Last year, CMiC released its first ever Industry Research Report on construction technology, “Construction in Transition: Insights from 550+ Industry Leaders,” and the results were overwhelmingly positive—from investment in construction technology to workforce recruitment and more. The company hopes this new resource will guide construction companies through their strategic plans when it comes to investing in the right contech for their business and business development.
Here is some insight he shared with Construction Executive about the 2024 survey:
What is CMiC’s intention with the results of this survey?
It is available for everybody. We’ve published it and it is for public consumption. Right now it’s been mostly in the general contracting space, but we will then focus specifically on other sectors of the industry such as subcontractors, specialty contractors, maybe segment it to industrial contractors, heavy civil, etc. and see if that information does change.
65% feel they’re still playing catchup from COVID. Other than economically, how do you project that’s going to play into the timeline of tech adoption?
I was actually surprised with that result. I thought that COVID was far enough in the past. I think that the catch-up effort or burden people feel from COVID is really because they didn’t take advantage of the digitalization requirement that COVID led to. From our perspective, COVID came to pass, people were working remotely and information wasn’t readily available to people who weren’t necessarily at an office or at an appropriate location where information can be filtered and garnered. So, that really caught many people by surprise. The catch up from COVID is not from an industry perspective and not from a production perspective, but rather from a technology and digitalization perspective.
63% are concerned about the election affecting the industry. How do you see the new administration affecting construction, especially contech?
The Build Back Better legislation has already been put in place. It’s a multi-year strategy that the federal government is investing in. So, anything with respect to infrastructure is not going to be impacted. The funds have been allocated. It’s in the budget. With respect to future investments in infrastructure, if an administration is not going to invest in infrastructure, maybe in four to 10 years it would be affected because infrastructure has degraded quite dramatically in the United States over the past number of decades with respect to funding and financing.
That’s a Federal Reserve matter, not so much a governing party matter. Obviously, there are some political influences here and there, but the fact of the matter is that inflation was relatively high post-COVID and it is tempered now.
30% said that automation is not a priority in the next 12 months. Why is that?
I think the ones who don’t need automation are the ones who are not going to scale their businesses. There are many businesses in the construction realm that are lifestyle businesses, they’re small businesses, two to 10 people. They meet their needs from a lifestyle perspective and don’t need to scale. So, those businesses who are not looking to grow and to scale in even a moderate to double digit fashion don’t really need a lot of automation. They could keep doing whatever they’re doing. If they have some simple office productivity tools, some simple accounting systems, they can get by. But if a business is looking to scale, which is the other 70%, they would need automation in order to affect that scale.
70% said they’re underspending on digital technology compared to their competition. Why would certain companies be underspending compared to others?
It’s multifaceted. It’s a combination of not understanding what investment is required in order to get to where they want to be, and the need for a bit of effort to understand what they want the technology to provide. There’s a lot of research that needs to be done. There’s time and effort that needs to be invested in order to get that app appropriately discovered. There are a lot of people who are just working and getting their projects delivered. It takes a little bit of additional bandwidth to allow for that kind of research and investigation of technology to take place. You need champions in order to affect that kind of digitalization.
That’s a decision that people make every single year, whether they’re going to spend that money or not. Those are the reasons why they’re underspending. They don’t budget for it. They don’t understand where the spend is going and they don’t really understand what their objective is.
Why do people feel so positive about the future of the workforce? And do we see technology helping to continuously improve that?
There’s no question the younger entrants into the industry are much more technologically savvy than the previous generation. And it’s not just because they’re younger, it’s because technology has evolved at a pace much faster than the technology in the previous generation.
And that’s not to say the previous generation doesn’t know how to do it. They just haven’t leapt from their personal consumer-based technology to a commercial-based technology. But this generation expects that the technology that they have at home will be in the business. If you’re able to provide that kind of access to technology and with the same user friendliness, the same user experience, the same kind of access to data that the younger generation is normally used to, I think that’s very, very promising. The generation that’s coming out of schools today are taught with the best tools that are available. So, they’re expecting those tools in the workplace and they’re looking forward to using that technology as well.
Regarding the overall confidence and optimism about the future of technology in the industry, what would you tell people to take home from this report?
Construction investment in technology is like one step ahead of jewelry in terms of confidence in the investment. However, in the past five, six or so years, or even before, investment in contech has been quite dramatic and quite aggressive. So that is giving everybody the notion that there’s more and more capability that’s coming from a technology perspective into the industry, and the industry will be catching up very, very quickly. Although, there’s still much more to do—say in the manufacturing sector or logistics or distribution, which have very capable systems; construction is still lagging from that perspective. But the future is very bright because of the amount of investment, and there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for further investment to make an impact into this industry.
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