Construction productivity starts with better information: Inside USA TODAY's Innovation Leaders

Construction teams know that delays rarely come from the work itself. More often, they come from missing information, outdated plans, or updates that never reach the right person at the right time. That gap between the office and the field is where most of the industry's lost time actually lives.

It's also the starting point for USA TODAY's Innovation Leaders, a documentary featuring Fieldwire and the construction professionals who rely on it to keep projects moving. Watch it below:

Rather than making the case for technology in the abstract, the film follows real project teams and looks at something more specific: what happens when everyone on a jobsite is working from the same information, updated in real time.

What you'll learn

• Why schedule overruns usually trace back to information gaps, not skill or effort
• How real Fieldwire customers closed those gaps in the field
• What changes day to day when the field and the office work from the same, up-to-date information
• Where AI fits into that same field-first approach, through Fieldwire's Field Intelligence

How coordination affects productivity

Productivity remains one of the construction industry's greatest opportunities.

According to FMI's 2023 Labor Productivity Study, contractors estimate that up to 15% of field labor costs are lost to unproductive work, with poor planning, communication, and project documentation among the leading causes.

Faron Riley, senior project manager at Sampson Construction, felt that friction firsthand. His team had cycled through several different systems over the years, each one handling its own piece of the job well enough on its own. The problem was what happened between them: "The biggest problem was they didn't collaborate with each other," Riley said.

As projects become increasingly complex, ensuring that everyone is working from the same information is becoming a key factor in improving efficiency and reducing rework.

USA TODAY's Innovation Leaders illustrates how a field-first approach helps address these challenges by giving project teams access to current plans, tasks, and project information wherever work happens. The documentary offers a behind-the-scenes look at how construction teams are embracing digital collaboration to improve communication, reduce busywork, and keep projects on track.

What jobsite innovation looks like in practice

For Ryan McHugh, CEO of Hi Power Electric, it comes down to something specific: getting the field the most current version of a drawing before it costs anyone time. "Drawings are changing every day," McHugh said. "Pushing those updated drawings on a daily basis to our field team ensures we are building to the most accurate set of plans and steering clear of delays."

It may sound like one small change, but it has a compounding effect. Fewer decisions made on stale information. Fewer conversations spent reconciling two different versions of what's actually happening on-site. It's also why Fieldwire was built to work without a signal, offline, on a phone in someone's pocket, because a tool that only works in the trailer doesn't solve the problem for the person on the third floor.

“At the end of the day, we're here to build a job, but we're here to do it efficiently. And if our field staff doesn't improve with the product, then we're not going to utilize it," said McHugh.

The future of construction technology

Fieldwire is now building AI directly into that same field-first layer through Field Intelligence, letting crews search across plans, tasks, and documentation in plain language, and automating the kind of reporting that otherwise eats an hour of a superintendent's evening. The industry looks to be at a genuine tipping point on this: ready to bring AI into the field, not just the back office, as long as it's built into a tool people already trust enough to open every morning and keep open all day.

That trust is the part that can't be shortcut. It's been earned project by project, across more than four million of them, on real sites, by real crews solving real problems, which is really what the documentary is about.

By putting current information directly into the hands of field teams, connected construction software helps reduce time spent searching for answers and enables crews to focus on delivering quality work safely and efficiently. Want to learn more?