Statistics show by 2030, there will be $15 trillion spent per year on projects. The challenge is statistics also show about a 70% failure rate, including being over budget, missing the schedule, or not meeting the requirements in some other way—and 80% of the value of an asset is after it is built. Certainly, technology can help solve this challenge.
This data was conveyed by Huw Roberts, CEO, PMWeb at the PMWeb conference in February. As we know, there is new investment in PMWeb.
In November 2024, the company announced a strategic growth investment from Bregal Sagemount, a private capital firm. In the same announcement, PMWeb said founder and CEO Marc Jaude is being elevated to chairman of the Board of Directors and Roberts was appointed CEO, who joins the company after most recently serving as CEO of Graphisoft.
Roberts says the advantage of this investment is it gives PMWeb the resources and fuel to take PMWeb to the next level.
Still, the product and company that customers have come to know and love will remain steadfast. During the keynote, Chris Wagner, director, PMWeb, also took the stage, ensuring the core team is still in place, saying, “The old way was great. The new way is just better.”
The team at PMWeb is taking the opportunity to reexamine every page and every function on the page to make the product better. While it is updating the interface, it is also improving the whole process for its customers.
“Fundamentally, PMWeb is your strategic control center. It is the place where you can get to all of that information, all of those people, all of the processes that you are trying to manage. More importantly, it is covering that whole lifecycle,” says Roberts.
The big value here is PMWeb is able to help its clients manage capital projects from concept through operations and it is all integrated—long-term capital planning and forecasting, project planning and scenario planning, budgeting and approval, contracting, executing and change orders, handover and turnover, and of course asset management.
Roberts shared with me exclusively customers are often focused on different areas. For instance, some customers are really focused on that backend asset management, while others are focused on the frontend long-term capital planning and forecasting.
“The amount of data about projects is phenomenal,” says Roberts. “But they are all different and they are all set up a little bit differently.”
All of this is very important to understand, as we begin to see the rise of AI (artificial intelligence). Roberts compares it to layers in a cake.
“You have to have data in the first place,” he explains. “The data has to be organized and structured, and it has to be managed and controlled, and then it has to be in access rights, and workflows, and you need to be in command of that data, and then you can start using it in a predictable, comfortable, secure way.”
He insists it must be that same progressive with AI. The danger as he sees it is if AI skips layers in the cake, and suddenly AI has gone all the way down to that unstructured data and is helping structure it for you, but it isn’t controlled by or connected to all those management and protocols and workflows and access rights and so forth.
Another consideration to keep in mind is AI often works best when we have a lot of data, especially data over time, which will almost certainly continue to open up new opportunities in the future.
As Roberts says, our future is so bright, we have to wear sunglasses.
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