Dispatches from ABC National Convention 2026, Salt Lake City
I rode a mechanical bull in Salt Lake City last week.
I also sat in on sessions about artificial intelligence, contract disputes, economic forecasts, and the future of the construction workforce. In that order. Which, honestly, is pretty on-brand for the ABC National Convention.
I have been coming to ABC for a few years now. But this year felt different. The energy around technology, specifically AI, was not the tentative curiosity I had seen before. It was urgency. Contractors across the country are starting to feel the gap between what their competitors are doing with technology and what they are still doing manually. And nobody wants to be the last one to figure it out.
Here is what three days and about a hundred hallway conversations taught me.
The Room Was Packed. That Is the Whole Story.
The 9 a.m. session on AI in construction was a full room. In a convention with 40+ sessions to choose from.
That is not a coincidence. That is a signal.
Rowan Steel-Hall, COO of Smartbuild, opened with something that stuck with me: "AI has moved from a buzzword to a jobsite reality, but for most construction teams it still feels complex or out of reach."
That is the gap. The tools are ready. The contractors are not. Not because they are behind, but because no one has helped them understand what "ready" actually looks like. His framework was simple enough to put on a sticky note:
Silos don't feel like a crisis, until someone leaves, a job goes sideways, or you're trying to close your books and half the information you need is nowhere to be found.
- Start small - One process. One tool. Do not try to boil the ocean.
- Fix your data first - AI is only as good as what you feed it. Garbage in, garbage out.
- Field adoption follows friction reduction - Teams adopt tools that solve daily frustrations, not tools that impress the boss.
The part that did not get said, but should have: All of this depends on your IT infrastructure being solid underneath it. Clean data. Secure cloud environment. Reliable connectivity. That foundation is what makes the AI layer actually work. Without it, you are just buying software and hoping for the best.
Materials Costs Are Eating You Alive. AI Is Eating That Problem.
Jared Moor, VP of Sales at Kojo, walked through what AI-driven procurement actually looks like in practice. The headline stat: materials account for up to 40% of total construction costs. And most contractors are still managing that spend with spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and crossed fingers.
The claim that made people lean forward: contractors using AI-driven procurement tools are seeing 2% to 5% savings on labor and material costs per project. On a $5 million job, that is $100,000 to $250,000 back in your pocket.
How? Three ways:
- Smarter procurement - AI optimizes when and where you buy based on price trends and project timelines.
- Demand forecasting - Predict what you will need before you need it, reducing emergency orders and premium freight.
- Inventory control - Stop buying what you already have sitting in the yard.
I had a conversation with Jared on the expo floor the day before. We talked about doing a joint educational event for Arizona contractors on exactly this topic. If you are a subcontractor trying to figure out where AI actually delivers ROI in the field, stay tuned.
AI Is Reading Your Contracts. And Finding Problems You Missed.
Chad Waite from Document Crunch presented what might have been the most immediately practical session I attended. The premise: construction projects are full of disputes that cost time and money. AI can help prevent them by reviewing contracts before the problems start.
- Document Crunch reviews contracts in seconds - not hours, flagging risk clauses, inconsistencies, and liability landmines that humans typically miss on the first pass.
- It guides field decisions in real time - giving project teams answers to on-the-job contract questions without waiting for legal.
- The ROI case is simple - the cost of one avoided dispute typically pays for years of subscription.
The question I asked from the floor: "When a contractor has poor document management habits upstream: inconsistent file naming, scattered storage, no version control, how much does that limit what your tool can actually do?"
His answer was diplomatic. Mine is not: a lot. AI contract review is powerful. But it requires that your documents are organized, accessible, and stored in a secure environment in the first place. That is not an AI problem. That is an IT problem, and it is one we solve every day.
The Three Things Every AI Session Had in Common
Here is what I noticed after sitting through four technology sessions in two days. Every single one circled back to the same three prerequisites:
- Clean data. Your AI tools are only as smart as the data underneath them. If your files are scattered across email chains, local hard drives, and that one folder on the server nobody has touched since 2019, the AI cannot help you. It needs structure.
- Secure cloud environment. Every AI tool mentioned at this conference lives in the cloud. That means your IT security posture, your backup strategy, your access controls, your endpoint protection is no longer optional overhead. It is the foundation that everything else runs on.
- Reliable connectivity. AI tools fail when the connection fails. Field teams abandon tools that are slow or unreliable. The most elegant software in the world is useless if your team cannot access it consistently from the trailer or the site office.
This is the conversation nobody is having loudly enough. Everyone wants to talk about the AI tools. Almost nobody is talking about whether the infrastructure underneath them is ready to support them. That gap, between technology ambition and technology readiness is exactly what we work on with construction companies every day.
One More Thing: The Economy Is Getting Interesting
Friday morning, Dr. Anirban Basu, ABC Chief Economist and CEO of Sage Policy Group delivered the construction economic outlook. If you do not know Basu, he is the closest thing the industry has to a prophet with a Ph.D.
The short version: 2026 is complicated. Tariff uncertainty, tight margins, and a commercial real estate market still finding its floor. The firms that navigate this well are not necessarily the biggest, they are the ones who have invested in operational efficiency.
His numbers will be the foundation of a full TechTip next week. But here is the early headline: when margins tighten, systems matter more, not less. The contractors who come out ahead in a tighter market are the ones who are not wasting 20% of their week fighting IT problems that a good managed services partner would have already solved.
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For over 20 years, Computer Dimensions has been the trusted IT partner for Arizona's architecture, engineering, and construction industry. We help AEC firms communicate better, collaborate smarter, and actually use the technology they've invested in. Because in construction, the tools only work if your team does.
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P.S. Next week I am breaking down Dr. Basu's full 2026 construction economic forecast and what it means specifically for your technology investment decisions. If tightening margins and tariff uncertainty are on your radar, and they should be, you will not want to miss it.
