Author: Peggy Smedley

These days AI (artificial intelligence) is moving into nearly every corner of our lives, from the decisions we make at home to the systems that keep buildings and plant floors operating. But as AI becomes more capable, we need to ask a more fundamental question: Are we building technology that helps us think better, or technology that simply gives us answers? A recent Vesela survey found 76% of daily AI users whose AI had challenged them said their thinking had become sharper. The finding points to an important opportunity. AI can be more than an answer engine. It can be…

The construction industry has a workforce challenge that impacts more than just hiring. The industry needs to develop people, build skills, and create career paths that encourage workers to commit to the industry and continue to grow with it. These statements seem to be coming up a lot lately. In fact, this is precisely what we see emerge with the data from a new report. As we see in a Jobs for the Future report, the state of America’s skills trades is important to a broader workforce conversation. Here’s what the numbers show us: More than 18 million people work…

Self-driving cars are often judged by their crashes, but perhaps there is a different question we should be asking: What can the data tell us about the future of transportation safety? The data does tell us an interesting story. Across five U.S. metropolitan areas, robotaxis recorded fewer injury crashes per mile than human drivers, and yet the findings also reveal why we cannot declare victory on autonomous vehicle safety just yet. Consider the geography. The San Francisco Bay Area recorded one of the highest rates of reported robotaxi crashes and Phoenix had one of the lowest. At first glance, this…

Construction projects generate mountains of information, from labor hours and production rates to schedules, costs, delays, and changes. Yet too often, that information remains fragmented or trapped inside individual projects. Construction companies measure what happened, file the reports, and then move on to the next job—without necessarily learning enough to make the next project better. Enter the new Cambridge Framework for Construction Productivity. Developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge Laing O’Rourke Centre using data from more than 25 U.K. construction projects, the framework takes a practical approach to a problem the construction industry has wrestled with for decades:…

Manufacturers have spent the last few years asking whether they should adopt AI (artificial intelligence). That question is largely settled. AI is no longer optional. But now there is a bigger question manufacturers must contend with: Can companies actually make AI work? The danger right now is that many manufacturers are confusing adoption with transformation. Let’s take a closer look at some numbers that tell an interesting story. A 2026 survey of 500 manufacturing technology decision makers in the summer found 60% now describe their organizations as broadly or fully advanced in AI adoption, which is up from 36% earlier…

Construction companies have always been data-rich businesses. Every project generates an enormous amount of information—from project plans and budgets to schedules, change orders, inspections, safety reports, equipment data, material costs, labor hours, weather conditions, and countless other details. But there is a difference between having all that data and actually putting it to work, which is why one of my recent predictions for 2027 that I mentioned on The Peggy Smedley Show is construction companies must begin treating historical data as an asset. Let me explain. Think about what happens when a project ends. The building is complete, the customer takes…

Here at Connected World and The Peggy Smedley Show, we often talk about how to scale AI (artificial intelligence) in manufacturing. We live, eat, and breathe this topic. But if we really look at the numbers, it tells a much different story in 2026. Only 22% of organizations have successfully scaled AI across multiple business units or adopted an AI-first approach, according to a Gartner survey. That number stopped me in my tracks because it tells us something important about where we really are with AI: We have spent years talking about transformation, investing in AI, and experimenting with use…

Here’s something three decades in construction have taught me: there will always be multiple vendors. And there’s never going to be one single vendor that does everything a project team needs. So, that makes the real question more interesting: how do you work with all the data across multiple platforms in a meaningful way? That is the question of this decade. As infrastructure becomes increasingly digital, the ability to move information across systems—and preserve its meaning along the way could become just as important as the tools used to create it. Recently, I had a conversation with Greg Demchak, vice…

The residential construction market is sending a message, and it is one we should pay attention to: We cannot build the future of housing the same way we built the past. The latest numbers from the NAHB (National Assn. of Home Builders) make the challenge clear. New single-family home sales fell 10.5% in July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 607,000—the slowest pace since the beginning of the year. Sales were also down 6.3% from a year earlier. NAHB says single-family home building is on track for a second consecutive annual decline in 2026. At the heart of the…

Here at Connected World and The Peggy Smedley Show, we have spent the last few years talking about AI (artificial intelligence), and now there is an AI revolution happening—one that is much more physical, and it is happening on the factory floor. The 2026 Roadmap on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Smart Manufacturing, published by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), makes one thing clear: AI and machine learning are moving deeper into the systems that make, move, measure, and maintain the things we depend on every day. Why? Because manufacturing is not an isolated industry that exists…