Construction Dive

Henning Roedel thinks questions about A I taking away jobs in construction miss the point.

“We don’t think about how to reduce our staff size, because we have enough backlog and work ahead of us that we need more people,” said Roedel, robotics lead for the innovation team at Redwood City, California-based DPR Construction. “You need to flip the displacement question around because we currently don’t have enough people in our industry to meet the construction needs of society as it is.”

The numbers back Roedel up. In March, even when construction layoffs reached their highest level since the start of the pandemic, there were still more than 341,000 unfilled jobs in the sector.

For Roedel, given the endemic labor crisis that’s been plaguing the industry for years, the early deployment of AI and robotic solutions into construction is evidence of job displacement and abandonment that has already occurred and threatened the industry’s ability to keep pace with demand.

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