BRICKS & BYTES BULLETIN
INTELLIGENCE FOR CONSTRUCTION LEADERS

THIS WEEK
The Month the Buyer Changed, the Lender Noticed, and AI Got Cheaper – May TEB Roundup

May’s Executive Briefing episodes, recapped in one place: the PE buyer circling your firm, the market split your bank has noticed, the contractor who torched his tech stack, and why AI got cheaper while the bills went up.

THE EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS

Full episode write-up at the bottom↓

Key Takeaway 1:

The new competitive threat in construction is a PE-backed buyer with a checkbook, an AI playbook, and the patience to buy ten firms like yours and run them as one. The firm down the road with better software is the smaller worry.

Key Takeaway 2:

The construction market split is more than a contractor problem – it is a credit problem. When lenders start sorting the industry into growth sectors and shrinking ones, the firms on the wrong side of that line face a different conversation at the bank.

Key Takeaway 3:

 AI got dramatically cheaper per unit over the past two years. But the total bill went up because usage exploded across every tool you already pay for. Watch the aggregate, not the unit price.

7 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION
ON THE RADAR THIS WEEK

If you are heading to Digital Construction Week on June 3rd, come and find me. I am hosting a fireside with Chetan Kotur of Laing O’Rourke that evening. Details are here.

  • Infosecurity Europe, ExCeL London, June 2-4 – connected construction platforms are a growing cyber target. (More)

  • Computex, Taipei, June 2-5 – Jensen Huang keynote; AI chip demand shapes data-center construction pipelines. (More)

  • Digital Construction Week, ExCeL London, June 3-4 – 9,000+ attendees; AI, BIM and robotics. (More)

  • SXSW London, Shoreditch, June 1-6 – 800+ speakers across tech, AI and urban futures. (More)

  • CIOB webinar: Sustainable Construction, June 5 – Net-zero delivery, circular materials and regulatory accountability. (More)

  • Tunnel Construction in India conference, Mumbai, June 1-2 – busy underground market, 18th annual. (More)

  • Fed Beige Book publishes June 4 – Construction credit and pipeline sentiment, twelve US districts. (More)

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FULL EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
The Month the Buyer Changed, the Lender Noticed, and AI Got Cheaper – May TEB Roundup

You have been heads-down on site. Fair enough. But last month moved fast, and four stories came out in our weekly Executive Briefings that are worth going back to. A new buyer circling your firm. A market split your bank has now priced in. A contractor who torched his entire tech stack. And AI is getting cheaper while your bills are going up.

The Buyer With a Checkbook

David Niewiadomski came on the show at the end of April, and he was not there to sell you software. He runs Zero RFI, KP Reddy’s General Catalyst-backed venture that is buying owner’s rep businesses outright and folding them into a single AI-enabled platform.

The same week, E3 Tech, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed joint venture, was doing the same thing in mechanical and electrical subcontracting. Two buyers, two sectors of the market, one thesis: buy the firm, drop AI into the middle of operations, and run the aggregate at a margin a standalone contractor cannot touch.

Niewiadomski said it plainly on the episode: “If you’re not tinkering with AI today, it’s going to be a problem for you in the future.” That was not a warning aimed at individuals. It was a description of what happens to the firms his platform is buying around.

Capstone Partners’ 2026 construction M&A data puts the structural reality behind it: PE buyers are paying a premium because they are not buying one firm, they are buying a portfolio position. If you have not seriously thought about what your firm is worth and who is building the platform it might fit into, April made that question urgent.

Image: Capstone Partners

The Split Your Bank Has Now Noticed

The second story ran across two episodes in early May, and the sharpest line came from Chase Gilbert at Built Technologies, who processes over $200 billion in annual construction spend through his platform: banks are adopting AI faster than construction firms are.

That matters because it changes the information asymmetry. The lender reviewing your draw request, your credit line, your project pipeline is running better data and faster analysis than most contractors are. And they have started using it to sort the market.

The macro that week made the split hard to ignore. UK construction forecast for 2026 was cut from plus 1.7% growth to a 2.5% decline. Same week, Caterpillar reported $63 billion in equipment already on order, up 79% in twelve months. Two numbers from the same industry in the same week, pointing in opposite directions. The data centers piece I ran in April set up the structural argument. The May episode landed the credit consequence: when lenders start pricing the split into their decisions, it changes who gets funded and on what terms before a project ever reaches them.

Cavanagh Killed Their ERP

This is the episode to send to anyone who keeps saying “we’ll fix the tech stack next year.”

Cavanagh is a 350-person Canadian contractor. They put their entire business inside ServiceNow, the platform that runs the CIA’s internal operations, and in doing so killed their dispatch system, their time cards, and their safety software. Incidentally, they are in the process of killing their ERP. Their former head of digital strategy walked me through the whole playbook on the AI for Mid-Size Construction episode.

The contrast that made the episode land: while Cavanagh consolidated onto one platform, Procore spent $11 million acquiring an AI company in January, a bet on integrating more capability into an existing ecosystem rather than replacing it. Two very different answers to the same question about where construction software ends up.

The real question is whether your technology stack will support a scalable, integrated business three years from now. 

Dustin DeVan’s Line on AI Spend

The May 22 episode had Dustin Devan, CEO of Ediphi, and Cameron Page from ClearStory, who has processed $3.5 billion in construction change orders through his platform. The AI spend debate was the sharpest part.

Devan’s line: “Mandating how many AI tokens your engineers burn isn’t a productivity metric. It has nothing to do with outcomes.”

That quote landed because it cuts both ways. If you are measuring AI adoption by usage volume, you are measuring the wrong thing. And if you are not measuring it at all, if you are just paying for features buried inside Procore, Autodesk, or whichever platform renewed last quarter, you are almost certainly spending more than you think.

The episode also ran a proper reality check on construction robotics: what is genuinely deployed on live sites today and what the honest timeline looks like for everything else. The HS2 cost verdict landed the same week: £87.7 to £102.7 billion to complete, first services pushed to 2036, a useful backdrop for any conversation about infrastructure delivery and technology.

The Ground Moved. Did You Notice?

Somewhere in last month’s four episodes is a conversation that is directly relevant to a decision sitting on your desk right now. I want to know which one. Hit reply, and let us know. That is where the real conversation begins


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