# The Trends Scorecard: Construction & Infrastructure – What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
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"The future of construction is intelligence made physical — smart materials, robotic precision, and data-driven design." — Futurist Jim Carroll This is the final entry in my Trends Scorecard series, where I go back into my own archive, dig up what I actually predicted years ago, and grade it honestly against the world of 2026. No cherry-picking, no quiet edits. This time the industry is Construction and Infrastructure -- the oldest business on earth, and one I have argued for two decades would be reinvented faster than anyone in a hard hat wanted to believe. Here's the scorecard. My book Being Unique is now in print - my first proof copy arrived just last night, and so it's available on most Amazon stores. You can learn more about and order a copy at unique.jimcarroll.com or via my books page. I'm pretty excited about this one and will have more to share. Back to construction. The setup: I kept telling builders they were about to become manufacturers For most of my career, construction was the industry people pointed to when they wanted to argue that some things never change. Bricks, mortar, a crew on a muddy site, a building that takes a year to go up. I never bought it. From keynote stages in Dubai, Oman, Philadelphia and a hundred construction and infrastructure events in between, I kept saying the same uncomfortable thing: the site was going to move into the factory, the trades were going to be joined by robots, concrete was going to come out of a printer, and the building itself was going to wake up and start talking back. Here's how I framed the whole arc back in 2019, in an exclusive piece I wrote for Gulf Construction: What's really happening is we are shifting the construction industry from one of construction, to one of manufacturing. And this isn't a sector I've admired from a distance. I had Claude dig through my blog and pull together the construction and infrastructure groups I've keynoted for over the years: Construction, Engineering & Standards Bodies — Kiewit Corporation, Alberici Group, Black & Veatch, Matheson Financial, American Concrete Institute, US Army Corps of Engineers Contractors, Trades & Building Systems — Distributors Contractors Association, Partners in Building, Canadian Plumbing and Heating, Rocky Mountain Electrical League, GE Lighting Infrastructure & Roads — Ontario Road Builders Association, CCI Wireless, Global Cold Chain Alliance Real Estate & Building Management — Exis Global, Trez Capital, REALTORS Triple Play Convention, Building Owners & Managers (BOMEX), FM Global And those are only the ones I've blogged about — there have been plenty more. So how did the calls hold up? Let's pull the receipts. Prediction #1 — "The smart home is not just a box of gadgets" (2017) — Hit Long before "smart building" was a line item in every developer's pitch deck, I was telling home and condo construction clients that they were thinking far too small. A smart building, I argued, was not a pile of connected thermostats -- it was a platform for energy, health, security and economic advantage. Here's what I wrote in 2017: a smart home doesn't just involve throwing in some Internet-connected devices; it's not just about the Internet of Things; there is a lot more potential, and the scope of the opportunity is pretty significant in the long term. The grade: Hit. In 2026, "smart building" is a category, not a nvelty. Connected HVAC, IoT energy management, predictive maintenance and building-health sensors are standard in new commercial construction, and the conversation has moved exactly where I said it would -- from gadgets to whole-building intelligence and energy. I called the gap between the gadget and the ecosystem, and the ecosystem won. Prediction #2 — "Construction becomes manufacturing" (2019) — Hit This was the spine of everything I said about the industry: stop thinking of a building as something you assemble in the rain, and start thinking of it as something you manufacture. In that 2019 Gulf Construction article I pointed straight at the UK's Legal & General, which was already building homes on production lines: moving away from building in sites with blocks, to building utilising robots in factories with subsequent assembly on site The grade: Hit. Off-site and modular construction is now mainstream language. By 2025 I was writing that moving up to 90 percent of construction activity off-site can accelerate timelines by as much as 50 percent -- and naming the firms doing it. The factory-then-assemble model that sounded radical in 2019 is now a board-level strategy across the industry. The frame held. Prediction #3 — "Bricklaying robots will build the home" (2019) — Live / too optimistic Here is one where I let my enthusiasm run ahead of the trowel. In 2019 I pointed to Australia's Fastbrick Robotics as proof the robotic mason had arrived: In Australia, Fastbrick Robotics has developed technology that can build a home in three days using a sophisticated, automated bricklaying system - forever changing the way the industry operates. The grade: Live, but I was too optimistic on timing. The technology is real -- Fastbrick's Hadrian, masonry robots, layout robots and Built Robotics' autonomous earthmoving all exist and are working in 2026. But "forever changing the way the industry operates" by now? Not yet. Robotic masons are demonstrations, pilots and niche deployments, not the default crew on the average job site. The labor-shortage pressure that should be pulling them in is enormous, and adoption is still slow. I will own this one: I had the direction right and the pace wrong. Prediction #4 — "We'll 3D print buildings in concrete" (2019) — Live / early I was an early and loud believer in printing structures out of concrete. In 2019 I held up Dubai's printed office as the proof point: It took but 17 days to print a building that was 20 ft high, 120 ft long, and 40 ft wide. The grade: Live, and honestly still early. 3D-printed concrete is no longer science fiction -- there are printed homes, printed military barracks, printed bridges and a real industry of printer companies in 2026. But it remains a fast-growing niche, not the way most buildings get built. The trend line is exactly where I pointed it; the volume just hasn't caught up to the headlines yet. Directionally right, scale pending. Prediction #5 — "The 2030 building: robotic masons, printed concrete, solar windows, anticipatory walls" (2019) — Mostly hit In my "20 Trends into 2030" piece I tried to describe the construction site of the next decade in a single dense paragraph. Read it now and it is striking how much has already shown up: We used to send people and materials to a site in order for a building to be assembled. Now, we generally assemble the building offsite with robotic technology and 3D printing technologies, and send it to the site for final quick, fast assembly. Essentially, we've gone from building homes on site to building them in factories. AI and robots drive this manufacturing process - brick laying robotic masons are everywhere, as is the ability to 3D print in concrete. We've also seen the continual arrival of all kinds of new material science and new concepts - solar energy generating windows, anticipatory smart building technology and more. The grade: Mostly hit, with one honest asterisk. Off-site assembly, factory-built homes, AI-driven design, 3D-printed concrete, solar-generating glass and anticipatory smart-building tech are all real and shipping in 2026. The one phrase I would soften is "brick laying robotic masons are everywhere" -- they are not everywhere, they are somewhere. Strip that one word and the rest of this paragraph reads like a description of the industry today rather than a prediction from 2019. Prediction #6 — "Roads and infrastructure get smart and connected" (2019) — Live / early I always insisted that the infrastructure was going to get as smart as the buildings -- that the road itself would become a data device. From the same 2030 outlook: They've become smart, intelligent, connected. Your self-driving car doesn't just drive itself, but talks to other vehicles around it, to sensors embedded in the road, and to light poles and other road-tech that helps to guide it on its voyage. The grade: Live and arriving, but earlier on the curve than the buildings. Instrumented bridges, sensor-laden highways, connected traffic infrastructure and structural-health monitoring are all real in 2026, and the wave of 21st-century infrastructure investment -- EV charging, distributed grid, 5G -- is exactly the build-out I described. But the seamless car-to-road-to-light-pole conversation is still patchy and regional, not universal. Right trend, still mid-build. Prediction #7 — "The site moves into the factory, guided by digital twins" (2025) — Hit The most recent entry, and the one that closes the loop on a twenty-year argument. Writing in 2025, I put the whole thesis in one plain sentence: We used to do most building and construction assembly on site - increasingly, we'll do more of it in a factory-like setting, off-site. The grade: Hit -- and notice this is no longer a bold future bet, it's a description of how the leading firms already work. By 2025 the supporting cast had all arrived: dynamic 4D digital twins replacing 2D blueprints, AI-driven project management, self-healing concrete and transparent solar-generating glass, modular projects cutting deliveries and embodied carbon. The thing I was once arguing for from a stage is now the operating model of the people who build for a living. The one I want to flag honestly If I'm grading myself fairly, the honest flag is timing, and it clusters around the robots and the printers. Prediction #3 -- bricklaying robots "forever changing the way the industry operates" -- and Prediction #4 -- routinely printing buildings in concrete -- are both directionally correct and both still early. The technology showed up exactly where and roughly when I said it would. What I got wrong was the slope of adoption. Construction is the most capital-shy, risk-averse, fragmented industry I cover, built on a vast base of small and medium firms who cannot easily absorb the cost or the skills required to change. I described the destination accurately. I underestimated how long the traditionalism, the funding constraints and the skills gap would slow the trip. "Everywhere" was the wrong word. "Inevitable" was the right one. What the scorecard tells us about what's next Here's the method behind all of this, and it is the same method that runs through every post in this series. I don't guess. I find a real trend that is already visibly underway -- a robot that builds a wall, a printer that extrudes concrete, a factory that ships finished rooms -- and I follow it relentlessly to its logical conclusion, assuming it gets faster, cheaper and better, because that is what trends do. The construction scorecard says the method works: smart buildings, construction-as-manufacturing, off-site and modular, digital twins, smart infrastructure -- all called early, all here. So where does construction go from here? That's a separate conversation, and a longer one than a scorecard can hold. I've mapped it out sector by sector in my current series, The Way Forward — the trends, the barriers, and the playbook for acting on them. If these receipts convinced you the method works, that's where you'll find where it's pointing next. Across every industry I've graded -- manufacturing, healthcare, retail, construction and the rest -- the pattern never broke. The lesson is always the same: watch the curve, assume it bends faster than the consensus believes, and follow it all the way to its conclusion. The people who got blindsided were never the ones who took the trend too seriously. They were the ones who decided their industry was the exception. Construction spent decades insisting it was the exception. It wasn't. None of them are. The future shows up on schedule for the people who were already looking for it -- so keep looking forward, keep following the curve, and go build what comes next.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/07/the-trends-scorecard-construction-infrastructure-what-i-predicted-and-what-actually-happened/