How Australia's Top Builders Are Thinking About Technology

A COO of a mid-tier Australian builder pulls the tech-stack invoice off the printer. Fourteen line items. Aconex, Procore, Payapps, Hammertech, a scheduling tool nobody remembers approving, three different sign-in apps across three projects, a spreadsheet cost-to-complete model the CA keeps in a personal drive.

Two subscriptions auto-renewed before anyone noticed. The total is not the number that hurts. The question underneath is: what does all this actually buy us? That question is quietly reshaping construction technology across Australia.

The question is no longer “which tool” but “how many”

For most of the last decade, the answer to any project problem was another tool. A scheduling problem meant a scheduling app. A safety audit meant a safety platform. A payment dispute meant an add-on for claim workflows. The stack grew one purchase at a time, each one solving a real problem, none of them designed to talk to the others.

What the leading builders in Australia have quietly figured out is that the stack itself has become the problem. It is the villain in almost every reporting delay, every disputed variation, every late-week margin surprise. The tools are not the enemy. The gaps between them are.

Where the Australian industry actually sits right now

Australia’s top 50 builders started $43.9 billion in new projects in the last twelve months, a 32% jump on the prior year’s $33.1 billion, according to the Hubexo Construction League 2026 [1]. The top ten alone account for $22.9 billion of that [2]. Fewer builders are winning materially larger jobs.

$43.9 billion in new project starts by Australia’s top 50 builders in 2025, a 32% year-on-year rise concentrated in fewer, larger, more complex builds.

Hubexo Construction League 2026

The ABS Building Activity release shows construction work done in Australia is running at record levels, driven mostly by engineering [3]. Demand is real. So is pressure. Infrastructure Australia’s 2025 Market Capacity Report puts the current workforce shortfall at 141,000, projected to reach 300,000 by 2027 against a $242 billion public pipeline [4].

The picture is not that Australian builders are short of work. It is that they are short of everything else: people, hours, margin, and the time to reconcile the systems that were supposed to help them run the work.

What the leading builders are doing differently

The KPMG Global Construction Survey 2025/2026 puts a specific Australian number on where the market has moved. 43.8% of Australian construction leaders report AI adopted at scale, compared with 24% globally, and the two priorities they cite are “improving data and technology capabilities” and “managing risk more effectively,” in that order [5].

That is not because Australian firms are buying more tools. Deloitte’s State of Digital Adoption in the Construction Industry 2026 reports Australian construction firms now use an average of 6.9 digital technologies each, up from 5.0 in 2024, but only 16% have reached what Deloitte classes as advanced digital capability [6]. Adoption is up. Integration is not.

The distinction matters. The top 50 have stopped buying more tools and started buying fewer, more connected ones. They are consolidating onto platforms that hold cost, schedule, safety, quality, and correspondence against the same project record instead of stitching those functions together with exports and spreadsheets. The middle of the market is still adding one more app.

“Many Australian firms, particularly mid-tier contractors, still face challenges with fragmented delivery, siloed data and limited technology adoption, leading to poor construction productivity. The reality is that there is a significant gap between ambition and execution, representing a potential A$56 billion annual opportunity if productivity matched the economy-wide average.”

Amanda Coneyworth, Partner, KPMG Australia, Global Construction Survey 2025/2026

The consolidation maths

The case for consolidation is not abstract. A mid-tier builder running eight to fourteen point tools pays licence fees, integration surcharges, and a hidden cost nobody itemises: hours the CA and PMs burn reconciling numbers between systems that were never supposed to speak.

That hidden cost is where McKinsey Global Institute’s headline finding actually lands in practice. Global construction labour productivity has grown at 1% a year over two decades, against 2.8% for the total economy and 3.6% for manufacturing [7]. The industry has been running to keep up.

Over 30% average reduction in software spend when Plexa replaces a stack of point solutions, before the reconciled-hours and faster-close productivity gains are counted.

Plexa platform benchmarks, 2025

What comes next if the divergence continues

Hubexo’s own commentary on the current outlook is unusually direct for an industry data report. Ashleigh Porter, Hubexo’s APAC president, describes the shift as builders “trading traditional, high-risk procurement for data-led precision and technological maturity” and warns that “opportunities are out there, but they won’t be won with yesterday’s systems” [1].

The concrete meaning of that warning is a widening two-tier market. Builders on a consolidated platform close out claims faster, forecast cost-to-complete in real time, and price tenders with confidence because their own historical data is queryable. Builders on a fragmented stack still find overruns in the monthly report, still assemble a status update from five sources when a developer calls, still trip on defects at handover that trace to inspections nobody could join up in time.

The gap between the two groups was uncomfortable a couple of years ago. Today it is a bidding advantage. On the current trajectory, it becomes a bidding wall.

The Australian context

Everything above lands harder in Australia than in most markets. Labour is the tightest input, margins are under sustained pressure, and the public pipeline is asking the sector to deliver against a workforce 141,000 people short today [4]. Every hour a project team spends reconciling data between five systems is an hour not spent on work Australia does not have the labour to spare.

That is why firms that were cautious about digital transformation a year ago are now leading it: the maths has stopped being optional. The pattern connects directly to why construction profit margins are tighter than they should be, and to the AI-readiness problem for construction data. A model, however capable, cannot reason across data that never left the tool that produced it.

Where Plexa fits

Plexa is built for the consolidation path. Cost, schedule, safety, quality, procurement, and correspondence all reference the same project record, so a variation raised on site carries into the progress claim, a schedule slip shows in the cost report the same day, and a defect at handover ties back to the inspection that produced it. That is what a single source of truth actually is in a construction context: not a dashboard bolted over five systems, but one record the modules share.

Across Plexa-managed projects, replacing a stack of point tools cuts software spend by over 30% before productivity gains show up in reconciled hours. The COO staring at the fourteen-line invoice should not need more tools to answer the question underneath it. The answer to “what does all this actually buy us?” should be one system, one record, and a team that gets its Monday morning back.

Related reading

• The cost-side symptom of the same fragmented-stack problem lands in why construction profit margins are tighter than they should be.

• Why AI-readiness begins with data consolidation, not model choice, is covered in AI is coming to construction, is your data ready for it?

• The specific AI use cases already delivering on Australian projects are in AI in construction: what’s actually working today.

See how Plexa consolidates the construction tech stack. Book a 30-minute demo with the Plexa team.