Bricks And Bytes
by Bricks And Bytes
Latest episode
Microsoft Cut $5 Billion From Data Centre Spending, MEP Contractors…
Microsoft Cut $5 Billion From Data Centre Spending, MEP Contractors…
About this podcast
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.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 377 episodes
- Microsoft Cut $5 Billion From Data Centre Spending, MEP Contractors Lost 15% in a Day, and Accenture Just Entered Construction With 5,000 People. · 23 minMicrosoft Cut $5 Billion From Data Centre Spending, MEP Contractors Lost 15% in a Day, and Accenture Just Entered Construction With 5,000 People. This week’s briefing covers…
- AI Redesigns a 244,000 Sq Ft Hospital in Four Days, Are Architects at Risk? & Snaptrude’s AI Agent Launch · 1 h 18 minCan an owner be their own architect? Altaf Ganihar says owners and developers are now asking Snaptrude exactly that. Alain Waha's answer: the design team's deliverable "ain't a…
- 90% of AI Takeoff Companies Could Disappear, The $3M AI Opportunity & Why Washington Is Broken · 1 h 1 min“Show me you can use these tools to 10x your productivity and you got a job. I don’t care how old you are, I don’t really care what college you went to.” In today’s episode of…
- $600 Million Into Self-Driving Excavators, Harvard’s 10,000-Leader Study, and a $13 Billion Contractor Opens a $50 Million Innovation Lab. · 19 minThis 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…
- Bedrock’s $600M Robotics Bet, 24/7 Construction Sites & Kojo Founder’s $50M Fund · 32 minShould 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…
- How AI Agents Are Changing the Way We Work in Revit and Eliminating Hours of Repetitive Work · 47 minArchitecture 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…
- What Construction’s Top Leaders Are Worried About Behind Closed Doors, the Knowledge Problem Nobody Has Solved, and Why Signed Contracts Are Falling. · 25 minThis 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…
- What Construction AI Is Missing: Connecting the Dots With Knowledge Graphs · 34 minTwelve 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…
- Construction’s 63% Problem, Aramco Under Attack & What Keeps 400 CEOs Awake · 22 minThis 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…
- Origin’s $20M Raise, Construction’s Robotics Problem, Anthropic’s AI Warning & Groundworks Summit · 41 minManufacturing 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…
- AI Robots, Construction's BIG Technology Problem, Drones & the Future of Jobsites · 48 minWhich 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…
- Autodesk’s New AEC Leadership, Schneider’s $22.6B PTC Deal, AI’s $4.2T Revenue Challenge & Construction Conferences · 52 minStartups are paying thousands for AEC conference booths and asking what they actually got for it. AEC conference season is here, and almost nobody we talk to is coming home from…
- AI Could Take 20% Off the Cost of a Building According to MIT. Here Is the Caveat. · 19 minThis week’s briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same uncomfortable gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers. Suffolk…
- Why Construction Procurement Is Broken: The 15–20% Cost, AI Agents & The Future of Buying Materials · 60 minCan a CEO tell you what their company bought last year? In today's episode we have Eldar Sadikov, CEO of Field Materials. He says most contractors can't, and he estimates 15 to…
- Accenture Just Entered Construction. Your Software Bill Is Moving to Per Token. And One 11 Billion Dollar Builder Stopped Innovating on Live Sites. · 21 minThis week's briefing covers four things that landed in the same week, starting with a story about an intern, a spreadsheet and eighteen thousand snags. Gene Hodge is Vice…
- Autodesk’s Next Chapter: Design to Operations, AI Pricing, Miter’s $40M & Kuro’s €10M · 1 h 3 minAutodesk now runs from the first sketch to the maintenance ticket. So who is left to compete? We got back from Autodesk University and put that question to three people this…
- Inside Mortenson’s $10.8B Business: The Bet on In-House Innovation | Gene Hodge · 46 minA few years ago, Mortenson's own leadership group told them they were treating innovation "kind of like a hobby". This year they're No. 10 on ENR's Top 400, running a 90,000 sq…
- Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back. · 14 minAutodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back. This week's briefing comes straight from Autodesk…
- Is Your Construction Data Ready for AI? | The Blueprint for Contractors · 39 min"My data is too messy for AI." We hear it on almost every call. Barry Chiu thinks it's the wrong way round. Consider this a contractor's guide to data and AI. Nobody has clean…
- Three Central Banks, 20 Months of Contraction, and an AI That Just Built a House From a Text Prompt. · 23 minThis week's briefing covers three things landing in the same week that construction leaders need to understand before they plan anything for the rest of the year. First, interest…
- The Human Extinction by AI Debate, OpenAI's Astra Model, $616M AEC Funding & Why AI Data Centers Fuel Inflation · 49 minAnthropic's own alignment lead says there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills us all within a decade. He was backing up a researcher who'd just quit the company over exactly…
- How A Specialty Contractor Became A ConTech Investor | BarrierCube Ventures, Track3D, and the CFO's Vendor Test · 50 min"I think what dies is when you have someone show up and they don't actually understand the problem they're solving and they can't relate to a builder." That's Brett Dahmer, CFO…
- Unusual Partnership Between Two GC's Signals the Future of Construction · 22 minThis week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping industrial construction, supply chain efficiency, and margin health on the ground. For decades, European legacy builders…
- Why Software Costs Rise but Productivity Doesn't, Solow Paradox Explained & How OpenAI Agents Breach Hugging Face · 60 min700 AI agents hacked Hugging Face. They built a secret notice board inside OpenAI's own infrastructure, swapped over 70,000 messages on it, split the work between them and then…
- Boldt VP: The Labour Shortage Is Not Construction's Biggest Problem · 59 min"If you're considered a feature, you're dead." Klas Berghede has spent nearly twenty years at Boldt, a 100% employee owned contractor that has been building since 1889. We asked…
- Site Layout Faceoff, Chinese Hardware Warning, and Largest US Contractor Breached as AI Ransomware Hits Machine Speed · 24 minThis week's briefing covers three shifts reshaping jobsite technology, supply chain security, and risk on the ground. For five thousand years, construction has relied on chalk…
- Bill Gates Warns On Robots By 2030, Meta's AI Wrote 220% More Code And Shipped Almost Nothing, Meta's $18B Settlement, & The First Software Tax In California History · 54 minBill Gates says robots will take construction jobs by 2030. Dustin DeVan offered to bet his entire net worth against it. In this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, Owen, Dustin…
- Robots vs Laser Projection: Who Will Win Construction Layout? · 1 h 10 minFour founders competing in construction layout walked into the same room.Nobody expected them to agree on much.But across the conversation, all four revealed the same thing about…
- The Problem With AI in Construction Is “99% Have No Clue” | HoloBuilder Founder on BuildCrew, Digital Interns and the Future of Estimating · 59 min“We never use the word AI anywhere. You’re saying we’re an AI company, not me.” Mo Akbari-Hochberg built HoloBuilder and sold it to FARO. Now he is back with BuildCrew, a…
- $2 Billion Into Self-Driving Construction Machines in 5 Weeks, Housebuilders Down 12.4%, and the Data Centre Boom Just Hit a Wall That Isn't Money or Power. · 25 minThis week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same week and all point at the same question. Where is the work going next. In the last five weeks more than two…
- The Excavators Operating Without Drivers, Gravis Robotics’ $200M Round & Physical AI’s Breakout Week · 54 minWe spoke to Kevin Peterson this week. He runs the tech at Bedrock Robotics. He told us their control room "looks like StarCraft, actually." You click on an excavator on a screen…
- The GC That Built Its Own Procore | Colin Stoner, Novo Construction · 49 min"Don't build. It's that simple." Strange advice from a man who built his own Procore.In 2011, Novo Construction evaluated Procore and walked away. They built Sentinel instead…
- 88% of Contractors Are at Their Lowest Backlog Since Lockdown. The Other 12% Have Never Been Busier. · 24 minThis week's briefing covers three things that landed in the same fortnight and point in the same direction. First, a closed room in central London. The CTO of DPR Construction…
- AI Price Collapse, Data Center Boom, Japan 1989 Warning, & Why Corporate RFPs Are Broken · 59 min"The US is dangerously close to the brink of being Japan 1989." That is not a hot take from a doom account. That is Patric on this week's Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, laying out why…
- Crewline Raised $7.1M to Put an Autonomous Roller on Every Construction Site in America · 39 min"Everybody thinks that autonomous heavy equipment is commonplace, whereas in fact the adoption is basically zero." Frederik Filz-Reiterdank said that to us from the operator's…
- $45B AI Fund Collapse, S&P Hits $70 Trillion & 0.1% GDP Reality | Can Markets Still Crash? · 38 minA 4x levered AI fund handed its entire public book to Citadel. The S&P 500 crossed $70 trillion days later. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Patric put a date on the next…
- Versatile’s $100M Lesson, Why AI Wrappers Are Dead and the Scope Gaps Killing Contractor Margins · 54 minWe asked Scoreboard AI's Charles Ma what the single most expensive mistake contractors make at buyout is. His answer:"Outsourcing their understanding of the project to their…
- $785 Billion, Autonomous Excavators, and a New Landlord Called BlackRock. · 19 minThis week's briefing covers three things that are already changing the shape of construction, one of them from a dirt road in Texas at 4am. Bedrock Robotics was founded by the…
- Procore’s $845M DroneDeploy Deal, Why Handoff Isn’t a Takeoff Tool and Construction Tech PR · 1 h 0 min$845 million. In cash. That's what Procore just paid for DroneDeploy. We sat down and ran the actual cross-sell math on this deal, and it's a lot steeper than the headline number…
- How Palantir Became Cavanagh Construction’s Operating System | Joe Patrois · 53 min"Construction's never had a software problem. They've had an assimilation problem." That line from Joe Patrois stopped us mid-recording. Joe was there on day one when Palantir…
- Barton Malow CEO Ryan Maibach on AI, Data Centres and the Future of Construction · 1 h 4 min"Have we seen the productivity benefit from that? I think it's reasonable to say that no, no, we haven't." That is Ryan Maibach, President and CEO of Barton Malow, on the…
- Why Contractors Are Finally Gaining The Upper Hand + Data Centers Dropping · 18 minThis week's briefing explores three of the biggest stories shaping construction. First, we examine the first signs that the data centre boom may be beginning to moderate…
- NFL Quarterback Jake Browning, a $2.1B Stadium and the $300K Bid Strategy · 1 h 4 min"I've been cut four times." That is an active NFL quarterback talking. Jake Browning backs up Baker Mayfield at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He also co-owns Sutter Street…
- PR for Construction Tech Explained | What Founders Need to Get Right · 59 min"If you were saying, I'm adding AI to the product or we're now agentic, we now have an agentic AI component, it's not really news." Katie Zeppieri said the quiet part out loud…
- From Palantir to Bricklaying Robots: Inside Monumental’s $32M Raise · 23 minPrototypes and demoware. That was Monumental two years ago, at their $25m Series A. Yesterday they announced a $32m Series B led by Khosla Ventures. In between, their robots laid…
- The Construction Tech Exec Exposing AI Vaporware · 52 min"I can make you something that looks like it's really expensive, but it took me four hours." Dustin Burns, SVP of Technology at McCownGordon Construction, on the software demo…
- 95% of AI Projects Fail. The Data Centre Boom Is Stalling. One Problem Is Behind Both. · 19 minThis week's briefing covers three things every construction leader should understand before they sign off on anything this year. David Gal from Samsara makes the argument that…
- Manhattan Skyscraper Buckling, Trunk Tools’ $70M, Change Management Over Tech & Why Fintech Backs Construction · 1 h 17 min"Real AI is way more about how you do change management than picking the right technology." That is Dr. Sarah Buchner, founder and CEO of Trunk Tools, on this week's Bricks…
- The AI Making Construction Sites Safer · 54 minYou can vibe code software in a weekend. You can't vibe code a decade of safety data. That was the throughline with Ben Leach and Andrew Barron of HammerTech. In an AI era…
- The Three Phases of AI Readiness - How Construction CEO's Can Prepare · 49 min"How much money did we spend last year on small equipment?" That's the one question David Gal, VP of Product & Engineering for ConnectedEquipment at Samsara, says stops most…
