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How will the construction site of 2040 look? Mace Construct has the answer
29 June 2026
Design coordination, clash detection, programme optimisation, supply chain scheduling, compliance documentation, health and safety, and onsite progress tracking will be largely carried out by AI on the construction site of 2040, according to Mace Construct.
Mace Construct’s Build Smart, Build Better report sets out to address construction’s perennial issue – poor productivity – (see recommendations below) by reviewing the contractor’s performance on its own projects. In so doing, it describes the construction site of the future.
In detailing AI’’s role, Mace Construct states: “AI is a part of the picture where potentially the gap between hype and evidence is widest. [However] the practical effect is that a share of the coordination or compliance work currently done manually, slowly and with errors, will be done faster and more accurately [by AI].”
Automation will also be a factor in 2040. “Automation will make the biggest difference where the environment can be controlled: in the factory rather than on site, and in the narrow set of site tasks where tolerances and repetition already align with what machines do well. Layout marking, rebar tying, installing lifts, bricklaying in controlled conditions, logistics handling, demolition and inspection are the plausible use cases,” Mace Construct says.
It adds: “Although a fully autonomous site is not likely by 2040, a site where a meaningful element of the most repetitive and physically punishing tasks has been passed to robots is.”
Automation is naturally allied with offsite manufacturing. “On the larger, more repeatable schemes – digital infrastructure, water, hospitals, schools, prisons, nuclear, grid infrastructure – a much greater share of the build will have moved offsite into controlled manufacturing environments by 2040. Offsite manufacture pays back when there is a repeatable pipeline to balance the capital costs against. Looking forward, the pipeline exists to do that,” the contractor states.
“Pre-manufactured value content on major schemes, which currently clusters around 25%-30% on the best-performing schemes, is likely to sit closer to 50% by 2040. Volumetric modularity is likely to remain a minority approach, as the report’s evidence suggests it is not likely to have widespread application. Component standardisation, consistent interfaces and panelised systems will be commonplace.
“By 2040, major sites are likely to be closer to an assembly operation than a construction operation in the traditional sense. That has implications for who works onsite, where they are trained, and on what terms they are employed. The trades that remain on site will be the ones that cannot be industrialised: groundworks, final fitters, services commissioning, the physical interfaces between manufactured components and the built environment.”
How to improve productivity
In the report, Mace Construct makes several recommendations that will enable the wider industry to improve productivity and build better. Here are some that caught DC+’s attention:
- public sector clients should score tenderers on whether they collect and publish project-level productivity data, as a weighted procurement criterion alongside price and programme;
- private sector developers and funders should adopt the Construction Productivity Taskforce’s (CPT) Private Sector Playbook as their baseline standard for productivity measurement and collaborative delivery on major schemes;
- the CPT’s seven-step framework for site measurement should produce an anonymised industry benchmark that participating firms can compare against – “the ability to see where you sit relative to peers on churn, rework, margin retention and output per hour is commercially useful intelligence, accessible only by contributing your own data”;
- bodies managing large pipelines – including airports, the MoD, NHS Trusts and university estates – should make data contribution a condition of framework membership;
- clients should treat the end of RIBA Stage 2 as a productivity commitment point, with a defined pre-manufactured value target, a procurement route and a supply chain integration approach all in place by that gate; operating briefs, describing what a building actually needs to do, should sit alongside project briefs from Stage 0; and
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) should establish a dedicated funding programme for robotics and AI applications in construction, focused on the tasks where automation is most immediately viable – layout marking, rebar tying, heavy logistics handling, inspection and factory-based manufacture.
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