us their control room "looks like StarCraft, actually."You click on an excavator on a screen and give it a job. Then it just digs. Nobody sitting in it.This went live on real customer sites on Monday.The same day, a company called Gravis Robotics got $200 million from SoftBank.We asked Kevin about the timing. Nobody seems to know.Full chat with Kevin and Alain is out now on Bricks Bucks and

en-gb

00:48:39

The GC That Built Its Own Procore | Colin Stoner,...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/18

"Don't build. It's that simple."Strange advice from a man who built his own Procore.In 2011, Novo Construction evaluated Procore and walked away. They built Sentinel instead, their own system of record. Fifteen years later, Colin Stoner (Chief Innovation Officer, 22 years at the company) told us why that call made them AI ready before most of the industry had a data strategy.The catch in his advice: build only if your team has total buy in. Without it, don't start.✓ Every AI

en-gb

00:24:01

88% of Contractors Are at Their Lowest Backlog Since...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/15

This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same fortnight and point in the same direction.First, a closed room in central London. The CTO of DPR Construction, a 14 billion dollar US contractor, sat around a table with tier one contractors, engineers, investors and founders. The consensus was uncomfortable. The biggest clients on the planet are telling their supply chains to price on outcomes instead of hours, and to expect that price to fall every year. Nobody in the room,

en-gb

00:58:58

AI Price Collapse, Data Center Boom, Japan 1989...

Bricks And Bytes ·

2026/08/14

"The US is dangerously close to the brink of being Japan 1989."That is not a hot take from a doom account. That is Patric on this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, laying out why asset overvaluation in private markets and infrastructure has him worried about stagflation.On this episode:✅ Why data center contractors are sitting on 11.4 months of backlog while everyone else has 7.5✅ The AI productivity story corporate America still cannot prove with real numbers✅ Why the construction RFP

en-gb

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

TaxTalent.com The Golden Rule Podcast

Adam Golden

TaxTalent.com Podcast

Tony Santiago

SoldiOnline

Mondadori Digital

Black Box - La scatola nera della finanza

Guido Brera e Gian Luca Comandini -...

Mikroökonomen a.k.a. Mikrooekonomen

Marco Herack