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.

A.I. Excellence in Construction: Research Briefings is a technology podcast hosted by Nate Fuller, with 25 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Nate Fuller hosts A.I. Excellence in Construction: Research Briefings, a technology show with 25 episodes published.

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  Episode #27

  Learning Construction: Should New Engineers Still Read the Spec Book?

  Oct 2, 202619 minS2026

  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

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  Episode #26

  Model Talk: Which A.I. Model Runs Your Jobsite?

  Sep 27, 202620 minS2026

  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

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  Episode #25

  A.I. Platform Strategy: Commit, Wait, Bypass, or Build

  Sep 21, 20265 minS2026

  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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  Episode #24

  Pulled in Four Directions: Who Sits in the Middle of Your A.I. Strategy

  Sep 10, 202620 minS2026

  Episode summary: Vendors, CEOs, IT directors and project managers each want something different from A.I., and construction firms are getting pulled four ways at once. Builders in the Placer Solutions A.I. peer groups describe what happened when a consultant's central hub pitch met 30-plus disconnected systems, and what actually moved things forward. What you'll learn: - Why a third-party A.I. hub pitch stalled at one heavy civil contractor, and what the firm built in its place after an ownership change put every employee in the stakeholder seat. - How a former-project-manager business solutions team let IT step back to governance while operations people evaluated the tools. - What a strategic initiatives director did when executives split between "use A.I. for everything" and "nobody will learn anything," and why an outside framework broke the deadlock. - Why two field tools that worked perfectly in the office never reached a single technician, and the field-champion rule one MEP contractor adopted as a result. Who this is for: - Construction executives, innovation/digital leaders, operations, and IT/security teams navigating A.I. adoption decisions. Full report & free sample: https://www.placersolutions.io/product/agi-in-construction Learn about the peer groups: https://www.placersolutions.io/peer-groups

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  Episode #23

  Builder Builds: The Seven-Day Dashboard

  Aug 18, 20265 minS2026

  Episode summary: A superintendent with no coding background built a live, multi-project risk dashboard in about seven working days. A VP of construction cut a month-end reporting cycle from ten hours to 45 minutes. Both stories come from construction leaders in the Strategic A.I. Peer Groups for Builders. What you'll learn: - How a superintendent who had never written code shipped a live risk dashboard scoring schedule, financials, quality, and safety across four divisions, and surfaced 200-plus open RFIs nobody had aggregated. - Why the strongest build in the group deliberately removed A.I. from the finished product and shipped as a plain website instead. - How a VP of construction got a month-end consolidation from ten hours to 45 minutes, build time included, and how he spot-checked it before trusting it. - What a senior operations manager walked out with after a one hour session run purely to show non-technical people what an agent is. Who this is for: - Construction executives, innovation/digital leaders, operations, and IT/security teams navigating A.I. adoption decisions. Full report & free sample: https://www.placersolutions.io/product/agi-in-construction Learn about the peer groups: https://www.placersolutions.io/peer-groups

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