Long-form writing from Matthew Smith on cognitive load, drift, data ownership, and the future of MEP construction.
The industry has seen versions of this before. This time, our contracts, our schedules, our production history, and thirty-year careers are the training data. That changes the question. For years we asked who owns our data. The bigger question is becoming who owns the intelligence created from it.
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Technical failure and institutional failure. Most of what the shop pays for is the second one. The lesson gets learned on the job. It just doesn’t move up to the shop.
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AI can process information. It cannot manufacture experience. For the first time in decades, construction is negotiating from a position where it possesses the scarce resource.
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Some capture your knowledge, structure it, and rent it back to you. Your teams generate the intelligence. Their shareholders keep the upside. The trades cannot afford to be next.
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Sub-$100M shops are about to have their insurance company tell them what tech to use. Construction should be driving this. Not riding in the back seat. And definitely not on the menu.
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Heads down building and testing DPM. Here’s the deal: everyone except our advisory board is getting cut. Who stays and why.
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The frontier model you depend on can get locked down with little warning. That shaped how we think about building Documint PM: around flexibility and data ownership.
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Dashboards promise intelligence. AI promises intelligence. Most of what they deliver is organized information. The gap is where cost and schedule impacts actually live.
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Don’t start because you’re afraid of missing out. Start because now is the right time to learn. Especially in MEP construction.
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Data that arrives after the decision is not data. It is a receipt. The next generation of construction technology will not win because it stores more information.
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Every meaningful advancement in the MEP trades has been met with resistance. There is another burden building on projects right now, and we are not measuring it.
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Your shop’s experience has value. It should stay with your business and help your people on the next job. The reframe: what Mike remembers is useful only if it reaches the person doing the work, before the hours are spent.
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It’s 1:47 PM Pacific. There’s a piece of equipment that needs to be ordered today, not tomorrow. SDE → DRV → ADS → CC, a framework for the load no one is measuring.
ReadOne long-form piece a month. No marketing. Field-tested writing on what’s actually moving in the MEP trades.
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