Adjusting to new technology could redefine labor roles in construction

Following national crises such as the Great Recession in 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21, the United States has, more than once, had to rebuild its labor force after projects were stalled and layoffs occurred en masse.

An ongoing labor shortage in the construction sector has directly impacted the housing industry and is currently one of the leading causes of the unaffordable housing situation, expert say.

“There are around 340,000 open jobs in construction right now. And depending on what statistic you follow, you’re looking at anywhere between 400,000 and 700,000 jobs that you would need to hire yearly, over and above normal hiring to keep up with the demand for construction,” Tanaya Srini, senior adviser with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said Friday during a panel event at The 2024 Ivory Prize Housing Innovation Summit .

How tech affects construction productivity

On top of that, Srini added that productivity in the construction industry has become stagnant:

“Since 2000, the overall economy has increased in productivity around 50%, manufacturing productivity has increased by 90%, and construction productivity has only increased by 10%. So we’re in a situation where labor can’t compensate for low productivity growth because we can’t hire enough people to meet this need.”

“All that being said, it’s a great time to be a ‘houser,’ because everybody is engaged with this issue,” she said.

Kevin Albert, founder and CEO of Canvas, a company that provides automation through its technology to the construction industry, said one solution to the productivity problem — that can be seen as controversial — is incorporating the latest technology to assist in labor jobs.

He noted that although the latest tech is used in the exterior process of homebuilding, productivity is lost during interior work because hand tools are still the norm.

One of the Canvas products is a worker-operated drywall finishing robot that reduces what is usually a five-day process to just two, boosting productivity.

“Our workers will bring the canvas machine in, they’ll select the workspaces they want them to work on, and the machine will use an accurate and precision spray to put on all of the material in kind of one shot, one drying cycle, and then the next day, you can sand that back into a final finish, as opposed to four drying cycles, five days of repetitive coming back to a wall,” Albert explained.

He added, “One of the biggest benefits that we see beyond just increasing productivity and reducing the cost that it takes to do the work, is that it actually takes a lot of that burden off of the worker’s bodies.”

Chad Bowker, CEO of Capsule, a company that specializes in the design, manufacture and installation of prefabricated modular products, said during the panel that although there is a branding issue across the industry that robots will take human jobs, in his perspective, it will only open more doors for people.

“Any automation that happens, everything that comes into an assembly line from our production facility starts on a machine. And so even though we’re not branding these robots as taking jobs, they’re actually opening jobs. I completely understand the branding issue,” Bowker said. “It’s branded as a zero labor line from the factory that sells it. And of course, it’s not zero labor. You have to do many things to it after it comes off of that machine, but it is inherently just a discussion topic.”

Fellow panelist Paul Cardis, CEO of On3, a field knowledge management system, shared Bowker’s sentiment. He repeated a phrase he learned from a previous professor: “AI won’t replace humans. It’s humans using AI that will replace humans.”

“Humans will be able to embrace robotics,” Cardis added. “We’ve essentially embraced a policy in our company, and I encourage others to do the same, that we will not fire anybody because of AI. ... We agree to retrain that individual and redeploy them in a new role.”

“I encourage other companies to embrace that so that we can move together in an additive way.”