Three notes from our visit to Advancing PreFab 2025... then a note about the big reality people are not yet communicating clearly:

1. There's a lot of new faces. Mathew Ford and I hung out at the Executive Track, Chaired by a gracious Amy Marks. Amy polled the audience "How many of you are here for the first time?" and 70%-80% of the room's hands went up.
2. Data Centers are leading Innovation. Huge amounts of money are being poured into that sector of the industry. AI and big data are a contemporary space race. As a result, data center builders are organizing-the-way-we-organize-projects faster, and with more technically facile thinkers.
3. Labor problems are top-of-mind. Every panel touched on [i] an aging skilled labor workforce, [ii] a lack of young replacements, and [iii] disorganized training for those that join (mostly on-the-job, reacting to day-to-day project pressures).

... It doesn't take a crystal ball to see the future. All three of these notes point to a durable, accelerating, cross-sector economic pressure to replace services with products. Construction is only the latest industry to compel firms away from engineered-to-order project delivery and towards configured-to-order project delivery methods. 

This isn't just the framing of a conference with "PreFab" in its name. Many offsite firms that trekked to Arizona last week are stuck wondering how to better kit and assemble their own scope, in their own shop, within their own risk envelope. The landscape of tomorrow's smaller, more productive construction industry is a different collection of risk envelopes. Vast rewards await firms that crack-the-code to combine trade work into larger building components with industrialized construction (manufacturing) methods.

At the Center, we detailed this future in Mod 2.0 (link). Our staff and Senior Research Fellows joined forces to help firms reorganize the marketplace to respond with planning and control. Drop a line to Mathew Ford or Jason Van Nest to learn more.