Bricks And Bytes

Bricks And Bytes
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A show about construction technology, business, and entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Bricks and Bytes Podcast, where we bring together the worlds of construction, technology, and entrepreneurship. We explore the innovative ideas and groundbreaking advancements that are shaping the future of the industry.

  1. 2 days ago

    $600 Million Into Self-Driving Excavators, Harvard’s 10,000-Leader Study, and a $13 Billion Contractor Opens a $50 Million Innovation Lab.

    This week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at where construction is actually heading. First, Boston. Suffolk, a 13 billion dollar privately held contractor, opened a 50 million dollar innovation facility called 100MAG in Roxbury this week. Inside it sits their in-house design and engineering team, a materials sourcing arm, a venture fund, an accelerator, and AI engineers embedded directly into live project teams. John Fish, who founded Suffolk and has run it for four decades, built the evening around one line. The cost to build a building today is now higher than the value of the finished building. He said it is the first time in his career that has been true. From that he gets to his argument that the next five years will be the most pivotal the construction industry has seen, and that Suffolk intends to be the one doing the disrupting. Then Bedrock Robotics. On Monday the company announced a 600 million dollar raise at a 4.1 billion dollar valuation. The company is two and a half years old, founded by engineers out of Waymo, and retrofits excavators so they dig without anyone in the cab. Total raised since launch is now just under a billion dollars. Kevin Peterson, Bedrock's co-founder and CTO, told Bricks and Bytes the strategy unlocked the round, not the other way round. The plan does not change. More customers, more capable machines, and next year fleets of different machine types working together overnight. The detail that struck Owen most: the data from the sensors is already paying for itself before the autonomy does. Site managers are seeing productivity dips at the start and end of shifts they had no idea existed. Then Harvard. A study covering nearly 10,000 leaders across 108 countries found that the organisations making the most progress on digital transformation are the ones engaging a specific type of employee. Harvard calls them digital wayfinders. They are frequently junior, they are already using AI without asking, and they challenge how things are done out loud. The companies getting somewhere are the ones that have found a way to use them rather than stop them. The authors have three recommendations: candid two-way communication, removing unnecessary bureaucracy while keeping clear guardrails, and giving wayfinders visible sponsorship and a seat in the room where real decisions get made. This week's episode is sponsored by Buildots, the construction intelligence platform turning site data into actionable insights for over 100 of the largest owners and contractors including Turner, Multiplex and Vinci Construction. Find out how to join them at https://buildots.com/lab/global-construction-benchmarks-report/ Also don't forget to check out our other sponsor Miter, the AI-powered operating system built for construction that connects payroll, HR, field operations and job costing in one platform. Today 1 in 50 US construction workers is paid on Miter every week. Learn more at https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=executive-briefing Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

    $600 Million Into Self-Driving Excavators, Harvard’s 10,000-Leader Study, and a $13 Billion Contractor Opens a $50 Million Innovation Lab.

  2. 3 days ago

    Bedrock’s $600M Robotics Bet, 24/7 Construction Sites & Kojo Founder’s $50M Fund

    Should founders take advice from investors who have never run a company? Owen's view on this week's Bricks, Bucks and Bytes was blunt: it's like hiring a personal trainer who has never stepped on a treadmill. Maria Davidson spent eight years building Kojo in what she calls construction's "hard mode". She has now launched Relational Capital, a $50M solo GP fund writing $1M to $5M cheques at pre seed and seed. Also on the show, Bedrock Robotics co-founder and CTO Kevin Peterson on how a company founded in 2024 just raised $600M at a $4.1bn valuation. Operator investors or career VCs. Which have actually been more useful on your cap table? Full episode live on YouTube and Spotify. #vc #constructiontech #aec #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors: Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com  Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:12 Inside Suffolk's 100MAG and why the next five years matter 03:59 Bedrock Robotics raises $600M 08:04 How a two year old company hits $4.1bn, and where the money goes 11:54 Deployment challenges and "the wolves at the door" 16:56 Maria Davidson's $50M fund and why operators make better investors 25:05 Where Maria is investing in construction tech 31:00 One piece of advice for every founder

  3. 6 days ago

    How AI Agents Are Changing the Way We Work in Revit and Eliminating Hours of Repetitive Work

    Architecture firms forget every project the day it finishes. The detail that caused an RFI goes back into the library unfixed, and turns up on the next job with the same problem attached. In today’s episode of Bricks & Bytes, Ross Wagner from Pirros joined us to unpack why it keeps happening, and what an AI project hub actually changes. What we learnt: * Why firms forget every project the day it finishes, and how a bad detail carries its RFI onto the next job * What Pirros does as an AI project hub, and how its AI agent Mira works alongside designers inside Revit * Why quality review belongs in the model as well as the drawing set * The shift in construction tech upstream into design, and the move from point tools towards connected platforms * Lessons from PlanGrid on hiring, building an AEC sales team and go to market through community Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in the comments! #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors: This episode is brought to you by our friends at Miter. If you haven’t heard of Miter, you’re missing out. Today, 2 of every 100 construction workers in the U.S. are paid through their AI-powered platform that connects payroll, HR, field operations, and job costing. And that number is growing fast.  Miter is on a mission to defeat what they call “the Frankenstack”, the tangle of 1980s software, spreadsheets, and paper that every construction back office is familiar with.  Learn why thousands of contractors are running everything from prevailing wage payroll to time tracking to per diems on Miter at miter.com (M I T E R .com) https://www.miter.com/?utm_source=bricks-and-bytes&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bb-sponsorship-q4-2026&utm_content=bb-podcast Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co Archdesk -  “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com  Chapters 0:00 Teaser 0:38 Intro: Ross Wagner, Head of Strategy at Pirros 1:05 Quickfire: are contractors taking control of design? 2:53 Why Ross joined Pirros after PlanGrid and Autodesk 4:06 How to stop knowledge leaving your firm 4:40 What is Pirros? The AI project hub for architects 5:30 Why AEC firms forget every project the day it finishes 7:38 Sponsors 10:43 The biggest problems inside architecture firms 12:20 Startup vs Autodesk: the “say no with pleasure” advice 14:46 Builders vs optimisers: architect and engineer co-founders 16:17 How to measure the ROI of AI in design 18:31 Why AI shouldn’t design construction details 20:15 Mira: an AI agent that works inside Revit 21:55 What a Head of Strategy actually does 22:51 How to know if your strategy is working 25:00 Competitive moat in the age of AI: why context beats code 27:12 How to hire great people (the “no jerks” rule) 28:44 Growing 5x and lessons from PlanGrid 29:56 What’s the end game: acquisition or IPO? 31:02 Construction tech trends: the shift upstream to design 31:57 Platforms vs point solutions 32:46 The three eras of AI: chat, copilot and coworker 33:46 Is AI drawing review enough? Drawings vs BIM models 36:53 How to build a construction tech sales team 37:50 Hiring your first salesperson 38:34 Advice for founders: start with the boring workflow 41:11 Doug Leone’s startup orchestra lesson 41:37 Go-to-market that works in AEC: community 42:43 Software fatigue and change management 44:06 Lessons from Autodesk vs startups 45:49 What’s next for Pirros: quality review and MCP

  4. 24 Oct

    What Construction’s Top Leaders Are Worried About Behind Closed Doors, the Knowledge Problem Nobody Has Solved, and Why Signed Contracts Are Falling.

    This week's briefing covers three things that matter more than the headlines suggest. First, America. The Architecture Billings Index came in at 44.7 in September, down from 47.2 in August and the largest share of firms reporting falling billings since May. Signed design contracts fell to 43.7. Enquiries are still positive at 53.2, which means clients are asking but not committing. AIA describes the index as a leading indicator for non-residential construction nine to twelve months out. What architects are not signing now is work you will not be bidding next autumn. On the other side, JLL puts 317 million square feet of industrial space under construction in the US, up 28.7% on a year ago and the most since early 2024. Same country, same week, two completely different economies. Then the knowledge problem. There is a chief estimator somewhere who is 63 years old, 30 years in the job, and retires in 18 months. None of what he knows is written down. This week Owen sat down with Zaid Khan and Bogdan Arsintescu, who helped build the Google Knowledge Graph in 2011, to answer one question. What actually is a knowledge graph and why does construction need one. The answer starts with a three-hundred-page spec, an addendum in a different folder, and a door schedule that was never updated. A chatbot finds the spec and answers with confidence. A knowledge graph finds the conflict between all three and cites the clause. The pitch stripped of the buzzwords is this. Become the project historian. Keep the context when the people leave. Then the Bricks and Bytes Council. Last Tuesday Owen sat in a room with leaders from some of the largest design, engineering and contracting businesses in the UK and the US. Everything is confidential but five themes came through. Design teams are materially smaller than a decade ago for the same work. Contractors are now running AI across drawing sets before they go out, so designers are building the same checks into their own process to catch problems first. Door hardware schedules and lighting schedules, handed to the most junior person in the office, are driving more RFIs than structure on some jobs. Architecture may be going the way of book publishing, more buildings, more architects, a profession hollowing out in the middle. The line that came up more than once from more than one person in the room: we did not even need a tool to solve that. We just had to change the way we think. This week's episode is sponsored by Buildots, the construction intelligence platform turning site data into actionable insights for over 100 of the largest owners and contractors. Find out how to join them at https://buildots.com/. Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

    What Construction’s Top Leaders Are Worried About Behind Closed Doors, the Knowledge Problem Nobody Has Solved, and Why Signed Contracts Are Falling.

  5. 22 Oct

    What Construction AI Is Missing: Connecting the Dots With Knowledge Graphs

    Twelve months ago, Zaid Kahn said the words "knowledge graph" to us in a Boston office. We nodded. We had no idea what he meant. So we brought him back, with Bogdan Arsintescu, who sat on the original Google Knowledge Graph team and later ran graph systems at LinkedIn and Microsoft. The ask was simple. Explain it like we're five.  A knowledge graph is a set of facts. Subject, predicate, object. "Door 105 has a 45 minute fire rating."  An ontology is the rulebook. Everyone agreeing what every symbol on a drawing sheet means before anyone reads it.  A chatbot context window is a drawing table. If the addendum is in the filing cabinet, it doesn't exist. Bogdan's line of the episode: "Knowledge Graph is just the bullet points." We still don't fully know what ontology means. But we're closer. #constructiontech #ai #aec #preconstruction #bricksandbytesOur Sponsors:Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.coArchdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com Chapters 00:00 Teaser 01:07 What Is a Knowledge Graph? (Explained Like You're Five) 04:10 Knowledge Graph vs Ontology: The Difference Explained 07:56 Sponsor 10:57 Why Construction Needs Knowledge Graphs (Spec vs Drawing vs Addendum) 14:58 Why ChatGPT Can't Do This: Context Windows Explained 19:11 Knowledge Graphs vs LLMs: Why You Need a Vertical AI 26:43 Preconstruction Risk: Why Bids Go Wrong 29:53 The Future of AI in Construction 32:10 How Neuron Factory Works With Suffolk and GCs

  6. 17 Oct

    Construction’s 63% Problem, Aramco Under Attack & What Keeps 400 CEOs Awake

    This week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same underlying question. Are construction businesses actually prepared for what is coming at them? First, the productivity number nobody wants to say out loud. Buildots Intelligence Lab published its first global construction benchmarks report this week, built on data from over 200 live projects across housing, offices, hospitals and data centres. On a typical project, crews deliver 63% of their planned production rate. The best quarter of projects reach 79%, which still means losing a full day every single week. But here is the part that should change how you run your jobs. Every project in the dataset has four consecutive weeks where crews nearly double their output. Same people, same building, nothing new on site. The report cannot tell you why it happens. But it can tell you it happens on nearly every job. The question is whether you are capturing those conditions and repeating them. Download the full report at buildots.com/lab/global-construction-benchmarks-report Then Aramco. One of their pipelines was hit by a drone. The next morning bulldozers were already cutting a new route. They recover from catastrophic events more than six times faster than the industry average. Not because of one thing, but because of a system. Zero hour response teams on site within minutes. Damage assessed before the incident is contained. Ninety percent of repair materials already warehoused locally. Multiple redundancies so no single failure stops the operation. The lesson for construction businesses is not about oil pipelines. It is about whether your contingency plans are a system or just a list. Then KPMG surveyed 400 American CEOs on what keeps them up at night. The answer was not labour, not tariffs, not interest rates. It was cybercrime. 85% say it will affect their company within three years and it ranked above every geopolitical risk. Construction had it ranked 10th. Turner, Kiewit and AECOM have all reported unauthorised system access since July. The lawyers say the most common attack is a fake invoice from a hijacked email with a different bank account number, and after 24 to 48 hours the money is gone. Drop your answers to this week’s questions in the comments of this week’s LinkedIn post.

    Construction’s 63% Problem, Aramco Under Attack & What Keeps 400 CEOs Awake

  7. 16 Oct

    Origin’s $20M Raise, Construction’s Robotics Problem, Anthropic’s AI Warning & Groundworks Summit

    Manufacturing in Europe runs 267 robots per 10,000 workers. Construction runs close to zero. That gap is why we are hosting Groundworks on 11 November. It is also why Origin exists. Yogesh Ghaturle joined Bricks, Bucks & Bytes the day Origin came out of stealth with $20M to put autonomous robots to work on interior construction. Why the last wave of drywall robots failed, and what has changed since The throughput question every contractor asks before anything else US contractors want to rent. European contractors want to buy the outcome. Martin's verdict: commercially viable on big jobs, hard to see on small and medium sites. So, a business or a science project? Full episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments. #constructiontech #ai #aec #bricksbucksandbytes #bricksandbytes Chapters 00:00 Teaser 01:21 Bricks, Bucks & Bytes Podcast 03:07 Groundworks Summit: Construction Robotics Event in London 10:43 AI in Engineering and Construction: Productivity Gains for Small Firms 13:19 OpenAI Recording Device Case and AI Cybersecurity Risks 17:39 Origin Raises $20M: Autonomous Robots for Construction 20:19 Interior Construction Automation: Wall Finishing Robots 21:34 Construction Action Models: How Origin's Robot AI Works 26:13 Commercialising Construction Robots: Pilots, Customers and Throughput 31:29 Hardest Challenges in Building Interior Construction Robots 33:08 Construction Robotics Business Models: Rental vs Outcome-as-a-Service

  8. 13 Oct

    AI Robots, Construction's BIG Technology Problem, Drones & the Future of Jobsites

    Which construction tech is the industry wasting money on? We put that to Stuart Drahota at DPR Construction and he didn't dodge it: progress tracking and deviation analysis. In his words, "we're not quite there yet." His reasoning: there's a real gap between what project teams expect from these tools and the effort it takes to make them work on a live job. Agree, or are we being too harsh?  We also got into: The digital dig board his team is now piloting across 15 DPR projects  Why he thinks progress tracking isn't quite there yet  The Sharpie layout robot DPR patented in 2013 and later licensed to Dusty Robotics  The one tool he'd keep if the whole tech budget vanished Full Episode live on Youtube and Spotify. Link in comments. #constructiontech #realitycapture #aec #construction #bricksandbytes Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:55 Introduction to Stuart Drahota and DPR Construction 03:07 Innovation Metrics and Impact in Construction 04:43 Technology Adoption and Challenges in Construction 08:23 The Digital Dig Board: Enhancing Job Site Communication 13:56 Reality Capture and Drone Technology in Construction 17:23 ROI of Drone Technology and Its Applications 20:25 Common Reasons for Technology Failure on Job Sites 20:57 Sponsors 24:48 Embracing Failure as a Learning Tool 25:38 Winning Support for Technology Adoption 27:34 The Evolution of Layout Technology 29:46 Building a Technology Roadmap 32:22 The Role of AI in Construction 35:32 Innovations in Robotics 39:09 The Future of Construction Technology 45:07 Advice for Newcomers in Construction

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About

A show about construction technology, business, and entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Bricks and Bytes Podcast, where we bring together the worlds of construction, technology, and entrepreneurship. We explore the innovative ideas and groundbreaking advancements that are shaping the future of the industry.

Information

  • Creator
    Bricks And Bytes
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    374
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Bricks And Bytes
  • Show Website
    Bricks And Bytes

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