I Use the Tools. I Don't Believe the Numbers.

Opinions about construction tech’s hours-saved claims usually come from one of two camps. There’s the cheerleader camp, where every new platform is about to transform the industry, and there’s the cynic camp, where nothing works and nothing ever will. I’m in neither one. I’ve been the office tech guy since my first GC job, I was part of the working group Suffolk set up with Microsoft Copilot experts, and I’ve tried building my own agents and Power Automate workflows. On most jobs I’m the one pushing for the tools, not the one complaining about them.

So when I say I don’t believe the numbers, I’m not talking about the tools themselves. I’m talking about the story sold around them, the promise of hours saved, and how rarely it survives contact with a complex project.

Tools like OpenSpace genuinely give us time. I don’t need to walk the site every day to know what changed last week. I still should, but when I don’t have the opportunity, I can go through the capture quickly and see what’s different. That’s real value, and nearly everything in the stack is aimed at the same target, giving us more time.

But in the same exact timeframe that all of this has been happening, projects have become more complex. Regulatory environments are heavier. Clients are more sophisticated, which is good and bad, because sophistication comes with requirements, and satisfying every stakeholder creates more administrative drag. The tasks the tools took off my plate got replaced by tasks that didn’t exist before, or by things that used to get compromised on and no longer are.

The time the tools give back gets eaten

It’s a bit of a tug of war. The hours came back, and the job grew to absorb them. A pitch about time savings that doesn’t account for that is describing a project that doesn’t exist.

I know the slide. The platform saves the average user ten hours a week. I don’t know what to do with that number. Those are probably hours 41 to 50. Or 61 to 70.

And that number lands on people who have heard it before. The field teams you’re pitching have been sold the future of construction seven times in the last five years. The real fight isn’t market noise, it’s that accumulated skepticism, and it gets won back one project at a time. People feel like they need to sell the world to get in the door, but if the world is what you sold, disappointment is the only place the relationship can go.

The way through isn’t a better version of the same promise. The pitches that get traction with me show how a tool slots into the work already happening and makes it better, instead of trying to overhaul a process that, imperfect as it is, is the only thing keeping the project moving.

You can’t out-pitch a four-year feedback loop

The other number I’m wary of is traction. Used on this many projects, this much success, this much time saved. I’m always willing to hear people out, but how long have you been doing this to know that for sure?

Most of our projects run two to four years. When we pilot something, we’re piloting across twenty jobsites, and getting real success measures and metrics out of that takes a long time. Meanwhile there’s a new AEC startup every 30 seconds. The market is generating claims faster than any project cycle can verify them.

There’s also the money. We run very small margins against the liability of the entire contract, so in almost all cases a tool has to show it’s a net value to the project before anyone pays for it. And we try to stay consistent, the same approach whether the job is in Miami, Tampa, Sacramento, New York, or Boston. We don’t swap tools often, and even the changes we do make feel like a lot to the people living with them.

None of that means stop building for this industry. It means the feedback loop you’re selling into is longer than your funding cycle, and buyers like me have learned to be wary of certainty that shows up faster than the proof possibly could.

The more I learn about this stuff, the less I realize I know, and I’m always willing to hear people out. Just bring me the version of the pitch that describes my actual week. That’s the conversation I’ll make time for.

John Riggs is a Senior Project Manager at Suffolk Construction.