(Photo courtesy of Procore)
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) almost impossible to miss on the exhibition floor and in conference sessions, Procore’s Groundbreak 2025, held last week in Houston, Texas, presented a glimpse into the future, including a pending transition in the CEO’s office.
“I’m eternally grateful for the countless number of friendships I’ve been able to develop with all of you over the last few years. And I want to thank you all for your continued partnership with Procore. But just like this industry, Procore too must evolve,” stated company founder and CEO Tooey Courtemanche as he welcomed some 6,000 attendees to the annual event. “Many of you may have seen I’ve recently announced my successor, Ajei Gopal, and Ajei is going to step in officially as Procore’s next CEO, next month. Today, I am incredibly excited to introduce you all to Ajei for the very first time.”
“Tooey, your journey building Procore, the relentless pursuit that you’ve had of your vision, the world class platform that you’ve built, and the unmatched partnership that you’ve forged with the industry over the past two-and-a-half decades has been nothing short of extraordinary. And it’s a legacy that you have to be incredibly proud of, and it’s one that I am humbled to carry forward,” said the incoming CEO. “I’m not replacing Tooey. No one can. I’m succeeding him. I’m here to honour the mission and the vision that have guided this company from the very beginning, to preserve the closeness with customers that sets Procore apart, and which brings even more innovation and scale to the industry.”
That innovation was very much focused on harnessing the power of AI in the newest tools within the Procore platform as the company unveiled new AI capabilities built directly into its intelligence layer, which it calls Procore Helix. Two of the emerging agentic capabilities topping this year’s agenda were Procore Assist, which serves as a conversational AI assistant that provides contextually relevant answers on-demand, and Procore Agent Builder, which allows platform users to create customized agents suited to the unique needs of their company and tasks.
“It’s so exciting that we are at this crossroads of taking this massive corpus of data that we have and applying agentic AI to it, and helping our customers be more profitable, to be more productive, and really just to run better businesses,” stated Courtemanche. “We have more data than anybody else in construction, I think, on one platform, and we’re going to be able to help our customers do so much more with that data. I think we’re going from the era of logging data into leveraging data, making data a really powerful tool for our customers.”
“This conference is buzzing with the talk of human intelligence evolution, with the talk of AI. I’ve been talking extensively about this for the last 30 years… the last three to four years, it’s been incredible,” said global futurist Nikolas Badminton during his Power of Construction session. “We’re transforming what construction is, and what we’re doing really is we’re creating a mastery of data.”
The event pointed to an evolution within an evolution, with lots of discussions around AI, but also expanding those conversations into new capabilities within AI technology that are taking a giant leap forward.
“AI is not new… AI is not even new in construction,” explained Kris Lengieza, vice-president and global technology evangelist at Procore. “But what’s really happened over the last nine months is generative AI, and specifically these large language models. And I think the big unlock there for folks is the ability to talk and interact with it in a very natural way.”
One of these leaps, he said, includes the ability of an end user to create an interactive AI agent of their own to bring a more natural, but customized, interface to the technology.
“You can go build an agent in 20 minutes… If you know how to tell it what you want it to do, you can build the first version, and then you can begin to iterate on it.”
He explained that project managers, estimators and others involved in the construction process “are going to be able to put AI to work for them and put these language models to work for them to create automation in their processes, which is going to unlock them to do things that actually add tremendous more value to a project.”
Of course, the AI results can only be as good as the data the technology taps, so the quality and format of the information was also a point for discussion during some of the educational sessions.
“The future is going to continue to trend in standardization of information,” said Michael Ho, CEO of Bespoke Metrics as he participated in an industry panel that provided a look at how one contractor streamlined prequalification and risk management through technology. “We have heard a lot about AI during discussions during the conference. It works much better with clean data, and actual real data that’s accurate.”
“When you use the more generic platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini, they’re great. They search the internet, and they pull a lot of information… but… you don’t know the sources. It’s hard to validate the truth,” said Lengieza. “You also don’t know if it is relevant to my project… the way that we built agent builder, we really focused on respecting permissions, it only looks at your project data that you have access to. It only looks at your company’s data or our database that we’ve trained on.”
To balance off the industry and technology discussions, Groundbreak also featured a mix of headliner entertainment, including comedic insights from Jim Gaffigan as well as an ending bash featuring Kimberly Perry of the Band Perry, Steve Augeri, former lead singer of Journey, and Johnny Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Next year’s Groundbreak is scheduled for October 21 to 22 in Orlando, Fla.
