The Problem Wasn't the Builders. It Was the Tools.

After rising to the top of Clark Construction's western region, Steve Dell’Orto walked away to start ConCntric. What he's learned since says a lot about why construction technology succeeds, why it fails, and where the industry goes from here.

Steve Dell’Orto has pretty much always been a builder.

As a kid, it was Legos, not superheroes. Then soapbox cars and go-karts. An uncle was in the trades. So were his wrestling and lacrosse coaches, or their brothers. By high school and college, Dell’Orto was spending summers hanging drywall, building decks and working as a grunt in a woodworking shop. He even had a side business building custom decks in college.

“I’ve always done things with my hands, building stuff,” he says.

There was a brief detour toward becoming a fighter pilot. That didn't work out. Construction did.

Dell’Orto was an economics major with no formal construction management education when he landed an internship with Clark Construction in the early 1990s. He found himself on a troubled project, working so many hours that Clark hired him full-time before he had even graduated.

He later learned the decision wasn't entirely a reward for his performance.

“I came to find out that he only did it because I was costing him too much in overtime,” Dell’Orto says. “So he just fixed me on a salary.” It worked out pretty well for both of them.

Dell’Orto would spend nearly three decades at Clark, eventually leading its western U.S. business and moving toward one of the company's top operating positions.

By pretty much any measure, he had made it. And then he left. Not for another contractor. Not to retire. He left to start a software company.

The fires kept getting bigger

There wasn't one great epiphany that led Dell’Orto to create ConCntric. There were a whole bunch of smaller ones.

As a project manager, he remembers constantly encountering gaps in the plan. Something would go wrong, the team would deal with it, and everyone would move on to the next problem. But trying to trace backward and figure out exactly how they had gotten there could be nearly impossible.

“Why does this have to happen?” he remembers thinking. “We put people on the moon in the ’60s. Why are we still screwing around with Excel spreadsheets and no true repository of information?”

As his responsibilities grew, so did his perspective. Running one project meant worrying about one plan. Running a portfolio meant worrying about the people, processes and tools underlying dozens of plans — and somehow gaining enough visibility into all of them to understand where trouble was developing. That visibility largely didn't exist.

The problem became harder to ignore during his final years at Clark.

Construction projects have problems. That's construction. Every once in a while, there would be what Dell’Orto calls a “brush fire” that required his attention. But the fires seemed to be getting bigger. And more frequent.

“I was starting to see grass fires, brush fires, forest fires,” he says. “And with frequency, I'm like, what the hell is going on? How could we have so many projects that required all of this hand-holding? Something's not right.”

What bothered him was that he didn't believe the people were the problem. Good teams were doing good work. Owners weren't necessarily being unreasonable. Contractors weren't trying to hide things.

Instead, incredibly complicated projects were being planned and communicated through systems that made it unnecessarily difficult for everyone involved to see and understand the same thing.

An estimator could understand all the logic buried inside a spreadsheet. An owner might simply see a spreadsheet. And when the owner couldn't easily understand why the contractor was recommending something, it became difficult to demonstrate transparency. Without transparency, trust started to erode.

“These are people trying to do the very best, but without the tools, it's an inordinate amount of work for which they have no time,” Dell’Orto says.

After watching variations of this play out over and over again, he reached

a pretty simple conclusion.

“I need to either fix it or suffer,” he says. “And I wasn't in for voluntary suffering.”

Maybe the process wasn't broken

There is an important wrinkle in Dell’Orto's story. He didn't leave Clark believing builders didn't know what they were doing. In fact, his experience suggested almost the opposite.

During his later years at Clark, he pushed his preconstruction teams toward more standardized processes and a common set of tools. The technology behind them wasn't particularly impressive.

“We were doing like a menagerie of Excel spreadsheets, Band-Aids and baling wire,” he says. But the processes were good.

Dell’Orto says that over a three-year period implementing that operating approach, his organization increased margins by 44 percent. His teams frequently won work despite proposing higher fees, higher general conditions and higher preconstruction costs because they could demonstrate a better thought-out plan.

They had built a better mousetrap. It just happened to be built mostly in Excel, and this is where his story gets particularly interesting.

When he started ConCntric, his instinct was to rethink the process itself. Once he got into it, he started questioning that assumption.

“When I set out to do this, I got really excited about the design and I'm like, ‘Oh, we can revamp the process,’” he says. “And you know what I kind of rethought as I went was like, you know what, the process itself … is not broken. It's just they're strapped to Excel.”

That's an important distinction. Excel is incredibly flexible. You can make it do almost anything. And that's both its superpower and its problem. Every team can make it work a little differently. Every project can have its own version. Every estimator can create a slightly different spreadsheet. The information is there, but much of the context around that information lives with the person who created it.

A “1” in a spreadsheet cell is a 1. But what does the 1 mean?

“If you structure that data and surround it with all the context of what that one was determined to represent, now you've really got something,” Dell’Orto says.

That's a much bigger idea than simply replacing Excel.

The construction industry isn't short on data. It generates mountains of it. The problem is turning all of that information into something an organization can actually understand, reuse and learn from.

In 2019, he founded ConCntric around the idea that the planning and preconstruction stage of commercial construction could be made more connected, visible and data-driven.

Maybe construction isn't resistant to technology.

Dell’Orto's move from construction executive to software founder also gave him an interesting perspective on one of the industry's favorite complaints about itself: construction is slow to adopt technology. He doesn't entirely buy it.

“There’s more bad software than there is good,” he says.

He has a pretty simple test for whether technology is actually good.

Does it create less work for the person using it? “If it is going to be effective, it needs to make less work, not more for the user.”

It sounds obvious. It isn't.

Think about how enterprise software often gets implemented. Something that used to happen through a conversation, professional judgment and a few notes becomes a workflow. Now somebody has to fill out ten fields. Someone else wants another piece of information, so another field gets added. Management wants better reporting, so now there are three more.

Eventually the technology that was supposed to make somebody more productive has become another part of their job. “You've created work,” Dell’Orto says. And he thinks the technology industry deserves some of the blame for construction's reputation as a reluctant adopter.

“Poorly developed technology solutions overcomplicate things, create more work,” he says. “And that's, I think, a contributor to why the industry hasn't adopted technology as fast as it would — because it just hasn't been given good technology.”

I think there's something important in that. We talk a lot about construction workers being resistant to change. And certainly some are. That's hardly unique to construction.

But maybe at least some of what we've labeled resistance is actually pretty rational. People aren't necessarily afraid of technology. They may just be tired of someone else's innovation becoming their additional workload.

Dell’Orto says that when he was at Clark, he had earned enough trust with his teams that they would generally follow him when he introduced a new way of working. Part of the reason, he believes, was that he had a reputation as the “anti-bureaucracy guy.”

He wasn't trying to give them another checklist. He was trying to remove one.

Built by builders — but not builders alone

Dell’Orto thinks construction technology has had another problem. A lot of it has been built from the outside looking in.

You can understand why.

Construction is enormous. It's complicated. It's fragmented. And if you're an entrepreneur or investor looking for a giant industry that still does a surprising amount of work in spreadsheets, construction is a pretty tempting target.

But identifying inefficiency isn't the same thing as understanding it. Dell’Orto argues that construction is simply too complicated and too nonlinear to learn superficially.

Think about a building at the corner of First and Main. It contains thousands upon thousands of components coming from manufacturers, suppliers and subcontractors scattered across the world, all moving through different supply chains and somehow needing to arrive at one physical location in the right sequence. An elevator alone contains an extraordinary number of parts, decisions and dependencies. This isn't a simple workflow.

“You cannot take many tools off the shelf and adapt them to be truly beneficial to what we do,” Dell’Orto says.

That belief also led him to start Built by Builders, a network of construction technology founders who spent meaningful parts of their careers actually working in the industry.

But Dell’Orto isn't arguing that the builders should simply kick the technologists out of the room. Far from it.

“You've got to marry those two worlds,” he says. Someone needs to deeply understand the problem. Someone needs to deeply understand how to build great technology.mIdeally, you have both.

Dell’Orto believes that gave ConCntric an advantage early. Rather than showing up and asking customers to teach his team how preconstruction worked, they could come in with 80 or 90 percent of the picture already mapped and ask customers to challenge it, validate it and make it better.

That matters.

A beta customer should help you build a better solution. They probably shouldn't have to teach you the industry first.

The contract isn't the finish line

Being on the technology side has also changed Dell’Orto's thinking about what happens after a customer buys software.

He describes it using the SaaS concept of a “bow tie.”

Technology companies can spend enormous amounts of money and effort getting a customer to sign a contract. Marketing. Salespeople. Demos. Pilots. Executive meetings. More demos.

Then the deal closes. The salesperson moves on. The customer gets handed to an implementation team, then maybe to support, and suddenly all that attention starts getting narrower and narrower.

Dell’Orto thinks it should widen back out. “If I had to overinvest in something, I'd probably overinvest on the customer success side,” he says.

That means getting users to value quickly. Helping them get their first wins. Staying involved as the product evolves. Meeting customers weekly if that's what they need, then backing off as they become more proficient.

“Our team is in lockstep with our customers for the entire time with them,” he says.

That philosophy comes with an obvious problem. How the hell do you scale it?

When I asked Dell’Orto exactly that, his answer was equally straightforward. “Hard. It's hard.”

And that's where his story starts turning toward AI.

What if the software doesn't need you to use the software?

ConCntric has been investing heavily in AI, including Amplify, its agentic AI layer.

But what's interesting about Dell’Orto's view of AI isn't that he's excited about putting AI into construction software. Everybody is doing that. What's interesting is where he thinks it eventually leads.

“A lot of our platform very rapidly is kind of cannibalizing itself,” Dell’Orto says. “We're making our own stuff obsolete and replacing it with full autonomy.”

Think about that for a second. Software companies have spent decades trying to design better interfaces so people can perform complicated workflows more efficiently.

AI raises different questions: What if the person doesn't need to perform the workflow at all? Why teach someone which buttons to click and in what order if they can simply tell the system what they're trying to accomplish? And if an agent can perform one task, why can't multiple agents perform a whole series of related tasks simultaneously?

Dell’Orto imagines a future where one person can orchestrate work that once required a much larger team. He isn't particularly worried about what that means for construction employment, largely because construction already doesn't have enough people.

He thinks workers should be worried about something else. “You should be worried about your bigger threat to losing your job — not being proficient with AI,” he says.

His argument is pretty straightforward. If one person learns to use AI to produce dramatically broader and deeper results and another refuses to use it, employers are going to notice.

“Be afraid of AI all you want. Resist it. Crawl under a rock at your own detriment.”

It's a harsh way of putting it, but it's also probably not wrong.

Still building

Dell’Orto is quick to admit that there are more unknowns than knowns about where all of this goes. Universities are scrambling to figure out what to teach. Construction companies are trying to understand where AI belongs. Workers are wondering what it means for their careers. Technology companies are building capabilities that would have sounded ridiculous just a few years ago.

Dell’Orto's own company is now actively trying to make parts of the software it spent years building unnecessary. But, there's a pretty obvious line connecting the kid building soapbox cars, the Clark executive cobbling together better preconstruction processes in Excel, and the founder now thinking about autonomous AI agents. He likes building things.

More specifically, he seems to like figuring out why things don't work as well as they should — and then trying to build something better.

Dell’Orto didn't leave construction because he was done with construction.

He left because after nearly three decades inside the business, he became convinced that some of the tools underneath it simply weren't good enough.

So he decided to build those instead.

“I need to either fix it or suffer.” Steve Dell’Orto chose to fix it.

Steve Dell'Orto is the founder and CEO of Concntric, an agentic AI-powered preconstruction intelligence platform transforming how projects are planned and delivered. As a 30-year construction industry veteran and former executive of one of the nation's largest contractors, Steve brings deep field experience and a passion for innovation to drive digital transformation across the built world. Through Concntric and his work as an advisor and investor in construction technology, Steve is leading the industry's evolution toward a more connected,

data-driven, and intelligent future. Steve holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia and an MBA from the University of Southern California.