About A.I. Excellence in Construction: Research Briefings
Short, research-driven briefings from Placer Solutions on how A.I. is reshaping construction. Distills key takeaways from the A.I. Excellence in Construction report series with real world use cases, adoption realities, and practical guardrails for scaling responsibly.
Learning Construction: Should New Engineers Still Read the Spec Book?
Episode summary: Three new 2026 studies test whether A.I. makes people lazy learners. This episode walks through what they found and applies it to how construction firms onboard new project engineers, using examples from the 2026 A.I. Excellence in Construction report.
What you'll learn:
- Why people who used A.I. for about ten minutes solved fewer problems on their own and gave up more often, while people asking for hints held steady.
- What a Middlebury experiment found about students who used A.I. as a tutor, and why their gains lasted a week after the A.I. was gone.
- How Fortis used an A.I. onboarding coach to cut new project engineer ramp-up from months to weeks, and why its use tapered off.
- What a rookie PE's first two weeks with a 400-page spec book look like when A.I. explains the spec instead of answering for them.
Who this is for:
- Construction executives, innovation/digital leaders, operations, and IT/security teams who want a pragmatic way to prioritize A.I. pilots.
Full report & free sample: https://www.placersolutions.io/product/agi-in-construction
27 Sept 2026
Model Talk: Which A.I. Model Runs Your Jobsite?
Episode summary: AT&T now routes 45 billion A.I. tokens a day to the cheapest model that meets its quality bar and reports cutting costs by as much as 90 percent, with open models taking a growing share. This episode asks what that shift means for a contractor whose A.I. arrives inside Procore, Copilot, or a startup's product.
What you'll learn:
- Why a large enterprise moved most of its everyday A.I. work onto open models it can run itself, and which parts of that decision transfer to a builder.
- How an owner's "no A.I." clause becomes a hosting decision once a firm can run open-weights models inside its own environment, using Sundt's approach as the example.
- What "USB-C for models" means in practice at Rogers-O'Brien, and why portability at the integration layer decides whether a contractor can ever switch models.
- How the report's rule to tier the work, not the technology, sorts jobsite tasks into the ones that need a frontier model and the many that don't.
Who this is for:
- Construction executives, innovation/digital leaders, operations, and IT/security teams who want a pragmatic way to prioritize A.I. pilots.
Full report & free sample: https://www.placersolutions.io/product/agi-in-construction
21 Sept 2026
A.I. Platform Strategy: Commit, Wait, Bypass, or Build
Episode summary: Three contractors at the A.I. Excellence in Construction Virtual Summit, held in collaboration with AGC of America, explained how they decide which A.I. platforms to commit to, wait on, bypass, or replace with something built in-house. Their answers differ. Their conclusion about which layer a contractor must own does not.
What you'll learn:
- How Cerris scored Copilot, Procore's agents, Autodesk's A.I., and Document Crunch against three questions, and why one firm landed on four different verdicts.
- Why RNGD built a data layer four years before it built an agent, and what a drayage ticket posting itself to an invoice reveals about the order of operations.
- What Zachry means by rent, control, and own, and why decades of operational context is the one thing it will not hand to a platform.
- What all three panelists stopped believing this year about which platform would win, and what replaced it.
Who this is for:
- Construction executives, innovation/digital leaders, operations, and IT/security teams who want a pragmatic way to prioritize A.I. pilots.
From the Builder Track of the A.I. Excellence in Construction Virtual Summit, in collaboration with AGC of America. Panelists: Luke Kotz (Cerris), Will Cotton (RNGD), Ranjeet Gadhoke (Zachry Construction).
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