Revizto’s 2026 “Bridging the Gap” report surveyed 2,000+ AEC practitioners across 8 global markets. The headline finding: technology integration is still the industry’s top challenge, coordination failures have climbed to the third biggest driver of rework, and nearly half of firms are paying more for software while questioning whether it’s worth it. The firms pulling ahead aren’t buying more tools – they’re simplifying their stack, upskilling existing staff, and leaning on automation to fill workforce gaps.
Rework costs the global construction industry somewhere north of $625 billion a year. That figure gets cited often enough that it’s almost stopped registering. But when you look at where that rework is actually coming from – and more specifically, how its causes have shifted – the picture gets more interesting, and more actionable.
Revizto’s 2026 “Bridging the Gap” report is worth reading carefully if you’re a contractor trying to figure out where your margin is actually leaking. It’s not a vendor puff piece. The data comes from 2,000+ practitioners and executives across 8 global markets, and the findings cut across the usual vendor narrative. More software hasn’t fixed the coordination problem. In many firms, it’s made it messier.
This is a breakdown of what the report actually says, what it means for contractors operating on thin margins, and where the firms that are outperforming their peers are putting their attention.
The Rework Problem Has Shifted – And That’s the Story
Coordination failures are now the third biggest driver of budget overruns
Change orders have long topped the list of rework drivers, and they still do. But the more telling shift in this year’s data is that poor communication and coordination has climbed to number three. That’s not a site problem or a procurement problem – it’s a workflow problem. And it means the source of budget bleed is sitting in the spaces between your teams, not just in the physical work being redone on site.
The firms that have made meaningful progress on rework reduction aren’t necessarily the ones running the most sophisticated tech stacks. They’re the ones where designers, trades, and owners got aligned early – through design-assist arrangements, design-build delivery, or simply better-structured coordination processes. As Sal D’Ambrosia, Director of Construction Technology at Wm. Blanchard Co., puts it in the report: when those groups collaborate early, the technology works, the budget reflects the value, and projects move forward with less friction. When they don’t, all the software in the world won’t save you.
That’s a usable insight. If your rework rate isn’t improving despite reasonable tech investment, look at the collaboration structure before you look at the tools. The data suggests the problem is upstream of the technology, not inside it.
Software Costs Are Up. Value Is Harder to Prove.
Nearly half of respondents are paying more for tools they can’t fully justify
Close to half of the firms surveyed report that their software and cloud licensing costs have risen by up to 10% over the past year. For a contractor running at 2-3% net margin, that’s not noise – that’s a real line item. And when the report asks whether that increased spend is delivering measurable value, the answers get uncomfortable.
Technology integration remains the top challenge across the board. Not adoption, not training – integration. The implication is that most firms are now holding multiple platforms that don’t talk to each other cleanly, and the friction created by that fragmentation is eating into whatever efficiency gains each individual tool was supposed to deliver. You’re paying for five tools and getting the productivity of three, because the handoffs between them are still manual.
This is consistent with what we’ve covered at Bricks & Bytes in terms of the scheduling software market – where the problem isn’t a shortage of tools, it’s that the tools don’t connect. Read our breakdown of why the scheduling market is fragmenting for more on what that looks like in practice.
“Integration, coordination and digital capability are inseparable. Technology integration remains the top challenge, rework is increasingly driven by workflow failures, and for architecture firms the number one barrier to gaining value from AI is limited digital skills.”Allister Lewis, Founder and CEO, Automated Data Driven Design (ADDD)
The Skills Gap Response Has Changed
Firms are simplifying tools and upskilling staff rather than hiring their way out
One of the more encouraging findings in the report is how firms are adapting to the skills shortage. The narrative a few years ago was that you needed to hire digitally literate people to get value from construction tech. The firms pulling ahead in 2026 have largely stopped chasing that. Instead, they’re simplifying their tool selection – fewer platforms, better integrated – and investing in bringing existing staff up to speed. Automation is being used to handle the repetitive, low-judgment tasks that were eating senior team members’ time.
That’s a practical response to a real constraint. Hiring construction professionals with strong digital fluency is genuinely hard. The talent pool is thin, competition for those people is intense, and they don’t come cheap. Upskilling your existing team is slower to show results but builds institutional knowledge that stays in the business. It’s also the kind of investment that compounds: a project manager who’s trained on your coordination platform becomes a trainer themselves, not a dependency.
For architecture firms specifically, the report flags that limited digital skills are the number one barrier to getting value from AI. That’s worth noting because it’s not a technology problem – it’s a capability and change management problem. And it has a more tractable solution than most technology problems do. As Francesca Lofiego, Digital Lead at Structure Tone, observes in the report: shifting people’s mindset is often the most challenging part of implementing new technology. That difficulty might actually explain why so many companies remain reluctant to adopt tools that could genuinely improve how projects get managed.
What the Outperforming Firms Are Actually Doing
Three patterns separate the firms pulling ahead from those still stuck in the gap
The report is careful not to oversell any single platform or approach, which makes the patterns that do emerge more credible. The firms that have closed the gap between digital investment and actual project performance share a few characteristics that are worth mapping against your own operation.
This maps closely to what we’ve written about before on BIM adoption patterns – where the firms that struggled were often trying to do too much at once, while the ones that stuck with it started narrow and expanded. See our earlier piece on construction’s greatest divide with BIM for more context on how adoption patterns play out across different firm sizes.
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Join 2500+ ReadersThe Comparison: Where Different Firm Types Stand
Not all AEC businesses face the same version of the coordination problem
The report surveys across firm types – GCs, architecture firms, engineering firms, subcontractors, and owners – and the picture isn’t uniform. The coordination challenge looks different depending on where you sit in the delivery chain, and so does the appropriate response.
| Firm Type | Top Challenge (2026) | Primary Rework Driver | Skills Gap Response | AI Adoption Barrier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General Contractors | Technology integration across subcontractors | Change orders + coordination failures | Consolidating platforms, automation | Integration complexity |
| Architecture Firms | Translating design intent to field reality | Design changes post-coordination | Upskilling existing staff | Limited digital skills |
| Engineering Firms | Cross-discipline clash resolution | Late-stage design conflicts | Automation of clash workflows | Data silos between disciplines |
| Subcontractors | Receiving accurate, timely information from GCs | Scope changes and late RFIs | Simpler, mobile-first tools | Low digital capacity on-site |
| Owners | Real-time visibility across the project | Coordination gaps between design and construction teams | Demanding integrated reporting from delivery teams | Dependency on contractor data quality |
The table reflects what the report surfaces: there’s no universal solution, but there is a universal problem. Wherever you sit in the chain, the gap between your teams – and between your tools – is where the money disappears.
Frequently Asked Questions
The 2026 “Bridging the Gap” report is an annual global survey published by Revizto covering digital adoption, rework causes, skills challenges, and technology spending trends across the AEC industry. The 2026 edition draws on responses from 2,000+ practitioners and executives across 8 global markets. It’s most relevant to GCs, project directors, and digital/technology leads at construction firms who are trying to benchmark where they sit against industry peers and identify where their digital investment is – and isn’t – paying off. You can access the full report via Revizto’s website.
The report doesn’t give a single definitive answer, but the pattern is fairly legible. As firms have added more digital tools – model coordination platforms, issue trackers, document management systems – the number of places where information needs to flow between teams has increased. When those tools don’t integrate cleanly, or when the commercial structure of a project doesn’t incentivize early collaboration between disciplines, information falls through the gaps. The result is decisions made on stale data, clashes caught late, and rework that could have been avoided if the coordination had happened in the design phase rather than on site. The report’s practitioner quotes consistently point back to people and process alignment as the root cause, with technology as a multiplier of whatever collaboration culture already exists. (Source: Revizto Bridging the Gap 2026)
The report doesn’t break down the software cost finding by firm size, but the concern about value-for-money is broadly distributed. Nearly half of all respondents – not a subset – report licensing costs up by as much as 10% over the past year. The pain is arguably sharpest for mid-market contractors where margins are thin and IT budgets are limited, but enterprise firms face their own version of the problem: they’re often paying for platform licenses across dozens of projects while struggling to prove consistent utilisation and ROI. The common thread is that software spend has outpaced firms’ ability to get standardised, measurable value from the tools they’ve committed to. (Source: Revizto Bridging the Gap 2026)
In the context of this report, technology integration refers to getting different software platforms to share data reliably – your model coordination tool talking to your issue tracker, your issue tracker talking to your scheduling system, your scheduling system talking to your cost management platform. The reason it remains the top challenge despite years of vendor promises on this front is that interoperability is genuinely hard, and the AEC industry has accumulated a fragmented vendor landscape where each major platform has commercial incentives to keep users inside its own ecosystem. APIs exist, but clean bi-directional data flow without manual reconciliation is still the exception rather than the norm on most projects. The firms getting this right have typically committed to a smaller number of platforms and done the configuration work to make those talk properly, rather than relying on out-of-the-box integrations. (Source: Revizto Bridging the Gap 2026)
Start with rework. If you’re not tracking where your rework is coming from – specifically whether it’s driven by change orders, design errors, or coordination breakdowns – you can’t apply the report’s findings in a meaningful way. Once you’ve got that data, the report gives you a useful benchmark: if coordination is showing up in your top three rework drivers, the priority is not more technology but better cross-discipline engagement earlier in the project lifecycle. On software spending, the question to ask is whether you can articulate measurable value from each platform you’re paying for. If you can’t, consolidation is likely more valuable than adding another point solution. The upskilling finding is also worth taking seriously: the bottleneck at most firms is not access to tools but the capability to use them properly under live project conditions. (Source: Revizto Bridging the Gap 2026)
The report covers 8 global markets, though Revizto does not list each market individually on the public report landing page. The respondent base of 2,000+ practitioners across those markets is large enough to draw defensible cross-market conclusions, though some findings may vary significantly by regional regulatory environment, procurement model, and digital maturity. UK and US contractors should expect the core findings on rework causes, integration challenges, and skills gaps to be directionally accurate for their markets, while acknowledging that specific percentages will reflect a global average rather than a single-country picture. (Source: Revizto Bridging the Gap 2026)
The report is published and sponsored by Revizto, a coordination platform vendor. That context is worth holding while reading it – the framing and findings will naturally align with the problems Revizto’s product is designed to solve. With that said, the data set (2,000+ respondents, 8 markets) is substantial, and the practitioner quotes included in the report are frank enough to suggest the findings aren’t purely manufactured. Bricks & Bytes covers vendor-sponsored research regularly and applies the same editorial lens here: take the data as a useful directional input, and stress-test the conclusions against what you’re actually seeing on your own projects. (Source: Revizto Bridging the Gap 2026)
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