Show Notes
Episode summary: AT&T now routes 45 billion A.I. tokens a day to the cheapest model that meets its quality bar and reports cutting costs by as much as 90 percent, with open models taking a growing share. This episode asks what that shift means for a contractor whose A.I. arrives inside Procore, Copilot, or a startup's product.
What you'll learn: - Why a large enterprise moved most of its everyday A.I. work onto open models it can run itself, and which parts of that decision transfer to a builder. - How an owner's "no A.I." clause becomes a hosting decision once a firm can run open-weights models inside its own environment, using Sundt's approach as the example. - What "USB-C for models" means in practice at Rogers-O'Brien, and why portability at the integration layer decides whether a contractor can ever switch models. - How the report's rule to tier the work, not the technology, sorts jobsite tasks into the ones that need a frontier model and the many that don't.
Who this is for: - Construction executives, innovation/digital leaders, operations, and IT/security teams who want a pragmatic way to prioritize A.I. pilots.
Full report & free sample: https://www.placersolutions.io/product/agi-in-construction
More from A.I. Excellence in Construction: Research Briefings
Episode summary: Nearly 6,000 executives report almost no productivity gain from A.I. while seven in ten of their firms use it. Four new studies trace the missing hours to checking A.I. output. This episode reads that research through the 2026 A.I. Excellence in Construction report to show where the checking lands inside a contractor.
Episode summary: Three new 2026 studies test whether A.I. makes people lazy learners. This episode walks through what they found and applies it to how construction firms onboard new project engineers, using examples from the 2026 A.I. Excellence in Construction report.
Episode summary: Three contractors at the A.I. Excellence in Construction Virtual Summit, held in collaboration with AGC of America, explained how they decide which A.I. platforms to commit to, wait on, bypass, or replace with something built in-house. Their answers differ. Their conclusion about which layer a contractor must own does not.
Episode summary: Vendors, CEOs, IT directors and project managers each want something different from A.I., and construction firms are getting pulled four ways at once. Builders in the Placer Solutions A.I. peer groups describe what happened when a consultant's central hub pitch met 30-plus disconnected systems, and what actually moved things forward.
Episode summary: A superintendent with no coding background built a live, multi-project risk dashboard in about seven working days. A VP of construction cut a month-end reporting cycle from ten hours to 45 minutes. Both stories come from construction leaders in the Strategic A.I. Peer Groups for Builders.