"How much money did we spend last year on small equipment?"

That's the one question David Gal, VP of Product & Engineering for ConnectedEquipment at Samsara, says stops most construction leaders cold.

Most of them can't answer it. And that blind spot is exactly why so many still can't use AI.

On today's episode, David walks us through the data maturity curve everycontractor climbs, whether they realise it or not: Phase 0 : clipboards, spreadsheets, and hundreds of thousands of assets nobodycan locate

Phase 1 : digitise the fleet, drop accidents, cut fuel

Phase 2 : insights, utilisation, proactive maintenance

Phase 3 : agents making the phone calls for you

His warning: you can't buy your way into Phase 3. Skip the groundwork and the AIhas nothing to stand on.

We also get into stolen fleets, autonomous job sites, and why one pane of glassbeats another point solution.

Watch the full episode on Youtube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction#constructiontech #ai #vc

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

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:35 The Data Backbone Construction Never Built

02:57 Why Construction Operations Are So Hard to Digitize

05:18 The Phases of Digitizing a Construction Business

08:10 What Staying Analog Actually Costs You

09:51 Sponsor

12:52 The Real Cost of Analog (cont.)

14:09 Getting From Phase Zero to Your First Digital Win

17:01 What the Data Reveals Once You Digitize

20:00 Putting AI to Work in Daily Operations

27:32 How AI Is Reshaping Fleet Management

30:15 Where Virtual Assistants Actually Add Value

34:10 Getting Your Team to Adopt New Tech

36:22 What Autonomy Really Means for Construction

43:10 Where Contractors Should Start Tomorrow

This month's recap covers what June 2026 actually meant for the industry, and it was not what anyone had pencilled in.

The cheaper borrowing that stalled schemes were relying on did not arrive. The European Central Bank raised rates. The Fed held. The Bank of England held. And a spike in oil above 125 dollars a barrel, triggered by fears over the Strait of Hormuz, made central banks nervous about cutting at all. On the materials side, US tariffs on steel, aluminium and copper are sitting at 50 percent, with non-residential material costs rising at their fastest pace since 2022. One estimate puts 17,500 dollars of added cost onto a single new American home.

Both doors closed in the same month.

Then the split that was supposed to be temporary. Data centres are now a bigger construction category than offices. But the thing holding that work back is not money, it is power, and grid connections are running five to seven years behind the builds. The boom is real. The gate is megawatts.

Plus a full recap of the three June briefings you may have missed, on safety tech, the AI price war, what happens when AI hands your client the knowledge you used to charge for, and why the first piece of reconstruction technology in Ukraine is not a crane.

And some trivia. What Gustave Eiffel built inside the Statue of Liberty, and what a Boston World Cup pitch crew found ten inches underground that nobody had touched in twenty years.

The LinkedIn comment thread for this episode is where the conversation is happening. Come and tell us where you land.

$95M raises, Palantir's sovereignty play, and a debate that nearly boiled over. This one had everything.

This week on Bricks, Bucks & Bytes, we sat down with Alain Waha (CTO, Buro Happold), Marc Minor (CEO, Higharc) and Jeevan Kalanithi (CEO, OpenSpace), alongside Owen, Patric, Martin and Dustin, for one of our most heated roundtables yet

On the table:

→ Palantir's new sovereign AI push with Nvidia, and whether "no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha" is real insight or pure marketing

→ Why Dustin thinks forward-deployed engineers "need to go away"

→ Higharc's fresh $95M Series C and the case for replacing AutoCAD in homebuilding

→ Whether the GC is really just an insurance company in disguise

→ Where OpenSpace is taking spatial AI eight months after acquiring Disperse

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

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

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:40 Alain Waha's Global ConTech Tour: India, US, Canada, UK

03:44 Why the West Underestimates India in Construction

06:36 India vs China: The $7 Trillion Construction Boom

09:25 Palantir vs Anthropic: The AI Sovereignty War

12:42 How Alex Karp Markets Palantir (And Why It Works)

23:47 Why Nobody Understands "Ontology": Palantir Buzzwords Decoded

24:51 Do You Really Need Forward Deployed Engineers?

27:55 Why Construction Is Really an Insurance Industry

29:14 Palantir in Construction: Cavtera, McCarthy and the Data Play

31:37 Higharc's $95M Series C to Replace AutoCAD (Marc Minor)

33:32 How Higharc Serves Home Builders at Scale

37:02 Higharc's Business Model and Home Building Challenges

40:00 Homes as Data: Inside the Higharc x USLBM Deal

46:02 World Cup Banter: US Football and Officiating

46:41 Is Football the World's Greatest Sport? The Debate

49:08 OpenSpace Spatial AI: Agents That See the Jobsite (Jeevan Kalanithi)

55:16 Data Centres and the AI Delusion Killing Startups

01:07:04 What 10 Years as CEO Taught Jeevan Kalanithi