The ConTech Exec
by Robert Zimmerman
Latest episode
Even Your Brightest Engineer Can't Read a Drone Scan
Even Your Brightest Engineer Can't Read a Drone Scan
About this podcast
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
Episodes
The newest 20 of 87 episodes
- Even Your Brightest Engineer Can't Read a Drone Scan · 51 min · Season 3 Episode 2647Even your brightest engineer can't make sense of a drone scan. That's what a CTO told Noa Ouziel, and it became the reason Arbel AI exists. Noa started out in product marketing…
- Who Is On Firewatch? · 47 min · Season 3 Episode 2646A construction site is the most dangerous version of a building, and it's the one with the least fire protection. I sat down with James Pecz, VP of North America at Ramtech. The…
- Bootstrapped with Zebel · 46 min · Season 3 Episode 2645Every estimator is a walking database, and some day that database retires. I sat down with Hamid Hajian, founder of Zebel, who grew up on job sites with his dad, a developer and…
- Never Design Around a Generator You Can't Buy · 51 min · Season 3 Episode 2645Data center equipment lead times are stretching construction schedules, and generators, switchgear, and transformers are where it hurts most. Mike Powers, Co-Founder and CEO of…
- Data Centers: Think Small · 46 min · Season 3 Episode 2644Everybody'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…
- Nobody Reads Your Gantt Chart · 40 min · Season 3 Episode 2644Projects 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…
- The New Age of Power · 43 min · Season 3 Episode 2643Everybody 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…
- Nuclear Visibility · 47 min · Season 3 Episode 2642Every 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…
- Robots? Really? ReFrame Opened My Eyes · 45 min · Season 3 Episode 2642Thirty-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…
- Autonomous Excavators · 40 min · Season 3 Episode 2643There'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…
- Sh*t Rolls Downhill. That's Your Whole Bid Process. · 47 min · Season 3 Episode 2641Owner 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…
- AI Blueprints And As Built Mysteries · 46 min · Season 3 Episode 2639Construction 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…
- Human Genome to Pipefitting? · 49 min · Season 3 Episode 2640Construction fabrication is still riddled with a costly lie: the model is not the workflow. David Basiji explains why the real bottleneck is getting from BIM and CAD into the…
- Paving on Main - Last Notes from Cavtera · 43 min · Season 3 Episode 2638We close out the three-part series with Joe and Ryan from Cavtera, and this is the one that actually answers the question the first two episodes set up. Turns out the code you…
- End Tech Debt · 43 min · Season 3 Episode 2637Part two with the Cavtera guys, Joe Patrois and Ryan Quesnel. Last week we cleared up the vocabulary — what Palantir Foundry actually is, what an ontology is (the nouns and verbs…
- Opening the Palantir Black Box - Cavtera · 44 min · Season 3 Episode 2636The conversation delves into the concept of Palantir Foundry and its impact on construction technology. It explores the challenges of legacy technology, change management, and…
- We Didn't Transform. We Just Digitized. · 45 min · Season 3 Episode 2635Before he was Field COO for public sector at Procore, AJ Waters was an engineer whose actual job on a project was moving RFIs out of his company's spreadsheet and into the…
- Be First To Be Third · 46 minSteve Jones started studying BIM in 2005, back when five people would give you ten definitions of it. Twenty years later he's still doing the same job: finding out what…
- Your CPM Schedule Is a Backwards Pass · 45 min · Season 3 Episode 34Everybody quotes the failure stat. Almost nobody reads it right. Alan Espinoza of Reconstructive AI returns for the full Texas Drive Time conversation, and he opens by reframing…
- No Time To Plan...But Time To Do It Twice · 47 min · Season 3 Episode 2633Your construction schedule is detailed to the hour. Your procurement schedule is two lines on a Gantt chart. That's the problem. Jeff Kaufman, founder of JIT Pro, started as a…
