Photograph: Aart Jan de Pol

The Building Industry Has a Scope Problem, Not a Software Problem

Starting a business in 2026 feels different. Not easier, exactly, but different in a way that's hard to describe until you've lived it. New tools land on my desk almost weekly. Meeting summaries write themselves. Marketing copy gets tested across audiences instantly. Data quietly tells me where my next customer is hanging out. All of it hums along in the background while I focus on the actual work.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about being a founder: a huge chunk of "running a business" has nothing to do with the problem you set out to solve. It's the admin, the reporting, the follow-ups. The “boring” stuff that exists only because you are operating a company. For the first time, that tissue is being handled for companies like ours. Which means the problem-solvers can finally go solve the problem.

So, we thought.. what happens when you point that newfound focus at an industry stuck for decades?

What I keep hearing on calls

The more building professionals I talk to, the clearer one thing becomes. The tools are clunky and old. They aren’t easy to use and quick to learn like other new software that are released.

We didn't go into this thinking we'd write a thesis on industry dynamics. We just wanted to make it easier to build better buildings. Easier and better. Two words that sound almost annoyingly simple, but they sit at the heart of everything we do. To get there, we talked to everyone, from the homeowner asking the first question to the inspector signing off.

We started to see some patterns.

The incentives are pointing in different directions

Here's the most uncomfortable conclusion we've landed on. The incentives of the industry are incredibly misaligned.

That sounds abstract, so let me explain. The architect's objective is rarely the same as the contractor's. The contractor's rarely matches the inspector's. The lender wants something different from the designer. The municipality wants something different from the homeowner. Each professional's win condition is, more often than not, in tension with the step that came before. Not always opposed, but the goals rarely match.

This isn't because anyone's acting in bad faith. Most people in this industry care deeply about their craft. The misalignment is baked into how the work is structured.

Why AI alone isn't going to save us

You'd think AI would fix this. Drop a few language models into the workflow, automate the paperwork, and suddenly everything flows. Wrooong.

Not quite. AI, as it's currently positioned in our industry, is doing something specific. It's making paperwork faster. That's genuinely useful, and I don't want to undersell it. The trouble is, the underlying issue isn't that the paperwork is slow. It's that nobody agrees on what the scope of the paperwork should be in the first place.

Speed up a broken process and you don't get a fixed process. You get a faster broken one. Every time we watch a team solve one bottleneck, another pops up down the line. The contractor's tools get better, so the architect drowns in change requests. The architect's tools get better, so the lender can't keep up. It's a wicked problem, and chasing it with point solutions just moves transfers pain from party to party.

The fix isn't more automation stacked on broken handoffs. It's lining up what each party is actually trying to accomplish, and then connecting the data that lets them accomplish it together.

And then someone says the word "data"

Here's where things get interesting, in a vernacular way.

The moment you bring up data in this industry, the room shifts. You can feel it. Suddenly there are security concerns. Privacy questions. Firm pushback that's part technical, part cultural, part something deeper. Many of the professionals I speak with don't have technical backgrounds, and the tools they've been handed over the years have rarely earned their trust. Why would the next one be different?

There's also a quieter dynamic at play. The people organizing the project and the people executing it on-site are often working from completely different information. One has the spreadsheet. The other has the reality. When data shows up, it tends to expose that gap rather than close it, and nobody loves being the one whose gap gets exposed.

So we end up with a sector that desperately needs better information flow, and a workforce with every reason to be skeptical of the tools promising to deliver it. Great.

Where this leaves us

We're not pretending we've cracked it. What I can tell you is that solving the wrong problem faster isn't the answer. The path forward, as far as we can see it, runs through two things at once: lining up the incentives between the parties who actually have to work together, and earning enough trust to let the data do its job.