The future of construction is digital

Construction has been described as the least digitised major industry for most of the last two decades. That is changing, but unevenly, and the gap between the projects that have adopted connected systems and those that have not is now large enough to show up in outcomes.

What has actually changed

Three things: cloud platforms removed the server and the IT project that used to accompany any adoption; mobile devices made site capture realistic rather than aspirational; and AI made it possible to interrogate a project record rather than merely store it.

What it means for document control teams

The pessimistic reading is that automation replaces the function. The evidence so far points the other way. What automation removes is the re-filing, the manual chasing and the report assembly — which is the part of the role nobody values. What remains is exception management and evidence integrity, which is the part that decides claims.

The teams doing well out of this transition are the ones that moved from processing documents to governing the record.