When people hear “construction technology,” they often think artificial intelligence, humanoid robots and the like. But is that futuristic, Jetsons-esque imagination starting to fade as more people in the industry begin to actually understand what contech is—and actually like it? Kris Lengieza, global technology evangelist at Procore, sat down with Construction Executive to give a year-end review and 2026 forecast on the construction technology market: how most construction companies are using AI, where AI still falls short and some favorite trends among contractors.
What are some of the trends/patterns you saw this year as they relate to construction technology?
When we were coming into 2025, we were thinking about the things that were going to have a large impact in the industry. I think we were scratching the surface on AI in those conversations, but that paid dividends much larger than many of us expected. The advancements in that space have just been so incredibly voluminous and fast that it has given us a lot of things to talk about. And I think when we talk about AI everybody goes right to Chat GPT and the LLMs, but there’s a lot more to that.
Procore spent all of last year doing research on our The Future State of Construction report—a five- to eight-year outlook on Contech. Some of the themes popping up were automation and augmentation—whether through AI agents or robotics—and I think we’ll only see them continue to accelerate in 2026. The good news there is that, when we surveyed construction leaders in 2024, 55% believed that [that type of tech] is really going to change the way that we work moving forward. That number has likely grown significantly in the past year. I think a lot of this automation and augmentation can make the industry a lot safer; it can allow people to actually spend the time on the work that they really, really want to do, which is actually building. We can automate a lot of those dull, boring, dirty, dangerous tasks. I think that’s what we’re going to see pulling into 2026 and we’re going to see a bigger payoff.
Are there any specific products you have seen throughout the broader industry that you think will become more mainstream in 2026?
There’s no doubt that we are going to see construction specific agents. You’ll see people start to really take advantage of things like agent builders and programs to use really specific industry knowledge and data sets to accelerate workflows. And they’ll be trained to do things that we know that people need to do on a jobsite everyday. A great example: Nobody went to school to be a civil engineer or a construction manager to process submittals. It’s a paperwork process that’s just incredibly intensive. It’s boring, but it has to get done. Those are things that are ripe for automation via agents.
The conversation I have with leaders at construction companies is they’re all trying to figure out what practical applications they can start with. It’s no longer a question of if they’ll use them; it’s how. Where it used to be a $100,000 to have a Boston Dynamics robot dog, now you can buy a similar quadruped robot at like $10,000 . And the integration at the software level, how much technical knowledge you need to have, is significantly changing as well.
People are realizing that it’s incredibly important to have really good data. That’s probably the thing that holds the industry back in some cases from being able to get the insights that we want. That’s where we are going to see the use of large language models that are really good at looking at large, structured data sets.
So, the technology is there for the mass adoption of these tools. The culture and the technical knowledge I think is what has to evolve very, very quickly, which is why I think you’re going to end up seeing a ton of upskilling in our space, which is really good because I think it allows us to bring in a lot of talent to the industry. We will probably see a broader workforce come into construction, and I think we’ll see those who are here really work on upskilling their talent to have the skills around these technologies that we need.
Where and/or how does a smaller contractor start to successfully create and implement an AI agent? How can a larger company adopt these AI agents with regulation/security in mind? How can they be sure that the data is being analyzed properly and safely?
I think of it as three buckets.
The first bucket: A small contractor 100% focused on building, but that wants to put these type of tools in the hands of its people because it’s going to help them get their job done. For those people, they have to rely on the technology vendors that they are already working with. A great example of this is that we’ve built out-of-the-box agents to do very specific workflows that we know are common across all of construction: RFI creation, daily log summary, submittal review, etc.
If you’re a smaller contractor that doesn’t have a lot of resources, you can still take advantage of those things today. Use the things that’s inside of the tech stacks that you already have. There are great LLM AI capabilities inside of Microsoft and Google. They are great for your day-to-day—summarize my emails, help me schedule meetings. They should be using those things because they’re probably baked into their tech stack already.
The middle bucket: People who have some technology already and more specific use cases that they want to tackle. This company will definitely be building their own processes and workflows in something like an agent builder. But they might also want to be able to integrate those agents across platforms. It’s not a completely custom agent that they’re building. It’s doing specific tasks based on data sets that it has access to, but it’s also within a very trusted environment for them.
The third bucket: Your larger, national and/or international companies. Now you’re talking about getting into a world where they are probably building their own agent orchestration platform, which may be something that is integrating into a program like Procore, but also many other systems because they’ve got their own custom data lake already built. They’ve invested a lot more in the infrastructure and they want to do much more advanced tasks. This is not about necessarily just helping to automate a submittal process. This is trying to help automate job set up, reviewing financials, maybe time sheets which are in your HR system. How do we reconcile all of those things? Maybe they’ve gone right to Chat GPT for an enterprise license or an open AI and are building out their own workflows inside of those systems that go across many other systems.
Those are the varying stages, but the one thing that’s consistent across all three of them is it has to be something that your people will trust. If they don’t trust it, they won’t use it. And it’s very hard to earn construction professionals’ trust. So, the change management or the rollout of these things is really, really important. It’s okay to experiment. It’s okay for things to not go right, but don’t roll things out to the entire organization until you have a level of confidence.
How can construction companies get ahead of the ban of Chinese-manufactured drones on federal projects yet still operate within their own means?
That’s a really interesting situation and I think what it all comes down to is truly understanding where your data is going and how it’s being captured and where it may end up. We just talked about AI and agents—It’s the same conversation there. You have to understand where your data’s going to go and what’s going to happen with it because it is an asset to you. And so when we talk about drones and robots, the reason that the price point is coming down on robots is there are a lot of international-based companies that have been developing this technology to drive the pricing down.
But the reality of it is, at the end of the day, I think understanding the control processes of where the data actually goes and gets processed is really important. And then you choose to work with a partner that you know where your data is going and who you trust.
If you just look at reality capture as a whole here—drones, robots walking around the jobsite, humans walking around the jobsite—there’s not going to be a slowdown in capturing photo and image and video of your jobsite. It’s only going to accelerate. We’re going to see more wearables with cameras in them. We’re only going to see more and more digital capture of the jobsite through photo and video than we’ve ever seen before.
So as just a general statement, whether it’s drones, whether it’s agents, I think we do have to be more aware of where the data is going, especially based on the project. You need to be a good steward of the data for the project, for the owners, for the others that are involved and for your own company.
How will the development of construction technology affect the broader construction economy in 2026?
These high-tech industries, which are investing a tremendous amount in building right now, are really pulling the industry forward. It’s megaprojects, it’s battery plants, it’s data centers. All of these things are providing more backlog than most companies ever had. That’s why I think the confidence is there because there is a tremendous amount of investment in that infrastructure.
The technology that is coming to our industry is finally coming into its own in many ways; it’s going to start to pay down some of what we talk about in The Future State of Construction report: How do we actually influence the productivity of our industry? How do we finally make a dent in that 28% of rework? I think people are feeling good about what they’re seeing with construction technology that we’re actually starting to take a big bite out of that apple.
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