Construction and design conversation right now is dominated by one subject. Artificial intelligence sits on every agenda, in every demo, and across most of the trade press. Teams describe a kind of overload, a sense that every week brings another platform promising to change how buildings get delivered.
Despite the continuous influx of new tools, the industry's most persistent challenge remains the same.
According to research commissioned by Autodesk, BIM and preconstruction professionals spend more than 13 hours a week searching for the project data they need.
That is not a fringe inconvenience. It is roughly a third of the work week lost to hunting for information that already exists somewhere. Projects still stall, budgets still slip, and rework still happens for the same reason it always has.
The right information does not reach the right people early enough. Better software has made that gap easier to see. It has not closed it.
The coordination problem hiding in Division 8
Openings are a small share of a building's cost and an outsized share of its coordination risk. Doors, frames, and hardware account for roughly one to three percent of total project value, yet a single project can carry hundreds of individual openings, each with its own fire rating, accessibility requirement, and hardware set. The math is unforgiving. A minor line item generates a major share of the questions.
That pressure shows up at the worst possible moment. Division 8 tends to be the last thing a design team wants to think about, so it gets pushed toward the end of the process and handed down to whoever has capacity. By the time anyone looks closely, the schedule has already tightened.
"Division 8 is typically the last thing a project architect wants to think about. Building out the door schedule with all the necessary information, functionality, and security requirements is delayed to the last second and then becomes a fire drill. That problem has not changed. Coordination needs to happen earlier in the design schedule to allow for more accurate information throughout the process."
Shari A. Muscat, AHC, CSI/CDT, General Manager, Openings Studio, on where openings fall in the design process
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked a project to closeout. Openings arrive late, often assigned to a junior team member as a discrete task rather than an integrated one. The information needed to get them right is scattered across drawings, schedules, and email threads. What should be a coordination exercise becomes a scramble.
Why more technology has not been enough
Building information modeling was supposed to settle this. The original promise was straightforward. The model would hold the information each stakeholder needed, available when they needed it, through design, construction, and the life of the building. Adoption has followed.
Industry surveys now put building information modeling use among large architecture firms at nearly universal levels.
Adoption alone did not deliver the outcome. The reason is not the model. It is the data inside it. A model is only as useful as the information it carries, and that information has to be accurate, trusted, and shaped for the person who will use it next.
"One of the age-old things building information modeling was supposed to solve was that all the information you needed would be contained in the model. The issue was getting the right information into the model that was usable by the right people."
Ryan McLachlan, AHC, CM-BIM, CFDAI, LEED Green Associate on the gap between the promise and the practice
Trust turns out to be the hidden variable. When a design team moves quickly, it cannot always vouch for the accuracy of every piece of metadata it produces. Uncertain data does not get shared, because sharing it carries liability. So the information sits, technically present in a model but functionally unavailable to the people downstream who need it.
The tool works. The flow of trusted information does not.
Speed raised the stakes
The industry has not stood still while this problem persisted. Project delivery has accelerated. Design-build now accounts for nearly half of United States non-residential construction spending, a decisive shift away from the traditional design-bid-build model that dominated for decades. These arrangements compress timelines that once ran two to three years into a fraction of that. Teams now design while the foundation is already being poured.
Speed changes the calculation. When schedules were long, a late catch on openings was painful but survivable. When design and construction happen in parallel, the same late catch cascades. Every downstream decision that depended on the missing information has to be revisited.
The gap between design intent and constructability has to be bridged faster than ever, and the older, sequential way of working cannot keep pace.
"How do we get involved earlier in the process, so that we are helping to shape the information more accurate and more constructable? Architects are designing while the building is being constructed. Speed to market, and how accurate data is coordinated into a deliverable, is what mitigates liability."
Shari Muscat, on earlier involvement as the answer to compressed schedules
Risk mitigation now sits at the center of nearly every project decision. Contractors ask how to de-risk the work and how to avoid exposure. The answer, repeatedly, comes back to data and timing. Accurate information, available early, is what protects the budget, the schedule, and the parties who signed for them.
A workforce factor few dashboards capture
There is a human dimension the software rarely accounts for. Experienced people are retiring, and their judgment leaves with them.
NCCER research projects that roughly 41 percent of the current United States construction workforce will retire by 2031, and much of what leaves with them is not written down anywhere.
The industry calls it the loss of institutional knowledge, and it compounds every other pressure. A veteran who could look at a plan and anticipate an opening conflict is hard to replace with a checklist. When that knowledge walks out the door, the burden falls back on process and on whatever information the team can actually trust.
General contractors already report difficulty finding qualified installers to build what design teams specify. The gap between what gets drawn and what can be built on the ground is widening, and it puts a premium on getting coordination right earlier, when there is still time to adjust.
Expertise and early coordination close the gap
The lesson is not that technology has failed. Technology was never the whole answer. Tools accelerate good practice and expose bad practice. They do not, on their own, decide what information matters, verify its accuracy, or ensure it reaches the right hands at the right time. That work still depends on expertise and on early, deliberate collaboration.
The teams that pull ahead treat information as something to shape, not just store. They bring the people who understand openings into the process early, while decisions are still open and inexpensive to change. They insist on data that downstream partners can trust. They close the gap the old way, through coordination, and use the new tools to do it faster and at greater scale.
The next article in this series looks at the technology directly, and at artificial intelligence in particular. The through-line holds. A tool is only as good as the data it runs on and the judgment that guides it. The oldest problem in the industry is still the one worth solving first.
Openings made easy.