Dive Brief:
- Construction industry executives will continue to take a bearish approach to adopting many forms of new technology in the coming year, according to peer-to-peer membership and executive coaching organization Vistage's Q2 2018 CEO Confidence Index Survey.
- Nearly half of respondents in the industry don’t expect any impact on their business in the next 12 months from technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, intelligent digital assistants and connected devices. However, for the latter category — also known as internet of things — construction CEOs surpassed the national average in expectation that the technology would affect business, with 41% responding affirmatively compared to 36% in the overall pool of respondents.
- More than half of construction execs said that their company’s success depends on incremental innovation, but only 11% banked on that type of shift coming from major technological breakthroughs, and only 10% were counting on having to develop new technologies themselves in order to bring about those kinds of changes.
Dive Insight:
Construction executives generally reported more optimism when it came to hiring expectations for the coming year and their views of the economy in the past year tended to be more positive, according to the report.
However, the commercial construction industry has been notoriously slow to adopt new technology, and the results of the Vistage survey show that respondents will likely continue in that vein in the coming year.
Despite construction and engineering managers' reluctance to incorporate new, digital tools in their workflows, venture capitalists recognize that construction technology will inevitably change the market and have therefore been pumping billions of dollars into innovators in the space this year and last. Meanwhile, groundbreaking solutions promising to shave time off projects' schedules, costs from budgets and hazards from workers' jobsite experiences are being developed almost on a weekly basis.
