Throughout the recent years of rapid technological innovation, one of the world’s largest industries has lagged behind: construction.
Despite moving $10 trillion every year, the sector has averaged just 1% productivity growth over the past two decades compared to 3.6% for manufacturing and 2.8% for the total world economy, according to a McKinsey report. Construction also ranked last for perceived innovation in a survey of 600 U.S. workers, who deemed the field to be “the least technologically competent” out of 10 industries. This lag comes with serious costs: Research from the Saïd Business School at Oxford University found that over 90% of the world’s infrastructure projects are late or over budget. And in the U.S. alone, $177 billion is wasted annually due to inefficiencies, according to a survey of 600 construction leaders.
To tackle a small piece of this, BigRentz—a California-based company that since 2012 has matched contractors with rental yards for heavy equipment like forklifts, backhoes, and excavators across the U.S.—reinvented its business from one still operating via phone calls to one running completely on AI that it built internally from the ground up. The models are old-school machine learning, showing there’s still value in earlier AI techniques other than large language models. Now the company is launching a stand-alone software platform for large contractors, which is powered by the same AI system but allows customers to run smarter procurement on their existing lists of suppliers.
