AutomationTactics is sponsoring the summit on Thursday, October 1, 2026, and joining the Alliance for the year after it. The summit is about the problem we work on every week: most construction firms bought AI licenses and the work never changed.
The ConTech Alliance is a New York nonprofit that connects builders with the people making tools for them. It runs summits, a hackathon, and a calendar of smaller gatherings. Its revenue comes from memberships and sponsorships, and it does not sell software.
Its October summit is called AI Adoption in Construction. Contractors present projects they have already put into use, attendees break into roundtables by role, and two panels address the two questions owners ask most: where to spend the time and money, and whether the output can be trusted.
AutomationTactics is sponsoring the summit and joining the Alliance for the year that follows. Matt Monihan will be there all day. Tickets, the venue, and the full agenda are on the event page.
Most contractors we talk to have already bought AI. Copilot seats went on at the last Microsoft renewal, and someone in estimating pays for ChatGPT on a personal card. Invoices still get keyed in by hand and approved a week later.
Where this usually breaks: an estimator opens Copilot, asks about a change order they know well, gets a confident wrong answer, and does not open it again. The license renews anyway. The process the tool was bought to speed up runs the same way it did before, because nobody changed it.
The survey numbers match what we see. RICS asked more than 2,200 construction professionals in 2025 and found 45 percent of firms with no AI use and about 1 percent that had scaled it across the business. Dodge and CMiC found 86 percent of large contractors expecting AI to give them an advantage, compared with 69 percent of small and mid-sized ones. The smaller firms handle more of their paperwork by hand, and fewer of them expect AI to help with it.
Associated Builders and Contractors puts the industry's hiring need at 349,000 new workers in 2026. The AI that does get used in construction today is almost all office work: invoices, submittal logs, RFP responses, meeting notes. In human terms: every hour of office work that AI takes over is an hour of hiring the firm can skip, and most firms already own the software that does it.
The cause is usually the process, and the research agrees. MIT's Project NANDA looked at 300 corporate AI deployments and found that 95 percent produced no measurable return. The tools that failed were never connected to the way the company already did the work, and in most cases nobody had written that work down. A tool cannot follow steps that only one person knows.
Start here: pick the office process that takes the most hours each week, write down how it runs today, and time it. That page is the first input every AI project needs.
AutomationTactics builds AI capability inside construction companies. We train the people, document how the work runs today, and build a data estate the company owns: its drawings, RFIs, submittals, and records, organized so AI can search them, kept in its own Microsoft 365 tenant. All of it runs on the Copilot, Procore, and ERP licenses the company already pays for. The method is Document-Train-Automate, and the order matters more than the tools.
In theory that takes an afternoon. In practice, week one is spent next to your controller or your estimator while they walk through the job step by step, including the exceptions, and the exceptions are most of the work. The first automation goes live around week twelve. After that we track the hours it saves against the hours the job took before.
Primus Builders, a design-build contractor, won a $405M contract with a Copilot RFP agent built this way and cut invoice processing from 15 to 20 hours a week to same-day. Their data stayed in their own Microsoft 365 tenant.
What this means for you: if you are going on October 1, find Matt and bring the process you wrote down. If you are not, the workbench is free, asks for three details, and takes about a minute.