Kaplanoglu
Capabilities are not the deciding factors in which technologies survive. The deciding factor is trust.
I led technology research and development, as well as construction projects, worth over $1 billion. Since the beginning of 2026, I have been advising construction and engineering firms on transformation, technology, and research and development as the founder of SBK Technologies. We work with clients to increase profit margins, grow market share, and improve efficiency by leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics.
I have seen this over and over again: A system would perform beautifully in a demo, then in a pilot, and then quietly disappear on-site. Crews don’t file complaints. They work around it until it’s gone.
That distrust has gotten even worse over the last three years, as workers have been hearing that artificial intelligence and robotics will replace humans.
When a tool shows up promising to capture everything and flag every deviation, superintendents don’t see any productivity gains. They hear: It is here to measure me, and maybe someday replace me. That’s not irrational. That’s self preservation.
Incentive programs, training sessions and governance policies aren’t enough to overcome this challenge. For a technology to take hold, the people expected to use it need clarity on three things:
How it works, what its limitations are so they can trust its output, and, most importantly, what it means for their own careers so they can trust that there is a future for them. Construction leaders handle the first two and skip the third.
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In the technology world, responsible AI means ensuring data security and preventing a model from doing something unsafe. Those matter. It also has to mean making sure the people on your site have a future. Introduce a technology without that, and they’ll kill it quietly, every time.
The firms that come out ahead in the transition won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest technology budgets. They’ll be the ones whose crews trust that the technology showed up to help them build.
Once trust is formed, adoption will increase, and the productivity gains will begin to surface. A new question then follows close behind: who captures that value?
I use multiple AI tools, but I still review the output, check references, read the sources, form my own views based on my experience and expertise, and write my recommendations. On one project, AI let me finish in six hours what would easily have taken two to three days. That productivity gain went to my client, not to me, because I was billing by the hour, not by the value of the work.
Remember, trust gets the technology adopted, productivity makes it pay off. The only question left is who captures the value. The firms that figure that out first will define the next decade of this industry.
Burckin Kaplanoglu is principal of SBK, a construction technology consulting firm. He was previously director of the Oracle Industry Lab and a construction executive at LendLease.
Source: www.enr.com
