Buildots, developers of an AI-enhanced construction intelligence platform for construction projects, has announced the Buildots Intelligence Lab, the industry’s first AI-powered research hub.
The Lab has been created to help project managers replace gut-feel decision-making with objective, data-driven intelligence. Its work rests on three pillars: insights that reveal critical industry trends, metrics that set performance standards and benchmarks that enable global comparisons across trades, verticals and geographies.
Drawing on aggregated, anonymized, previously unavailable global data, the lab will publish metrics, insights and benchmarks to help address long-standing industry blind spots and make this available at no charge.
Buildots itself is based in Chicago with established offices in London, U.K., and Tel Aviv, Israel. Through its new Canadian hub office in Toronto, Amir Berman, VP of industry transformation and head of the Buildots Intelligence Lab, told the Daily Commercial News the company is building a team, “directly out of the Canadian construction industry, people who’ve run these projects before doing the work, not just software people.”
Buildots was formed in 2018 to develop a construction intelligence platform for construction projects of all scales that allows project managers to receive accurate progress tracking down to the individual element. Berman said this delivers construction intelligence that helps teams finish on time and on budget, predicts delays early, reduces subcontractor disputes and standardizes workflows for efficient execution.
On a specific project, the Buildots platform integrates AI in three steps: Image capture using 360-degree cameras or drones; Buildots’ proprietary AI analysis that compares that footage against the project’s BIM model and schedule to determine what’s actually been built compared to the plan down to individual elements; and intelligence that gives both real-time delay predictions weeks in advance, and trade-by-trade productivity data. The result is when problems surface, there’s still time to do something about them.
“That feeds early delay risk detection, so a slipping trade shows up as a risk weeks before it would show up on a traditional schedule update,” Berman explained. “And because the data’s tied to specific locations, teams can see exactly which areas are ready for the next trade to move in, cutting down the wasted trips and stalled starts that come from not knowing an area’s actually clear.”
Berman said major national contractors like Ledcor and Pomerleau are adopting Buildots at an organization or portfolio level to allow value to compound across projects. This benchmarking between projects offers the potential for continuous improvement where lessons from one job actually carry into the next, rather than starting from zero each time.
This work over recent years has inspired the introduction of the Buildots Intelligence Lab.
Staffed by elite researchers and construction professionals, the lab’s findings are drawn from data collected from construction projects worldwide, with regional details typically disclosed alongside published insights. As it develops, the lab is inviting industry professionals, academics and analysts to bring their own questions and hypotheses and challenge the lab’s team to validate onsite patterns with statistical proof.
A research tool like the Intelligence Lab is needed like never before, Buildots says. The construction market has grown steadily in size over recent years.
According to the Construction Market Report 2026, it will grow to $17.26 trillion in 2026, with some market forecasters projecting a valuation of $21.73 trillion by 2030. This growth is being driven by urbanization, the expansion of public infrastructure programs and increasing residential construction demand.
Yet Buildots says the industry today still largely relies on benchmarking frameworks established decades ago even before smartphones, despite massive changes in project complexity, technology and data availability.
The Buildots Lab’s early research both challenges and confirms long-held industry assumptions.
One of the key findings revealed relates to schedule adherence. Interestingly, it says education projects rank “dead last in terms of schedule adherence,” lagging significantly behind health care and data centres.
“Across the projects in our dataset, only 48 per cent of active activities are on track in an average week,” Berman said. “Break that down by sector and the ICI-relevant numbers stand out. Commercial projects run at 44 per cent adherence, industrial at 43 per cent, in any given week.”
The lab has also determined the final 20 per cent of an activity takes 27 per cent of its overall duration. This “long tail” effect means late-stage stalls are structural, not incidental.
Another key finding relates to the fast- growing and time-sensitive sector of data centre construction.
“We found a 20 to 50 per cent gap between the MEP work planned for a given week and what actually gets delivered,” Berman said. “That’s a substantial, measurable source of delay in exactly the kind of complex, services-heavy build that owners and GCs are racing to deliver on time. Anyone running MEP-heavy institutional or industrial work can use that as a gut-check against their own planned output.”
Although the lab is part of Buildots, it operates independently from its commercial activities, ensuring its research remains objective and transparent.
“Everything we publish is on the lab’s homepage,” Berman said. “We’re trying to help modernize an industry that’s relied on gut feeling and outdated benchmarks for too long, and no single company can fix that problem on its own.”
John Bleasby is a freelance writer. Send comments and Inside Innovation column ideas to [email protected].
