Field tech adoption in commercial construction — 2026

The headline number

Across the published industry reports we consulted (JBKnowledge ConTech Report 2024, Dodge SmartMarket Brief 2023, ENR “Top 50 Construction Tech Startups” 2025 retrospective), the repeated finding is: field-side adoption of construction-PM software is a fraction of office-side adoption.

Specifically:

• Project-management software (Procore, Autodesk Build, Fieldwire, PlanGrid) is in use at ~75-85% of mid-to-large commercial GCs, per JBKnowledge.
• Within those GCs, weekly active use by tradespeople averages 20-35% — the “long tail” of field users either never logs in or logs in once and never returns.
• The most cited reason: tradespeople don’t open project-management apps. They text a foreman or a PM.

The numbers vary by report and by company size, but the directional finding is consistent across every source we could find: the office uses the software; the field mostly doesn’t.

What the operators say (interviews)

We’ve interviewed 12 commercial PMs at GCs ranging from 4-100 active projects. The pattern is unanimous on three points:

1. The PM ends up as the “lookup layer” for the field crew — 40-80 inbound texts/day asking for data that’s already in Procore.
2. Giving the field crew Procore access has been tried and rejected at most shops we surveyed: license cost, adoption friction, and permission complexity were the recurring rejection reasons.
3. The PM’s working theory of the cause is consistent:tradespeople don’t use apps; they use phones.

Where text-message interfaces fit

If we accept the “tradespeople use phones, not apps” framing, the design implication is direct: the interface for field data should be a phone number, not an app. Forward operationalizes that idea: text the project, get the cited answer.

We’ve published a longer-form take on the tradeoffs at The Procore lookup tax; the technical architecture is at Building Forward.

Sources cited

• JBKnowledge ConTech Report (annual; methodology + sample size disclosed in the published PDF).
• Dodge SmartMarket Brief: Connected Construction (2023).
• ENR Top 50 Construction Tech Startups (2025 retrospective).
• Our own interviews with 12 commercial PMs at 8 distinct GCs; details available on request under NDA.

How to engage

If you’re a GC with the field-adoption problem, drop your email above for an early-access conversation. If you’re a researcher / journalist working on this topic and want our interview transcripts (anonymized), email josh@getforward.xyz.