McKinsey's July 2026 AEC paper says AI and related automation could cover 39 percent of construction desk work. A second figure travels with it: nine percent of the industry uses AI daily.
The two numbers are compatible. Most of the work McKinsey counts happens in the trailer, the office, and the estimate, and most of the industry is still on the dirt.
BuiltWorlds' 2025 AI benchmarking survey put the question to 53 people at 30 organizations, most of them general contractors and many of them large. Nearly two-thirds rated their own AI maturity as average. Almost everyone said they wanted operational efficiency. The blocks they named were data privacy, missing internal skill, and poor data. That is a small sample, and it lines up with what turns up on mid-size desks: a chatbot for correspondence, a stack of PDFs that do not parse, and a cost book that still lives in one person's head.
Nine percent counts the people who opened a tool today; the rest of the paper is a forecast.
Dodge's AI for Contractors survey, reported by Gerard de Valence, found 86 percent of large US contractors think AI will be a competitive advantage, against 69 percent of smaller firms. Cost of investing was an issue for 49 percent of the smaller group and 26 percent of the large one.
The field tools with named customers this year are cameras, capture, and a few retrofitted machines. The desk tools that last check the math, compare the sheets, and mark what the proposal does not say.