What Construction’s Top Leaders Are Worried About Behind Closed Doors, the Knowledge Problem Nobody Has Solved, and Why Signed Contracts Are Falling.
This 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 in August and the largest share of firms reporting falling billings since May. Signed design contracts fell to 43.7. Enquiries are still positive at 53.2, which means clients are asking but not committing. AIA describes the index as a leading indicator for non-residential construction nine to twelve months out. What architects are not signing now is work you will not be bidding next autumn. On the other side, JLL puts 317 million square feet of industrial space under construction in the US, up 28.7% on a year ago and the most since early 2024. Same country, same week, two completely different economies.
Then the knowledge problem. There is a chief estimator somewhere who is 63 years old, 30 years in the job, and retires in 18 months. None of what he knows is written down. This week Owen sat down with Zaid Khan and Bogdan Arsintescu, who helped build the Google Knowledge Graph in 2011, to answer one question. What actually is a knowledge graph and why does construction need one. The answer starts with a three-hundred-page spec, an addendum in a different folder, and a door schedule that was never updated. A chatbot finds the spec and answers with confidence. A knowledge graph finds the conflict between all three and cites the clause. The pitch stripped of the buzzwords is this. Become the project historian. Keep the context when the people leave.
Then the Bricks and Bytes Council. Last Tuesday Owen sat in a room with leaders from some of the largest design, engineering and contracting businesses in the UK and the US. Everything is confidential but five themes came through. Design teams are materially smaller than a decade ago for the same work. Contractors are now running AI across drawing sets before they go out, so designers are building the same checks into their own process to catch problems first. Door hardware schedules and lighting schedules, handed to the most junior person in the office, are driving more RFIs than structure on some jobs. Architecture may be going the way of book publishing, more buildings, more architects, a profession hollowing out in the middle. The line that came up more than once from more than one person in the room: we did not even need a tool to solve that. We just had to change the way we think.
This week's episode is sponsored by Buildots, the construction intelligence platform turning site data into actionable insights for over 100 of the largest owners and contractors. Find out how to join them at https://buildots.com/.
Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.
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