Bricks And Bytes

A show about construction technology, business, and entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Bricks and Bytes Podcast, where we bring together the worlds of construction, technology, and entrepreneurship. We explore the innovative ideas and groundbreaking advancements that are shaping the future of the industry.

Bricks And Bytes is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 359 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Bricks And Bytes, a business show with 359 episodes published.

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  Bricks And Bytes

  Inside Mortenson’s $10.8B Business: The Bet on In-House Innovation | Gene Hodge

  Sep 29, 202646 min

  A few years ago, Mortenson's own leadership group told them they were treating innovation "kind of like a hobby". This year they're No. 10 on ENR's Top 400, running a 90,000 sq ft R&D facility and about to launch a joint venture with Goldbeck. So we asked Gene Hodge, their VP of I4 and Innovation, how he proves the ROI on all of it: "I think anyone asking what's the ROI on innovation is not interested in innovating, most likely." CFOs, we'd love to hear you push back on this one. #construction #constructiontech #aec #ai #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors: BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com 00:00 - Teaser 00:43 - Intro 01:36 - Who is Gene Hodge & Mortenson Overview 02:31 - Quick-Fire Questions: Builder vs Technologist 03:10 - Sponsors 06:19 - Is Most Construction Tech Worth the Money? 06:49 - How Has the Jobsite Changed Since 2005? 07:43 - The Reality of AI on the Construction Site 08:29 - Autonomous Equipment & Robots in 5 Years 09:30 - What Actually Moves the Needle on Projects 10:04 - Mortenson's In-House R&D & Innovation Spending 11:39 - Data Sovereignty: Which Tech Mortenson Refuses to Buy 12:33 - Goldbeck Joint Venture & Industrialised Construction 14:57 - Real-Time Jobsite Visibility vs Manufacturing 16:03 - Standardisation vs Bespoke Client Architecture 17:27 - Data Centres & the Hyperscaler Effect 18:56 - Industrialised Construction Across Resi & Defence 21:19 - Day-to-Day Role & The ROI of Innovation 23:04 - 30 Years After VDC: Why Has Productivity Stagnated? 25:35 - Lessons from 2003: 18,000 Punch List Items on Paper 28:29 - Precast Duct Bank Innovation 30:24 - Building a Corporate Culture of Innovation 32:38 - BLUvera: Scaling Offsite Manufacturing 34:38 - Redesigning the Jobsite Trailer & Field Wellbeing 36:41 - AI Hype vs Real Jobsite Workflows 38:46 - Machine Learning in Pre-Construction & Estimating 40:44 - Measuring AI ROI & Enabling Growth 41:49 - How to Pitch Tech to Mortenson 42:57 - What Keeps an Innovation VP Up at Night 45:19 - Cross-Industry Collaboration & The Future Contractor Model 48:19 - The #1 Tech for 2035: Generative Design & Real-Time Costing

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  Bricks And Bytes

  Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back.

  Sep 21, 202614 min

  Autodesk Just Closed the Loop From Design to Operation. The RFI Is Being Erased. And the Master Builder Is Coming Back. This week's briefing comes straight from Autodesk University in Las Vegas, the biggest technology conference in the AEC industry, where Owen was invited as part of the media and analyst cohort. Three things stood out above everything else. First, agents. Autodesk showed agents checking submittals against specifications, comparing subcontractor bids against scopes of work, and tracing the impact of a single RFI through a building model and into the project schedule. But the more important point came from Andrew Anagnost, CEO of Autodesk. He said the agents will get so smart that the whole concept of an RFI gets erased over time. His aim is to spot the problem while the design is still being made so the RFI never happens. His line on what comes next was direct. Transparency is coming for AEC whether AEC likes it or not. The catch, and it is the same one we keep coming back to, is that every demo on that stage worked because drawings, model and schedule all sat in one connected place. Most firms listening to this are not there yet. Second, the platform war. In a live keynote demo a planner, an architect and a civil engineer each worked on the same project from one set of data, carried all the way through from design into construction. That is Autodesk Forma's core argument against Procore. If the design already lives in Autodesk, why move it somewhere else to manage the build. The MaintainX acquisition for 3.6 billion dollars closes the final gap. Design in Autodesk, build in Autodesk, operate in Autodesk. Once an owner is on the platform they can mandate it across their entire supply chain. Several Procore customers at the event said they were looking at making the switch. Third, the master builder. Anagnost said Autodesk set out over a decade ago to automate the making of the model and they are very close. His line was that the act of creating a model is not where the value is created. More people at this year's conference than ever before said the industry is heading back to the master builder, the model where one firm both designs and builds, before architect and contractor became separate jobs. Owen argued that exact point on the show back in April. It is no longer a fringe view. Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

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  Bricks And Bytes

  Is Your Construction Data Ready for AI? | The Blueprint for Contractors

  Sep 15, 202639 min

  "My data is too messy for AI." We hear it on almost every call. Barry Chiu thinks it's the wrong way round. Consider this a contractor's guide to data and AI. Nobody has clean data at the raw level. Not one contractor. You can't know how bad yours is until it's all in one place and you can put the systems side by side. When you find that job numbers don't match across two systems, that's your first win, not a setback. His line on it: "you're already a step ahead of a lot of people, because people are not even aware of how bad the data is." Waiting until your data is clean means waiting forever. In today's episode of Bricks & Bytes, we sit down with Barry Chiu, CEO and co-founder of Kroo, to unpack why the obsession with "clean data" is holding contractors back from using AI. Full episode out on YouTube and Spotify! Link in comments. #construction #constructiontech #ai #aec #bricksandbytes Our Sponsors: BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com 00:00 Intro 01:12 How the company grew and where it is now 03:39 What AI actually does in construction tech today 06:54 Why construction data is useless without context 09:13 Connecting data across your project systems 10:08 Sponsors 13:09 Real customer examples of unified project data 15:33 Why construction data management is so hard 18:05 AI readiness: what you need in place first 23:24 How to build a strong construction data foundation 24:37 Data permissions and security in construction software 26:24 Should you use third-party data tools? 28:41 Why subcontractors are winning with tech 29:59 Data sovereignty and competitive advantage explained 31:07 How to get real value out of your data 32:59 Questions to ask a software vendor before you buy 34:52 What's next for Crew and AI in construction

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  Bricks And Bytes

  Three Central Banks, 20 Months of Contraction, and an AI That Just Built a House From a Text Prompt.

  Sep 12, 202623 min

  This week's briefing covers three things landing in the same week that construction leaders need to understand before they plan anything for the rest of the year. First, interest rates. The European Central Bank raised rates for the second time this year on the tenth of September, to two and a half percent, with markets now pricing more than three further rises over the next twelve months. The US Federal Reserve decides on Wednesday the sixteenth, with traders putting the chance of a rise at around seventy percent. The Bank of England decides the day after, and is expected to hold at three point seven five percent. A hold is not a cut. The scheme that only works if rates come down is still waiting. And the thing pushing rates up, energy, is the same thing pushing material costs up. Construction takes the cause and the cure at the same time. Then the numbers. UK construction has now shrunk for twenty consecutive months, with housing falling to its weakest reading in August. Eurozone construction has contracted for fifty two months in a row, with France posting its steepest fall since lockdown. In the US, the chief economist at Associated Builders and Contractors said the increase in non-residential spending in July was entirely due to data centres. Take them out and non-residential is at its lowest since September 2023. One type of building is holding up the entire market on both sides of the Atlantic. Then OpenAI released a model called Astra on the third of September. In the launch demos it opened a 3D modelling tool, built a house, and exported it into a game engine you could walk around in. It rebuilt the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco overnight from old drawings and photographs. A post on LinkedIn this week asked the question nobody has a clean answer to yet. If the model can produce the design, what is the architect for? The comments split five ways, and none of them are comfortable. Drop your answers to this week's questions in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.

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  Bricks And Bytes

  The Human Extinction by AI Debate, OpenAI's Astra Model, $616M AEC Funding & Why AI Data Centers Fuel Inflation

  Sep 11, 202649 min

  Anthropic's own alignment lead says there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills us all within a decade. He was backing up a researcher who'd just quit the company over exactly that. On this episode of Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we read the entire doomsday scenario out loud: the data centres, the autonomous research, the whole thing. Then we picked it apart. Martin's take: it's a fairy tale that conveniently justifies more regulation. Dustin's take: the AI can't even build its own infrastructure without us, so who's actually building the robots to run it?Bernie Sanders wants to ban superintelligence outright. Anthropic's own safety lead admits nobody has a plan to stop it either way. Full breakdown in the episode.. #ai #bricksbucksandbytes #constructiontech #bricksandbytes Chapters 00:00 Intro01:16 AI Extinction Risk: Are We Really in Danger? 04:19 How AI Could Actually Wipe Out Humanity 07:18 AI vs Architects: The Commoditization Threat 10:18 Can AI Ever Be Truly Creative? 13:11 AI, Laziness and the Erosion of Critical Thinking 16:12 OpenAI's Astra: Designing Full Homes with AI 27:38 $616M Funding Boom in AEC Startups 30:34 Why Foundational Models Threaten Construction Startups 33:17 VCs Pile Into Physical AI and Robotics 35:57 Europe's Construction Industry in Freefall 37:50 Rising Interest Rates Crush UK Housebuilders 41:25 AI, the Fed and the Next Economic Crisis 44:50 Apple's $2,000 Folding iPhone Verdict Listen to the Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3P7JkiN9X3N4Kh6jlDsOgi?si=91JP5nxvQbKStkp8AQdAOg Subscribe to the Bricks & Bytes Newsletter: https://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/ Visit our website: http://bricks-bytes.com/ Follow us: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bricks-bytes/ Twitter: https://x.com/bricksbytespod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bricksbytes/Our Sponsors: BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.comEnjoying the insights? Hit that Subscribe button to stay ahead in construction tech, AI, and the future of how we build.

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