How AI could give site crews back an hour a day, according to Fieldwire's CEO. Fieldwire CEO Puneet Raj joined me on stage at the Emirates to talk about AI on job sites. His view is that a mid-size contractor doesn't need an AI strategy at all. It needs a productivity strategy, with AI as one of the tools inside it. Fieldwire's new Field Intelligence puts AI into the app crews already use, customers report saving up to an hour per craftsperson per day, and for now the rule is simple: AI recommends, a human signs. Most of the AI chatter in construction lives in the office. Meanwhile the foreman on level four, iPad in hand, has been quietly dropping PDFs into ChatGPT and getting back answers that are, well, generic. That gap ran through a fireside chat I hosted for Fieldwire at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium (a big ask for a Chelsea fan). Across from me was Puneet Raj, who became Fieldwire's CEO in 2025 after roughly a decade inside its parent company, Hilti. If you run projects on thin margins, here's what matters: where AI earns its keep on site today, where it still falls over, and what you can do about it next week. Start with your most painful process, not the shiniest tool. Pick a champion, pilot AI in a sandbox, and keep a human signature on anything that leaves the site. A tool company that swore it would never buy software. How Hilti changed its mind about Fieldwire. Fieldwire's founder, Yves Frinault, once told me how it started. Hilti visited him in Silicon Valley insisting they were only there to learn. Then the CFO rang from the car to the airport asking to invest, on one condition: Hilti would never acquire. Hilti came in on Fieldwire's Series B in 2017, and in November 2021 it bought the company for roughly $300 million. Software had drifted from the edge of a tool maker's strategy to somewhere close to its center. Puneet is a product of that shift. He was working on Kindles at Amazon when Hilti pitched him construction as the one industry nobody can opt out of. When he took over Fieldwire, he spent his first six months as an intern, demoing the product and trying to sell it himself. What crews are already doing with ChatGPT. Before building anything, Fieldwire surveyed 176 customers worldwide for its AI on the Jobsite report, from managing directors and owners down to project managers, foremen and craftsmen. Roughly three in four said they already use AI in some form. When I asked the room to raise a hand if they'd used AI that week, it looked closer to nine in ten. Field staff are using it too, mostly by throwing a plan into a general chatbot and asking what needs doing today. The answers come back generic. So when I asked whether a £50 million contractor needs an AI strategy, Puneet pushed back hard. I don't think anyone needs an AI strategy. You definitely need a productivity strategy and AI is one of those tools that can help you get there. Puneet Raj, CEO, Fieldwire Why office AI struggles once it reaches the site. Small screens and very specific questions. Puneet sees two things change on site. The device shrinks to a phone or iPad. And every question is tied to a place and a task: an electrician on the fourth floor of a multifamily block wants that room's spec, and will act on the answer straight away. The office can absorb a few wrong answers. A live site can't. Fieldwire's response is Field Intelligence, an AI layer built into the existing app so nobody has to spend even 15 minutes learning a new tool. It lets crews search across plans, tasks, photos and forms, and create tasks by voice. Ask it for today's tasks and it can also flag a model clash and offer to raise an RFI. On a $40 million storage-unit job Puneet visited, the supervisor simply asked the app for the quality checklist written into the spec and worked through the punch list it returned. No digging through folders. Customers in Fieldwire's annual survey say this saves up to an hour per craftsperson per day. Puneet's bigger target is the paperwork foremen take home at night. Within 12 months, he reckons, AI will draft those forms and supervisors will just check and sign. Get the field-level view on construction tech every week. Operator stories, deals and honest takes on what's working on real projects, straight to your inbox. Recommend, never act (at least not yet). Whose name goes on the RFI? I tested the room. About half would let AI fill in a form. Nobody would let it send that form to a client unread. Only 15 to 20% said they'd trust an AI search answer about their own project documents, even something as basic as the wall color on level one. Puneet didn't argue. Trust in construction is very hard to earn and very easy to lose, so Fieldwire is building its AI around four commitments. * Label it and keep people in control. AI answers are flagged as AI generated, and AI recommends while a person decides. * Role-level security. On a shared project, the mechanical sub shouldn't see what the electrical sub has been asked to do. * Your data stays yours. Customer data isn't used to train models without explicit permission. * Build it with customers. More surveys asking where AI should help, and just as importantly, where it shouldn't. So if an AI-drafted RFI turns out wrong, the name on it belongs to the foreman, supervisor or PM who accepted it. Liability in construction sits with the contractor, which is exactly why that human sign-off isn't going anywhere soon. Three things a mid-size contractor can do next week. Puneet's keep pile for 2027. I read Puneet ten AI use cases from his own report and told him to bin seven. He kept voice instead of typing, autofilled forms and daily reports, and AI suggesting schedule changes based on real progress (with clash detection cheekily squeezed in as a fourth). His advice for next week was refreshingly unglamorous. Find the painful process. Pick the workflow that hurts most today. You know it far better than any vendor does. Name a champion and pilot it. Test AI on that one process in a sandbox, with one person owning the results. Spread what works. Carry the results from one project to the next. Construction software that never gets adopted in the field is wasted money, however clever it looks in a demo. As for jobs, Puneet expects more people in that room in five years, not fewer, pointing to the data center and utility backlog AI itself has created. And the one thing to stop doing tomorrow? Doom scrolling. Generic chatbot vs field-specific AI. How the two compare, based on Puneet's description. | Factor | Generic chatbot (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) | Fieldwire Field Intelligence | | Where it lives | A separate app or browser tab | Inside the field app crews already use | | Quality of answers | Broad and general | Aimed at the specific task, trade and location | | Grounding | Whatever documents you paste in | Project plans and specs already uploaded, plus a construction knowledge graph Fieldwire is building | | Access control | Anyone with the file sees everything in it | Role-level security by trade (a stated commitment) | | Data and training | A common worry among contractors about where uploaded project data ends up | Not used for training without explicit permission | It's an AI layer built into Fieldwire's jobsite management app. Crews can search across plans, tasks, photos and forms, create and manage tasks by voice, and get help rewording RFIs, all inside the workflows they already use. Fieldwire's pitch is that nobody should need training to start using it. (Source) Join the construction briefing people read to stay one step ahead. News, deals, and deep takes on the forces reshaping construction - from 500+ issues and counting.

BuildersAI alternatives - and why most teams choose BuildersAI. William Charlesworth-Jones Founder, BuildersAI Quick answer. The main alternatives to BuildersAI are Procore, Fieldwire, and Autodesk Construction Cloud. All three are built for large enterprise contractors with IT teams and significant implementation budgets. If you run a UK SME construction business, none of them were designed for you. Most contractors who compare BuildersAI end up choosing BuildersAI because it is the only platform that works from day one without training, prices per project rather than per user, and gives trades answers without going through the site manager. What you'll learn. Why people look for alternatives. If you are searching for BuildersAI alternatives, you are probably in one of two situations. Either you have seen BuildersAI mentioned somewhere and want to understand how it compares before committing, or you are already using something else and it is not working. Both are good reasons to be here. Construction software has a long history of promising a lot and delivering tools that only the office uses. Trades ignore them. Site managers work around them. The WhatsApp group stays open. The question worth asking is not which platform has the most features. It is which one everyone on site will actually use from day one, without training, without chasing people to log in. The real problem with construction software. Most construction software was built for enterprise contractors with IT departments, implementation teams, and training budgets. It assumes a level of technical comfort and management overhead that most UK SME contractors simply do not have. The result is a market where the tools with the most features have the lowest adoption on site. Site managers end up maintaining the system in parallel with WhatsApp because trades will not change. The investment produces no return. The gap in the market has always been a platform simple enough for any trade to use from day one, built around the actual problems UK sites face: wrong drawing revisions, lost compliance records, site managers losing hours to questions that should have answers already. What UK sites are actually losing every week. * Site manager time lost to avoidable questions5-15 hrs/week * Rework as a share of project cost2-5% * Projects running late or over budget95% * UK contractors using dedicated site softwareUnder 10% Procore. Procore is the largest construction management platform in the world. Large main contractors use it to manage complex, multi-year programmes across hundreds of stakeholders. What it does well: Comprehensive project management across financials, scheduling, drawings, RFIs, and submittals. Deep accounting integrations. Strong reporting at enterprise scale. Where it falls short for UK SMEs: Enterprise pricing, weeks of implementation, and low trade adoption. Built for the US market. The site manager often ends up running Procore and WhatsApp in parallel because trades do not engage with the system. Bottom line: Excellent for large main contractors with IT support. Not built for the majority of UK construction businesses. Fieldwire. Fieldwire is a field management platform with solid drawing and task management tools. It is more accessible than Procore and has a reasonable mobile app. What it does well: Drawing mark-up, task assignment, punch lists, and inspection forms. A cleaner interface than Procore for field use. Where it falls short for UK SMEs: Per-user pricing escalates quickly when you include all trades. No AI assistant. UK-specific compliance features are limited. Trades still call the site manager for answers because there is no way to get information themselves. Bottom line: A reasonable platform for drawing and task management, but not AI-first and not built around UK compliance workflows. Autodesk Construction Cloud. Autodesk Construction Cloud combines BIM 360, PlanGrid, and BuildingConnected into one platform. It is best-in-class for BIM coordination on complex projects. What it does well: Model coordination, design-to-build workflows, and deep integration with Revit and AutoCAD. Where it falls short for UK SMEs: Heavily enterprise-oriented. The BIM tooling is powerful but irrelevant to most SME site workflows. Cost, complexity, and trade adoption are all significant barriers. Bottom line: Worth evaluating if BIM coordination is central to your work. For typical SME site coordination, it is significant overkill. WhatsApp. WhatsApp is not construction software. It is a consumer messaging app that UK sites have adopted by default because nothing simpler existed. What it does well: Free, already on every phone, no learning curve. Where it fails: No version control on drawings. No read receipts on group messages. No audit trail for compliance or disputes. No way for a trade to find an answer without asking someone. The site manager becomes the human router for every query on site. Bottom line: WhatsApp is the problem this industry needs to solve, not the solution. BuildersAI wrote a full piece on the real cost of using it: The WhatsApp Problem No One is Talking About in Construction. How BuildersAI is different. BuildersAI was built specifically for UK SME contractors, from the ground up, around three things that everything else gets wrong. Trades use it from day one. If they can use WhatsApp, they can use BuildersAI. There is no onboarding process, no training required, no chasing people to log in. The platform is simple enough that adoption is not a project in itself. The AI assistant removes the site manager from the middle. Trades ask questions in plain English and get instant answers drawn from the project's drawings, documents, and announcements. The site manager stops being the human router for every query on site. Per-project pricing means costs do not escalate. Include every trade on site for a flat monthly fee. No per-user charges, no surprises as the team grows. Most contractors who compare BuildersAI come back to BuildersAI for the same reason: it is the only platform where you can set up a site in the morning and have every trade using it by the afternoon. See BuildersAI on a site like yours. BuildersAI will walk you through the platform using your project type as the example. Most sites are live the same day.