The ConTech Exec

Robert Zimmerman

Real people. Real work. Real talk. The ConTech Exec features conversations with the executives, founders and operators who build and power the projects behind AI, manufacturing and construction. Every week we go inside the whole chain that gets a big project built: the demand for AI, the energy and power connections, the sites and infrastructure, the construction trades, the technology, the manufacturing of the equipment, and the capital behind it all. No hype and no jargon, just straight answers from people doing the work. Your host is Robert Zimmerman, who has 35 years in commercial construction as a contractor, general contractor and subcontractor. He is the author of Critical Path and runs Stentorian Research, which tracks whether large capital projects can be delivered. New conversations every week. Website: https://contech-exec.com Stentorian Research: https://www.stentorianresearch.com Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBCjFumYpr3f1X1wry8rO_A

  1. 3d ago

    Data Centers: Think Small

    Everybody's building data centers the size of a small city. What if the better answer is a lot smaller? This week I sat down with Meltem Ballan, CEO and co-founder of Concrete Engine. She started her career as a pattern recognition engineer, worked on NATO projects, studied the brain, and spent time at General Motors. Now she's building distributed AI "factories" that are small, modular, and placed where the power and land already exist. This one is about where AI and construction meet. I want my construction folks to see a different model than the giant mission-critical build. What we get into: Why the big cloud companies have used up most of the computing power, and what that means for researchers and startupsDistributed AI factories: data centers of 10 megawatts or less, linked togetherEmpty office floors, grain elevators, and farmland as places for data centersCutting build costs with containers, insulation, and older generatorsWhy power price isn't the only bottleneck, and why construction cost matters just as muchWhat construction workers and local communities get out of it, beyond a few jobsFarmers owning their own dataMeltem's take on open-source AI tools going closedSmaller, local, and built with the community instead of dropped on top of it. Find Concrete Engine at concreteengine.com Connect with Meltem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meltemballan/ Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  2. 6d ago

    Nobody Reads Your Gantt Chart

    Projects don't blow up in one big moment. They drift. The master schedule says one thing, the job site is doing another, and nobody finds out until somebody walks into the Monday meeting and starts shouting. This week I sat down with Carlos Carvalho of Aphex, calling in from London. Carlos started out with Costain on Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) and HS2. He found the same old spreadsheets running some of the biggest jobs in the world. So he and his founding team built a planning tool for the people actually building the job, not the people reporting on it. We get into: Why a spreadsheet is where a plan goes to dieKeeping the master schedule and the daily field plan from drifting apartCatching delays the next day instead of weeks laterTalking into your phone instead of typing up a daily report at the end of a long shiftLanding a $6 billion job as your third customer, and the hair it cost himWhy data won't replace experience, and why no decision is sometimes worse than a bad oneCarlos is moving his family to Toronto in January to build out Aphex in North America. He showed his wife the city in July at 35 degrees. January is looking more like minus 25. Good luck, brother. Texas is always an option. Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  3. Sep 21

    The New Age of Power

    Everybody thinks you plug these AI chips in like a toaster, flip the switch, and off it goes. It doesn't work that way. The new AI chips don't pull steady power. They spike and drop many times a second. Michael Wood III of DG Matrix tells me that at big-campus scale, those swings are cracking turbines, shearing generator shafts, and frying backup power gear in days to weeks. He says that problem has gone from theory to reality. This one's a bit of a shift for me. I usually sit down with software founders. But the AI buildout is running into a physical wall, and I want my AEC folks to see the hardware that's out there, not just the same system that gets drawn the same way on every job. DG Matrix builds what's called a solid state transformer. A regular transformer is a big hunk of iron, copper, and steel: one voltage in, one voltage out, about the same thing Tesla and Edison were putting in the ground. Their version uses power electronics instead, and it takes power from several sources at once (the grid, batteries, on-site generators, backup gensets) and sends it out to several loads. Michael says one unit does the work of 10 to 15 separate pieces of gear. What we get into: Why the big data center builders aren't waiting on the grid. They're making their own power on site and leaving room for the utility to tie in later.Same hardware on every job. The differences get set up in the software, not rebuilt in the field.Permitting and certification on gear the permit office has never seen before. Michael also breaks a little news about their testing lab.Lead times. Michael says they're typically delivering in five to six months.Skilled labor. He says 80 to 90 percent of the system gets built in the factory, so the site work comes down to cable terminations and commissioning.Texas, ERCOT, Senate Bill 6, and whether a data center can be a good neighbor to the grid instead of a risk to it.What these projects owe the ratepayer and the town they land in.Small modular data centers, and the substations around the country that still have power available. You can throw $700 billion at a problem, but somebody still has to make it, ship it, set it, connect it, commission it, and service it for the next 20 to 30 years. Electricians coming up right now, pay attention to this one. Find DG Matrix at dgmatrix.com. Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  4. Sep 21

    Nuclear Visibility

    Every project management software out there promises "real-time visibility." Hussain Arwani was managing 15 to 20 nuclear construction projects at once, and he'll tell you straight: he didn't have it. When the boss asked for a status, the honest answer was "let me get back to you." So he built Masaro. Here's the idea. Superintendents and foremen already talk their updates all day, in phone calls, schedule meetings, and end-of-shift reports. The supers Hussain interviewed told him it eats hours of their day. Masaro lets them say it once, into their phone. The update is written out as they speak, lands on a dashboard, and moves the schedule in P6 or Microsoft Project. Anything that pushes the critical path gets flagged for the project team to approve first. The schedule doesn't get to run off on its own. In this episode we get into: Why most construction software gets built for the office (hint: the field doesn't hold the budget)Whether the contract schedule is a plan or a piece of leverage. I've called it fiction. Hussain was more polite.Why everybody wants the real-time truth from the jobsite, right up until they get itThe number I think matters most: how long it takes to get from "we have a problem" to somebody actually doing something about itWho owns the project data, and why in nuclear the answer is short: the owner owns all of itWhy a pen and a notebook on the dash of my truck is still the best cybersecurity out there The truth will set you free. It'll piss you off first. Masaro.io is now out of stealth, If you back construction tech that starts in the field instead of the corner office, he's worth a call. Find Hussain: masaro.io | Hussain Arwani on LinkedIn Real People. Real Work. Real Talk.

  5. Sep 21

    Robots? Really? ReFrame Opened My Eyes

    Thirty-five years in this business and I've never seen this career path: DARPA robotics, then years leading Amazon's robot arms that pick and pack everything you order, then… go build houses. Felipe Polido, co-founder and head of technology at Reframe Systems, did exactly that. The plans an architect hands you are a rough recipe. Where the outlet goes, sure. How the wire runs, where the staples land, what gets drilled first — that's left to the trades to figure out in the field, on every single house, every single time. Reframe's answer isn't a magic wall panel that clicks together. It's software that generates the actual build instructions, then prints them right on the lumber and the sheet goods. The stud tells you what it is. The subfloor shows you where the light goes. The electrician looks up and there's one hole, already drilled, right where the wire runs. We get into what the robots do and don't do (the dull, dirty, dangerous framing work — not the finish carpentry), how a machine deals with twisted grade-two lumber (a real carpenter still sorts the pile first, and I had opinions about that), why they build with the same materials as everybody else instead of chasing a venture-backed miracle product, and how a three-story triple-decker went from crane on Tuesday to a building on Friday. And then the honest part. Even with a factory that keeps getting faster, Felipe says the things that could stop them cold are the same things that have stopped all of us: permitting, foundations, and inspectors who read the code a little differently in every town. Fire, apparently, spreads differently from municipality to municipality. Felipe's team is moving out of a 17,000-square-foot pilot facility into a building roughly seven times that size, and they're going from signed lease to operational in about seventy days. Ask a factory owner how easy that is. Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.

  6. Sep 21

    Autonomous Excavators

    There's an excavator loading trucks on a live job site right now with nobody in the cab. Not a demo. Not a parking lot test. A paying job with 1.2 million yards of dirt to move, and that's just phase one. Rachael Ferrera leads innovation at Zachry Construction. Zachry, Sundt Construction and Champion Site Prep are the first three contractors to put Bedrock Robotics' fully autonomous excavators to work on real projects. Rachael and I met at ENR FutureTech and have been trying to get this conversation on the calendar ever since. Turns out she was a little busy. So I asked the first thing any field guy would ask: what does the crew think? Her answer was honest. The early feedback from the field, which she says they expected, was "that's not as fast as a human." She's fine with that. Speed wasn't the line they just crossed. Running safely with an empty cab was. Speed comes next. In this episode we get into: How Zachry is measuring the machine: one autonomous excavator working next to human crews on the same job, moving the same dirtWhy they bid the job with people only and added the machine afterThe real labor problem, which isn't empty seats but the decades of skill that are hard to replaceRemote sites, 12-hour shifts, months away from family, and where a night shift with no operator could fitWhy schedule and safety outrank price on the big data center builds, and how strange that feels coming from low-bid highway workWhat separates the tech companies that make it in construction from the ones that never owned a pair of bootsWhat she wants next: a whole crew of machines you hand a goal to, not a list of instructions. I really respect the work: it took hundreds of calls, texts and meetings to get one machine on site. It also took a field crew already working six days a week. The technology is the headline. The people who made room for it are the story. Real People. Real Work. Real Talk.

  7. Sep 14

    Sh*t Rolls Downhill. That's Your Whole Bid Process.

    Owner hires an architect. Architect draws something beautiful. GC bids it out with two weeks and zero contact with the person who drew it. The trades get three days and a set of drawings with the RFIs still baked in. Then everybody acts surprised when the change orders start. Viyas Sundaram, CEO of STACK Construction Technologies, calls it what it is on this episode. His words: "Stuff rolls downhill in that configuration." (He cleaned it up for us. Then he didn't.) Viyas started as free labor on his immigrant parents' dream home, ran GoCanvas through its sale to Bluebeam's parent company, and took over STACK in March. His argument is that the funnel doesn't just dump risk on the trades, it throws away the most valuable knowledge on the project: how the thing actually got built. Robert's scrubber story, where an architect walked him into a room with concrete on all six sides and pointed, is the whole problem in one anecdote. Also in this one: Why Viyas says the trades are "in the business of getting shit done," not bidding, and why nobody became a carpenter for their Excel skillsThe speed-versus-accuracy fight in AI takeoffs: big contractors carry buffer to absorb an 80% answer; the three-person shop on thin margins can't"Construction is the art of layering on top of imperfections," and why the trades run out of layers firstWhy an "AI" sticker on the box impresses nobody in the fieldData ownership: STACK's stance that your own project history should train your estimates, not public data, unless you opt inRobert's pushback on "value engineering" (there's no such thing; call it cost engineering)Viyas's take on where it all ends: when the job site feeds back to the drawings, "there is no pre when it's a loop"If you've ever been handed a bid package with a question you already knew the answer to, this one's for you. STACK: stackct.com. Viyas Sundaram is on LinkedIn.

  8. Sep 7

    AI Blueprints And As Built Mysteries

    Construction AI is moving from hype to real operational leverage, and Raymond Zhao thinks the biggest unlock is not replacing engineers, but giving them a smarter assistant that catches problems before they become RFIs, change orders, and field delays. Raymond, co-founder of Structured AI, joins Robert to explain how agentic AI reviews drawings, detects cross-disciplinary inconsistencies, and flags code issues inside complex Revit and BIM workflows—without taking over professional liability. They discuss why Raymond left architecture, how Structured AI is improving construction quality control, why AI adoption depends on change management, and what it means to treat a building set like an intelligent asset you can actually ask questions of. This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in architecture, engineering, construction, AI adoption, and the future of infrastructure. Raymond Zhao is the co-founder of Structured AI, a construction AI company helping engineers and builders detect issues faster, reduce review burden, and improve drawing QA.

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About

Real people. Real work. Real talk. The ConTech Exec features conversations with the executives, founders and operators who build and power the projects behind AI, manufacturing and construction. Every week we go inside the whole chain that gets a big project built: the demand for AI, the energy and power connections, the sites and infrastructure, the construction trades, the technology, the manufacturing of the equipment, and the capital behind it all. No hype and no jargon, just straight answers from people doing the work. Your host is Robert Zimmerman, who has 35 years in commercial construction as a contractor, general contractor and subcontractor. He is the author of Critical Path and runs Stentorian Research, which tracks whether large capital projects can be delivered. New conversations every week. Website: https://contech-exec.com Stentorian Research: https://www.stentorianresearch.com Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBCjFumYpr3f1X1wry8rO_A

Information

  • Creator
    Robert Zimmerman
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    83
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Robert Zimmerman
  • Show Website
    The ConTech Exec