Since the COVID-19 pandemic set off shock aves, the construction industry, like many others, has been rocked. There have been limitations of workers onsite, new safety restrictions, delays caused by supply chain issues, layoffs, stalled projects and more.

But the good news is the industry prevailed. After losing 1.1 million construction jobs in the first two months of the pandemic, approximately 931,000 have been recovered already. That number is likely to surpass pre-pandemic levels within the coming months. There are big plans for infrastructure spending and new home construction is also on the rise. These are very positive signals for construction growth moving forward.

To capitalize, contractors should continue to invest in and leverage new technologies. A myriad of products, tools and services are being adopted across the construction industry with great success, and with even more advances are in development. Here are some of the biggest areas where tech innovation is making a substantial impact moving forward.

A New Data-Powered Industry

With such a low rate of digitization, accurate and reliable data has been hard to come by for builders. While preconstruction processes create a wealth of digital data on the front end, most of that data is lost the moment construction begins. Digitizing the physical construction site has always been a massive challenge, which is why builders are still walking sites with paper drawings and highlighters to manually capture the status of construction and report financials to the office. New AI-powered technologies are changing this with mechanisms for automatically collecting, analyzing and generating a wealth of unbiased project data that then can be used to make budget-saving decisions on the current project, as well as smarter estimating decisions on the next project.

Today, a new wave of construction tech that is fueled by reality capture data and powered by machine vision is poised to massively increase the benefit of that data. Many of the top builders benefit from extremely experienced superintendents, foremen and estimators. These are the men and women who can just look at a jobsite or a set of drawings and intuitively know exactly where things stand. In the next decade, a large portion of these high-value people will retire. When they leave, the industry will lose incalculable amounts of hard-won field knowledge, and one of the ways construction executives can close that knowledge gap is by arming their existing teams with better technology.

Where today we lean heavily on our best and most experienced people to provide data from the field based on their vast historical knowledge, in the future we need to supplement that knowledge in the field with technology. This new wave of software systems can answer questions, such as “Where we are meeting, beating or missing schedule or productivity targets?” If contractors understand when and where projects head off track earlier in the process, they can course correct, saving time, money and frustration.

In addition to keeping an extra eye on the schedule and budget for the current job, the tracking data collected by these new software systems can be fed back to estimating teams to ensure the next bid is as tight and competitive as it can be, while still giving project teams room to breathe. Contractors who get ahead and adopt now will not only be winning more work, they will be winning more profitable work.

But what does this mean at the practical level? Take digitizing the jobsite as an example. Photos and videos reduce the need for site visits, which can be a game changer for collaboration and trust building by capturing and delivering a date-stamped, location-based imagery.

Machine vision can stretch these benefits even further. Simply walking the jobsite with a handheld camera or leveraging an existing site camera means the low-value work of continuously monitoring the jobsite is removed. Image recognition and classification software makes it possible to detect installed work and track actual production rates against the budgeted production rates.

Other software systems can read-in that same image data track against the schedule or detect safety hazards, which means the data is captured once and creates multiple different types of value from tracking production, to the schedule, to safety and ultimately budgets. While all of this can happen today, expect it to be the norm within the next few years.

Transformational Processes

Technology will also help transform and modernize building processes. Consider prefabrication. This has been a part of construction for decades, but it’s struggled to take root. With the technologies now available, contractors should reconsider prefab, looking at simple scopes, such as casework or glazing, where a large amount of preparation is done offsite, with components assembled onsite. This is becoming more common across all of the trades. The benefit is that when work is performed offsite, the contractor can control the conditions for employees, eliminating large safety risks and the physical impact to employees. It can also increase schedule certainty.

Another area where technology will prove transformational is with the reuse or repurposing of spaces. Land and buildings are at a premium. As such, existing spaces will evolve over time. But think about how much easier and more cost-efficient projects could be if a renovation team had access to prior site documentation. With blueprints, photos, videos and other information about plumbing, wiring, gas lines and materials preserved in a shareable digital format, tremendous amounts of materials could be saved as fishing expeditions are eliminated. This practice could have a significant environmental impact. The technology is there to make this vision possible, and leveraging it will become all the more important for the collective future.

Additionally, technology increasingly will be used to solve financial issues. Cash flow is a large problem for construction. Trade partners install materials and expending labor daily, but they won’t be compensated for months. Billing is populated weeks before the end of the month, which makes it hard to quantify exactly what should be paid for. When cash is finally released from the owner, a large amount of paperwork is required to make payments to trades, and then suppliers. By providing better tools and more accurate data along with eliminating the need for manual checks through modern sources of documentation, cash will flow to those floating the project much faster.

Growing the Future

Moving forward, the construction industry will experience significant investment from the outside. VC’s are ready to open their pocketbooks to back contech companies that will drive greater efficiency and productivity to building projects while driving down costs.

Construction represents a $1.3 trillion market segment in the U.S. alone, and it’s an industry ripe for disruption. With the upcoming Procore IPO yielding a potential $5 billion exit, on top of Autodesk’s $875 million acquisition of PlanGrid in 2018, the venture community is beginning to recognize that there is money to be made here. They also see willing partners in construction firms that have readily adopted new technologies, with many GCs adding in-house innovation teams to enable them to make the best use of novel tools that help them do their jobs better, faster or easier.

With more dollars coming in, and more companies making products and services specifically for the construction industry, it is poised for a long overdue massive, positive disruption of the industry.