00:00 Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, February 22nd.
00:05 Today on Forbes, this new billionaire is building an army of robot construction workers.
00:13 On a freezing December morning, John Fish is outside, standing near the edge on the
00:18 33rd floor of South Station Tower, a half-finished skyscraper in downtown Boston.
00:24 He points to a bright red crane below as it carries a pallet of metal panels through the
00:29 frigid air and explains his plans to automate it.
00:33 In a distinct Boston accent, Fish says, "There's a camera on the crane itself that watches
00:39 the boom and sees it swing and registers all that information.
00:43 How can you get more pics per hour in a safe manner?
00:46 We've got to be very, very careful."
00:50 Down on the busier 14th floor, over the relentless thumping of pneumatic nail guns and the din
00:55 of grinding steel, Fish describes how the robotic revolution is changing his construction
01:00 sites.
01:01 His construction company, Suffolk, is introducing two-foot tall machines, think miniature army
01:06 tanks, that zoom around and print blueprints and layouts for workers to follow, speeding
01:12 construction and reducing errors.
01:14 Fish says, "We're going to be putting it on all our jobs."
01:20 Fish is a 63-year-old construction industry lifer.
01:23 He made a fortune building high-rises from Massachusetts to California.
01:28 He's worth $2.3 billion, thanks to his 100% stake in the $6 billion in revenue, Suffolk.
01:35 The Boston-based construction firm, in the last 20 years, has built more than 150 million
01:40 square feet of commercial real estate in the U.S., including much of Boston's skyline
01:45 and hotels in Los Angeles and Miami.
01:49 Now he's looking to disrupt the $2.1 trillion industry that made him so successful.
01:54 His Suffolk Technologies division is building new construction-focused software products,
01:59 some of which it's spinning off into separate ventures, while his venture investing arm
02:04 has taken stakes in dozens of ambitious construction tech startups that do everything from 3D printing
02:09 of walls to manufacturing emission-free portable power generators.
02:15 While taking Forbes on a tour of Suffolk's ultra-modern headquarters in Roxbury, a working-class
02:19 neighborhood in southern Boston, Fish says, "Our industry is the only industry in the
02:25 world where productivity has gone down in the last 50 years as opposed to going up.
02:30 Think about the Empire State Building.
02:32 It was built in the 1930s and took 14 months to build.
02:35 Today, it would take five years."
02:39 One reason is that many in the industry want nothing to do with robotics or AI.
02:44 According to a report from McKinsey, the general contractors, subcontractors, unions, and multi-billion-dollar
02:51 management firms that run construction sites have "entrenched analog ways of working."
02:58 Brent Thielman, an equity analyst at DA Davidson who covers engineering and construction, says,
03:04 "Technology is accepted at a very slow rate in this industry, and that's probably going
03:09 to be the same case for the foreseeable future.
03:11 At the end of the day, it is a labor market."
03:15 In fact, it's a labor market that has long struggled to attract enough laborers.
03:19 There were many more construction job openings in 2022 than any previous year in the 23 years
03:25 that the Associated Builders and Contractors, also known as ABC, has been keeping track.
03:31 Plus, costs are up.
03:33 Wages in construction rose 34 percent between 2012 and 2022, according to government statistics,
03:39 while input costs—think steel, cement, and wood—have jumped nearly 40 percent since
03:44 early 2020, per ABC.
03:47 Fish is convinced that robots will be key to solving the labor shortage and keeping
03:52 costs down.
03:53 Putting robots on job sites is no small order.
03:56 There will be regulatory scrutiny, client skepticism, financial pressures, and pushback
04:01 from human workers.
04:02 But Fish insists it's necessary regardless of the obstacles.
04:07 The other half of the equation is data.
04:09 Fish says Suffolk already has its own "special sauce" after a decade-long investment in
04:14 analytics, which the firm uses to track progress and manage costs at its 100-odd active job
04:20 sites.
04:21 To spice up that special sauce, Suffolk has been reinvesting its earnings into new technologies
04:26 and products that it's developing under Suffolk Technologies, which Fish set up in
04:31 2019.
04:32 He has spun off one product—a cost-estimating software called Edify—into its own company,
04:38 with plans for a second—Edge—a job site planning tool—this year.
04:43 If you want to learn more about John Fish, look out for our Forbes Reports video.
04:48 For full coverage, check out John Hyatt's piece on Forbes.com.
04:53 This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:55 Thanks for tuning in.
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