By Belle Lin

The construction industry is looking to AI and AI agents to make project managers' lives easier, and eventually address an exodus of retiring talent.

Construction-software firms are selling AI-powered tools that can assist site managers and foremen with work like analyzing sites for potential safety violations -- tasks AI models can accomplish by searching through and synthesizing large amounts of data. And they are laying groundwork for AI that can one day reproduce the knowledge of an experienced leader or skilled worker.

Such technology comes at a critical time. The recent data center boom is resulting in a drastic uptick in demand for skilled builders. Meanwhile, the industry is short about 439,000 workers, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group. About 41% of the current construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031, the National Center for Construction Research and Education found.

Procore Technologies, which sells construction-management software, unveiled a slew of AI agents last year that aim to help with daily construction site to-do's, including a log agent, a foreman's personal assistant and an action item generator for back-office tasks.

The Carpinteria, Calif.-based company, founded in 2002, reported $339 million in revenue in its most recent quarter. Procore's AI tools rely on a variety of models, including those from OpenAI.

The company's Assist tool taps large-language models to summarize jobsite information and other documents, so project managers can find answers hidden in their data, such as the fire-rating requirements for a specific room or wall. Other Procore tools use AI to extract data from project documents to automatically create a list of required submittals.

Procore is one of several software providers for the construction sector, and among the largest that specializes in project management. Others include Trimble and Autodesk, as well as smaller startups using AI to tackle construction scheduling and design-based tasks.

AI also has other uses in construction: The startups AI Clearing and OpenSpace use computer vision to track the progress of construction sites based on aerial and other real-world images. Skillit, a New York City-based startup, is using AI and AI agents to match construction workers with open positions.

One reason AI tools for project management help save time is because they support natural language processing, enabling managers and other site workers to speak directly to the apps on their devices.

Dictating into Procore's AI tool lets Minneapolis-based Mortenson's superintendents record their daily logs while they drive around a project site, said Gene Hodge, the construction firm's vice president of innovation. "If you can input data that way, and not have to do it in front of a computer, having that user interface improvement is really great," he said.

Kaufman Lynn, a Florida-based construction firm, built an agent using Procore's technology that pulls data from nearly a dozen different tools and automatically creates a formatted monthly progress report. "Something that took us six to eight hours is done within minutes," said Tim Bonczek, an executive vice president at the firm.

Sixty percent of construction firms are already using some form of AI, though most of those are large companies, according to research from International Data Corp. Many smaller construction providers are still digitizing and were moving to the cloud just a few years ago, said Jeff Hojlo, an analyst at IDC.

Looking ahead, AI could serve as a way to save and transfer the knowledge of skilled workers -- especially those who retire or exit the sector.

"We have a number of people retiring in our sports division that have built a lot of stadiums, and we're talking about, 'How do we capture all of the knowledge that they've built?'" Mortenson's Hodge said.

When construction firms start to use AI, it also forces them to create the data the technology can use later, said Aviad Almagor, Trimble's vice president of technology innovation. "Historically, this data sometimes just resides in the heads of those experienced employees," he said, "Let's sit with the expert, who is our domain expert, and ask them to make this data more visible to the system and to the other employees."

Construction firm Skanska is already trying to use AI to share the knowledge of a few skilled experts with the entire company. Will Senner, Skanska's senior vice president of preconstruction, and Anita Woolley Nelson, its regional executive officer, said the company built an AI safety agent trained on thousands of documents created by experienced safety leaders -- policies, procedures, best practices -- and combined it with feedback individuals have given about their decision-making processes and approach.

"We already had very intentional mechanisms in place to capture the success stories, best practices and lessons learned from our project teams throughout the business, so generative AI became a new way for us to unlock that," Senner said.

But before AI agents can help with knowledge transfer, people need to trust the technology.

It is still a challenge getting construction workers to use AI rather than relying on existing tools like pen-and-paper, said Amy Bunszel, Autodesk's executive vice president of architecture, engineering and construction.

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

The construction industry is short about 349,000 workers, based on January 2026 data from the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group. "Construction Companies See Promise in AI Agents," at 10 a.m. ET, incorrectly said the industry was short 439,000 workers and referenced 2025 data.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 27, 2026 17:30 ET (22:30 GMT)

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