Contractor Survey: 1,800 Builders on Labor, AI, and What Comes Next

A survey of 1,800 contractors conducted by Trimble 2025 finds the industry at a crossroads: most contractors are optimistic about project demand heading into 2026, but two stubborn problems keep showing up at the top of every priority list. Labor shortages are capping how much work firms can actually take on, and disconnected data between the office and the field is quietly eating margin on every job that does get built.

What Did 1,800 Contractors Actually Say?

According to Trimble 2025, the survey covered contractors across commercial, residential, and industrial segments and found broad confidence in near-term demand, particularly in data center construction, manufacturing facilities, and healthcare. That aligns with what Construction Dive 2025 flagged as the five construction trends most worth watching heading into 2026, with mission-critical and industrial work leading the pipeline.

But underneath the optimism, the Trimble data surfaces two consistent friction points. First, contractors cannot find enough qualified workers to staff the projects already in front of them. Second, the information they need to manage those projects, estimates, schedules, change orders, field reports, lives in separate systems that do not talk to each other. The result is predictable: rework, delays, and margin erosion that shows up at final billing rather than at the bid stage, which is the worst possible time to find it.

Why Is Labor Still the Biggest Brake on Growth?

According to Trimble 2025, workforce availability was the most commonly cited constraint on growth among surveyed contractors, a finding that tracks with broader industry data. The construction labor gap is structural, not cyclical. Retirement rates among experienced tradespeople continue to outpace entry-level recruitment, and the pipeline of trained workers has not kept pace with the volume of work entering the market.

For a working GC, this creates a specific set of problems. You are bidding jobs based on labor assumptions that may not hold by the time the project starts. Subcontractor availability is tighter, which means schedule risk is higher. And when you do find good workers, keeping them is a cost pressure in itself. Firms that have built systems for workforce planning, clear project timelines, and reliable subcontractor relationships are positioned to take on more work than competitors who are scrambling for crews job by job. The survey data suggests the gap between those two types of firms is widening. You can read more about how labor shortages are playing out across the construction industry in this related analysis: Construction Labor Shortage: 456,000 Workers Needed by 2027.

Where Does AI Fit Into a GC Operation Right Now?

According to Trimble 2025, AI adoption among the 1,800 surveyed contractors is accelerating but unevenly distributed. The firms reporting the clearest gains are using AI in estimating workflows and scheduling, specifically to speed up quantity takeoffs, flag scope conflicts earlier, and model schedule scenarios faster than manual methods allow. These are not abstract efficiency wins. Faster, more accurate estimates mean more competitive bids and fewer late-stage surprises that compress margin.

The firms that have not yet integrated any AI tools are not standing still, but they are falling behind on throughput. When a competitor can turn around a detailed estimate in half the time, they can bid more jobs in the same window. Over a full calendar year, that compounds into a meaningful difference in revenue and backlog. The survey does not suggest GCs need to overhaul their entire operation around technology overnight. What it does suggest is that firms still treating estimating software, project management, and field reporting as separate, unconnected tools are leaving efficiency on the table that their more connected competitors are picking up. Related coverage on how AI tools are working inside contractor workflows is available here: AI Tools for General Contractors: Workflow Impact.

Why This Matters for General Contractors

The Trimble survey is useful not because it reveals anything surprising but because it puts numbers behind what most experienced GCs already know in their gut. Labor is tight, data is fragmented, and the contractors who are growing are the ones who have solved for both problems in some operational way, not just one.

The demand environment heading into 2026 is real. According to Construction Dive 2025, data center construction, domestic manufacturing buildout, and healthcare facility work are all expanding, and each of those sectors tends to require experienced GCs with demonstrated project delivery track records. That last part matters more than it might seem. Owners awarding large, complex projects are increasingly checking references, reviewing completed project histories, and looking at how contractors have handled past work before they invite firms to bid. A thin or hard-to-find track record online is a visibility problem before it ever becomes a pricing conversation.

The firms that will capture the most of this demand are not necessarily the largest. They are the ones who can staff reliably, close the data loop between estimating and field operations, and show prospective owners enough documented history to earn a spot in the bid pool.

If you are a GC sitting on a full pipeline right now, the Trimble data is a prompt to look at where your next bottleneck is, because labor and data integration were the top two answers from 1,800 of your peers. If your pipeline is softer than you would like, the same survey points toward where the demand is concentrated and which operational capabilities are separating the firms winning that work from the ones watching it go elsewhere.