What’s in this podcast?
How do you transform a business when every project is different, supply chains span thousands of organisations and margins leave little room for error?
In this episode of Hub & Spoken, Jason Foster, CEO & Founder of Cynozure, is joined by Tom Gould, Director of Digital Transformation at Skanska UK, to explore what it takes to digitise construction.
Tom explains how Skanska is working towards consistent processes across projects, connecting its technology and capturing data that can help teams spot risks earlier. They discuss why these foundations matter for AI adoption, how uncontrolled usage costs could erode profits and the challenge of turning individual time savings into measurable business value.
The conversation also explores digital twins, including Tom’s experience of achieving energy savings of up to 30%, and the potential for robotics to improve safety and address workforce shortages.
Episode timings
00:00 — Introduction
05:09 — Digitising complex construction projects
11:01 — Aligning the construction supply chain
13:28 — Using technology, data and AI to transform construction
19:04 — Building the foundations for transformation
24:07 — Digital twins and construction productivity
29:04 — The future of construction
35:42 — Bringing people through change
38:18 — Conclusion
The following interview transcription has been edited for length and clarity.
00:00 — Introduction
Jason Foster:
Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. Today, I’m excited to have with me Tom Gould, who’s the Director of Digital Transformation at Skanska. We’re talking about digitising construction.
There’s a lot going on in construction and every project can be different, so there’s quite a task involved in digitising across the supply chain. I’m super excited to have Tom on the show and to get into it. Tom, welcome along.
Tom Gould:
Thank you very much.
Jason Foster:
Let’s introduce you. Tell people who you are and, importantly, who Skanska is. I know you and, as I walk around London, I see your boards everywhere, but let’s make sure the audience knows exactly who you are and who you’re working for at the moment.
Tom Gould:
As you said, my name is Tom Gould. I’m the Director of Digital Transformation here at Skanska UK. I look after a range of areas within our UK business, including data and analytics and software development. I also lead digital change within the organisation and look after our digital construction and operational teams across the business.
I’ve been with Skanska for nearly nine years. Prior to that, I had a background in architectural technology and design, so I’ve always been in construction in one way, shape or form.
In terms of Skanska, we’re one of the world’s biggest construction and development companies, operating in many different areas around the globe. Here in the UK, we’re recognised as one of the biggest construction organisations.
We operate across infrastructure and buildings, as well as having our own facilities management business and our own specialist cementation piling business. Of course, we also work on that big project called HS2. We’re quite well known across London and the South East, as well as in other parts of our business across the UK.
Jason Foster:
You mentioned a phrase there that I didn’t understand, so I want to go back to it. You mentioned digital construction. What’s that about?
Tom Gould:
That’s one of the many terms that exists within construction. If we go back to around 2007, when BIM, or building information modelling, was really introduced to the construction sector, we’ve seen many different versions of that terminology, from digital engineering and BIM to digital construction and, more recently, what we describe as digital delivery.
Those are our teams and individuals who manage the 3D models and the production of information across the lifecycle of our projects.
Jason Foster:
So, it’s the digital version of the physical construction that you do?
Tom Gould:
Yes, it is. Some people might describe that as a digital twin, but perhaps we can come back to that later.
Jason Foster:
I’m going to mark that to come back to, because that’s where my head went. It sounds as though there might be some nuance in that point.
Your role spans digital, software development and data. That’s a horizontal transformation role, right? Is it mostly about change, newness and transformation, as your title suggests, or do you also look after the day-to-day running and operation of technology and digital platforms?
Tom Gould:
It is more about change. We made some significant changes last year in our UK business, particularly around the way we’re set up and how we organise digital and what we describe as IT.
I sit on the Technology and Sustainability Leadership Team within Skanska UK. Within that leadership team, we cover four key areas: digital transformation and IT, innovation and business planning, and sustainability.
The idea is that digital transformation changes the business, while IT runs the business. Sustained success comes from keeping our organisation going while building tomorrow’s organisation.
Jason Foster:
That makes a lot of sense. I see that split in many sectors and it works quite nicely. It’s good for you because you’re focusing on the future and on strategy, as well as how you improve and innovate the built and digital environment.
Tom Gould:
Absolutely. Exactly that.
05:09 — Digitising complex construction projects
Jason Foster:
My knowledge of the construction sector is that, although everything you do is construction, the areas you mentioned, including infrastructure, buildings, facilities management and HS2, involve quite varied projects, time horizons, budgets, sizes and scales.
Digitisation often involves commonality, automation, consistency and centralisation. How easy or difficult is it to digitise the work in the built environment and its digital component?
Tom Gould:
I think it’s very difficult. When you compare construction with other industries, it’s perhaps a little further behind in terms of how digitally productive we are.
In construction, no two buildings are the same and no two infrastructure projects are the same. There’s a lot of uniqueness in the work we’re involved in because every customer has a different requirement. Most architects like to put their own flair on what a building looks like, so there isn’t a lot of repetition. That makes applying a level of standardisation and consistency extremely difficult.
We also have many different roles on a construction project. We have everything from design teams authoring and designing the buildings through to managing that design and getting it into manufacturing. Then we have to get the materials onto our construction sites and physically put everything together.
The end-to-end process of a construction project lasts years and there are many different facets involved in delivering it, so it’s very difficult.
We also have, if I may say, quite a traditional workforce. We encounter the same problems from a people perspective that you probably find in other industries, where people have been doing things in the same way for a long time. Trying to change how they do those things is a big task.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Many things have been happening in construction to help with that, and BIM was really the first attempt. How can we digitise our construction information and enable information to flow between systems and organisations, so that we have a more collaborative approach?
I think the UK has done a really good job of that and has demonstrated leadership in this area on the global stage. That includes the 3D modelling aspect, how we create repetition and how we use software to speed things up. It also includes the flow of information throughout the design and construction process and, eventually, handing that information over to someone who will operate the building.
Our approach at Skanska has been to look at this through a model of process, technology, data and people. We’re currently undergoing quite a big transformation to find consistency and standardisation across core project processes. We want to treat our construction business less as a series of individual projects and make it more consistent across the board.
When someone moves from one job to another, the processes they follow should feel the same, the technologies they use should be familiar and the data they’re trying to digest should also be familiar.
We’re looking at our core processes and identifying where we can standardise and where we see repetition across our projects. We then want to implement those processes on all our projects to create consistency, while aligning our technology stack with how we execute them.
It’s fair to say that most construction organisations have hundreds of applications for delivering the same processes, and Skanska has some work to do there as well. We’re looking at our entire technology stack and how we can create consistency in it. We’re also considering where we can see longevity in our partnerships with software vendors and how we can apply those technologies to our processes.
Once we do that, we can hopefully achieve better integration between those technologies and begin capturing data that helps us understand how we can improve from one project to the next and improve performance.
None of that happens without our people. We need to understand what skills and competencies they need to execute it, both in the back office and in our frontline operations. There are opportunities in all areas.
Jason Foster:
It’s a great opportunity, and I can see why you consider this transformation. This isn’t a lift and shift with small tweaks and improvements. It’s a genuine transformation in how you operate end to end across the value chain and supply chain of the construction work you do.
11:01 — Aligning the construction supply chain
Tom Gould:
Absolutely. Skanska doesn’t physically deliver anything on our construction sites. We manage our supply chain, which includes thousands of people and many organisations.
That complexity is difficult because, if you put yourself in the position of a subcontractor or supply chain organisation, they don’t only work with Skanska. They work with many other tier-one contractors. Imagine what it’s like for them to turn up to each project, use a different system every time and repeatedly learn how to use it.
We’re trying to work with our supply chain. There’s a Skanska supply chain event happening today to understand their pain points, the key technologies they’re using to deliver their projects and how Skanska can align itself to work alongside them.
Jason Foster:
I was going to ask about the different stakeholders. As you say, you’re providing an overlay in some ways, and all these different contractors, third parties, government and arm’s-length organisations, smaller businesses and larger businesses are coming together to create what will hopefully be a great space or piece of infrastructure.
I know that complexity multiplies when you’re in a highly matrixed stakeholder environment, as you are.
Tom Gould:
Absolutely. We have different contractual relationships with all those parties.
Coming back to what the original BIM strategies tried to do, and what has been done more recently as part of ISO 19650, there has been an effort to shape those contractual relationships and determine how requirements pass down from the appointing party, which is the client.
Those requirements feed into organisations such as Skanska and our design teams, and then pass down to the subcontractors and perhaps another layer below that, where they also have a supply chain.
Creating consistency between them is very complex. There’s little room for error when you’re working in what is traditionally quite a low-margin industry, so gaining as much efficiency as possible is extremely important to us.
13:28 – Using technology, data and AI to transform construction
Jason Foster:
You mentioned the low-margin nature of the business. When we’re talking about transformation and quite long-term change, where can digital, data, AI and technology as a whole genuinely change construction?
You’re not only talking about Skanska. This is almost a system-wide, industry-wide change. If we think within the four walls of Skanska, where can technology genuinely create change? Is it in the margins? Is it focused on people? Where do you think the greatest opportunity lies in the transformation programme you’re considering?
Tom Gould:
I think there are opportunities in many different areas. Perhaps I’ll cover a few topics and then relate them to a construction project.
The first is removing uncertainty. There’s a common phrase about doing things repeatedly and expecting a different result. Sometimes construction can be a little like that.
By deploying technology and capturing the right data, how can we use that information to identify emerging risks earlier? How can we recognise the consistent issues affecting project performance and gain visibility of that performance at the click of our fingers?
How can we take data currently sitting in systems, which represents all our knowledge, bring it out and connect it between systems to create efficiencies? We could then move from being a reactive industry towards being a proactive or predictive one. We’ve seen that succeed in many other industries.
The world of AI offers huge opportunities for construction, not least for individuals. How much time do we spend doing administrative or mundane tasks? How can we use tools such as GenAI to remove some of that low-value work and apply ourselves to higher-value work, which will hopefully result in commercial benefits?
Then, how can we automate some of those activities? Where can things happen more autonomously without people having to keep clicking buttons in a system? There are many opportunities for that in construction.
From a site perspective, think about how we walk the site every day and track progress. When can we reach a point where computer vision can look at the site, compare it against a model and say, “You’ve completed 25% of what you planned to do today,” or, “You’ve completed more than you planned”?
Those capabilities are beginning to emerge in construction, and we’re seeing many different companies appear and provide them. The challenge is that there are too many of them in construction at the moment.
Then there’s the huge subject of repeatability. We might build a building today that’s very unique, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have greater standardisation in how buildings are put together in the future. Perhaps the only unique element will be the land on which the building stands, because that will always be different. Who’s to say we can’t find ways of creating repeatable designs?
We talk a lot about off-site manufacturing and trying to improve the quality and speed with which we deliver construction projects. The way we might do that, and make construction a higher-margin industry, is by having greater standardisation.
You can see that working in sectors with a lot of repeatability. Education and schools are a good example, and healthcare might be another. We see more modular forms of construction where we don’t need as much uniqueness.
There are many opportunities for technology and data to have a huge impact, benefiting every part of the lifecycle: design, construction and facilities management.
Technology and data in facilities management are perhaps slightly overlooked. The time and money we spend designing and constructing a building are nowhere near the cost of running that building and keeping it standing for the next 30 to 50 years.
Facilities management is a very archaic part of construction. Many companies will still use paper-based operation and maintenance manuals that sit on a shelf. How we use data and technology to capitalise on that part of a project’s lifecycle is fascinating, and it’s something Skanska has been examining quite heavily.
Jason Foster:
There’s a lot there across the end-to-end process. It’s interesting when you talk about the uniqueness of a building. There’s the uniqueness of the outcome, which might be a beautiful building or a great piece of engineering, but the inputs used to get there often involve repeatable processes, even if they still allow creativity.
I suppose it’s about picking out the components of an end-to-end project, allowing creativity and innovation in the output, but taking a modular approach to the things that contribute to that outcome.
19:04 — Building the foundations for transformation
Tom Gould:
Absolutely. That’s why delivering digital transformation sometimes isn’t about doing the exciting things. It’s about getting your foundations right.
You can use the analogy of a construction project. A building wouldn’t stand if you didn’t get the foundations right, but the foundations aren’t the exciting part of a building. They’re what holds it up.
We’re at a similar point within construction. Skanska and many of my peers in other construction organisations are focusing on how we create repeatable processes, what our data needs to look like and how we capture that data more effectively.
We’re considering the core technologies we want to use to operate our business and the skills our people need to deliver that. Some of it isn’t very exciting, but it’s absolutely paramount if you want to accelerate your transformation.
Jason Foster:
I’d push you on that. I think it is exciting because it’s where the transformation can happen. A drone flying over a site, taking images and turning them into something might be exciting to some people because it’s new technology. However, as you say, the transformation becomes exciting when you get the foundations right, and that applies across the board.
Tom Gould:
Absolutely. Let me give you an example. When you think about AI, transformation is about deciding where you’re going to apply it and what infrastructure you need to protect your people and your business. Token usage, for example, could wipe out your profits quickly if you don’t control it.
Getting AI into your organisation and establishing those foundations isn’t necessarily what people find exciting. They want access to the tools today. They want to roll out Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot, or whatever their business uses, without necessarily understanding the foundational activities required to accelerate adoption.
It’s only when you get your data right and have an integrated technology stack that you can apply AI in a way that really adds value.
Saving time for individuals across the business is less tangible, and its value is harder to track, than running AI and building machine learning models to predict what will happen on your projects from a forecasting perspective. That has a much higher value to us.
There can be a perception among the recipients of change in any organisation that you aren’t moving quickly enough or that what you’re doing isn’t particularly exciting. However, the foundational work we’re doing will allow us to deliver those exciting things.
Jason Foster:
It forms the basis. One thing we’ve learnt over the past two or three years, particularly when we start thinking about agentic AI, is that the best-value approach is to break what you do into quite small activities and tasks, then give agents one specific thing to do rather than trying to create an all-encompassing solution.
That requires you to break down and understand the process: how it moves, how things flow, where the handover points are, who passes what to whom and what data is required. That’s how you really drive the agenda.
You have to understand your process and the way you work. You have to write it down and make sure it’s clear.
When you have flexibility and variety in what you do, breaking things down into small component parts means you can automate, identify opportunities or add AI to one part without necessarily doing it across the entire process at once. That’s a good way to build out the transformation iteratively.
Tom Gould:
One of my colleagues, Jack van der Werf, whom I work with very closely and who’s also a good friend, and I have been working together on the concept of business architecture in construction. How does your business operate and orchestrate its processes?
It’s only when you start getting into it that you understand how big the task is. The beauty of having quite a decentralised organisation is that we’ve grown those businesses, established great footprints in certain areas and built great relationships.
The complexity is that you have silos and perhaps slightly more fragmentation across those things. That makes it harder to deploy agentic solutions when the step-by-step guidance describing what you want to do and which system it needs to happen in isn’t black and white. There’s certainly an area of grey.
24:07 — Digital twins and construction productivity
Jason Foster:
That’s another complexity to add to the mix. It feels like a good point to return to the distinction between a digital twin and digital construction. There’s a technological manifestation of the physical built environment. Is there a difference, or is that a nuance only discussed by you and others working in construction technology?
Tom Gould:
Even within construction technology, you’ll get a different answer depending on whom you speak to.
At Skanska, we spent a long time thinking about what a digital twin is, and we approached it purely from an operational standpoint. We recently built a product called Intellect, which a colleague and I led over several years. That was about building a digital twin for operations.
The simple way of thinking about a digital twin is as a connection between the physical and virtual assets. If I change something in the virtual world, it changes the state of that asset in the real world.
We spent a long time building a smart building system that connects to all the physical assets and allows us to drive the building’s behaviour through the digital model. That has created huge value. We’ve seen energy savings of up to 30%, improvements in how we operate buildings and increased asset longevity.
When we talk about digital construction, we’re talking about how we use digital tools to help us construct a project or building. It’s about putting the right digital tools in our people’s hands to achieve the performance we want.
Having said that, we’re now a few years on from building the Intellect product, and bringing digital twins into construction projects is within reach more than ever.
For example, you could deploy Internet of Things sensors to our people, plant and materials. You could physically see where people are on a construction site and what they’re working on. You could see the behaviour of our plant and equipment: how many lifts a crane has completed compared with what was planned, or how long it has been operating compared with sitting idle. You could also see what material has actually been installed.
That would probably represent a digital twin of what is happening in reality. I think that’s the next step for construction. How are we going to create a digital operating model and digital twin of the construction site? How are we going to use that to improve construction productivity?
It’s about making sure we get value for money and deliver projects as quickly as possible, at the right quality, while increasing the amount of money we make in the business.
Jason Foster:
Is productivity the big win? Does that drive everything else?
Tom Gould:
I think it’s probably one of the biggest wins. Our CEO, Katy Dowding, has been part of the Construction Productivity Taskforce and chaired it for some time.
The work that community has undertaken established that productivity, or a lack of productivity, has a significant effect on project performance. That includes delivery times and financial outcomes.
A classic example is looking at how much tool time people have. How can we make sure people are able to spend as much time as possible using their tools on a construction site, working and delivering a construction project at maximum efficiency?
We also need to look at the efficiency of our plant and equipment. On our projects, sometimes the cranes aren’t operating or a hoist is stuck on a certain level. These things have knock-on effects and cause delays. Productivity is absolutely one of the key areas we need to examine.
Jason Foster:
I can see the difference between digital construction and a digital twin, and how they can work together.
Because there’s such a big drive for productivity, you can use a digital twin almost to model the impact of changes and then put technology in people’s hands to improve productivity. You have proactive planning and management alongside reactive, day-to-day execution.
29:04 — The future of construction
Jason Foster:
It would be good to explore where all this goes. You’re on this transformation journey. We’ve talked about getting the foundations right in terms of the platforms and technology you put in place, but also about how you break up and construct processes, what can be automated and where the challenges and complexities lie.
We also know that productivity and margins are important. If we roll forward to a point where you’ve started to get this right, or you’ve got it more right than you have today, what will it look like in five or ten years? What will the industry and Skanska look like? How will working on a Skanska programme look and feel different from today?
Tom Gould:
I’ll come at that from a few different angles. It’s a very big question, so I’ll do my best to answer it.
First, if you were an individual joining the construction industry in five or ten years, it would be an exciting place to be. If you joined a company like Skanska, you’d expect to know exactly what you were doing in your role. You’d expect AI to be at your fingertips and fully embedded in how we work.
You shouldn’t have to move from one project to another and learn everything repeatedly. You should be able to see repetition in the work you’re doing.
I’d also expect new roles to emerge in construction. In the past 12 months, I’ve employed a team of software developers. When I joined Skanska nearly nine years ago, I was one of perhaps five people in the business who had “digital” in their job title.
I expect more emerging talent and attractive roles to enter construction that you probably wouldn’t hear about today.
The design process has to become more efficient. Sometimes I think about how Skanska joins a project when that project has already been running for the client for perhaps two or three years through the design period.
Bringing in computational design, using AI to accelerate the design process and using prompt language to create unique or repeatable designs for our customers will be significant. I think that will change how design organisations operate within construction.
Last week, I saw OpenAI’s Astra, which looks incredible. Three days later, I saw on LinkedIn that someone had already connected it to Revit, arguably the industry’s most widely used authoring tool. It was building a building from scratch, with all the technical design completed.
The role of the human in that situation becomes much more about checking than doing. I suspect design will change significantly.
That also changes what companies like Skanska can offer. Today, we mainly construct buildings, but tier-one contractors might bring some of those skills in-house and offer a wider range of services to customers. Perhaps we’ll move further into the design space, as well as what we do at the moment, and further into the handover space.
I think construction sites will feature a combination of robotics and humans. There are roles on our construction sites that would benefit from operating 24 hours a day, which a robot can do and a human cannot.
Our number-one priority is making sure our people go home safely every day. How can we reduce human interaction with plant, machinery or dangerous working locations and replace it with robotics?
Humanoid robotics is very interesting. When combined with AI, these robots can recognise things and perform multiple different types of task, which will accelerate progress even further. At PropTech Connect last week, AWS had one of these humanoid robots walking around the event, which was quite a strange thing to see.
Robotics will also help solve workforce scarcity in construction. We’re seeing an ageing workforce and people leaving construction. We aren’t seeing as many people come through university or college and move onto construction sites.
We know there’s a huge and growing need for more construction, but we don’t have enough people. Introducing robotics will make us more productive and help us address a problem we know exists in construction.
The experience of occupying a building will also change drastically. I mentioned the digital twin work Skanska has been doing, and I can only see that accelerating and improving how buildings operate autonomously.
Your car has been telling you that you have a flat tyre or need fuel for a long time. Buildings need to catch up and do the same thing. That will help us achieve greater longevity and better performance from buildings.
It will also reduce running costs for our customers and create more opportunity for them to improve their margins. It will have a more sustainable effect on the world around us because construction is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions.
Skanska is working very hard to reduce that impact, and we have a pledge to reach net zero carbon by 2045. The less material and energy we consume while constructing and operating buildings, the better.
I also see the tenant experience improving. You might be able to order coffee to your desk, adjust the temperature only in your area or talk to the building and ask it to do things for you.
I see these things happening in the next five to ten years, ultimately making construction a more profitable and sustainable place to work, as well as making it slightly more predictable, which it isn’t always today.
Jason Foster:
That’s a great vision. There are many people aspects, which I like, but there’s also the societal impact and the effect on the planet and sustainability. It’s a really interesting time.
35:42 — Bringing people through change
Jason Foster:
My final question is: how do you bring your organisation along with you?
You’re playing an important part and, as we’ve discussed, this is transformation. There are many things where you might wonder how a quite traditional workplace will handle them, hear about them and understand that they will have a positive impact on people’s work.
What work have you done to bring people along with this transformation and change? It’s very exciting when you articulate it in this way.
Tom Gould:
People are always the hardest part. We can spend too much time on the technological aspect of change and not enough on its cultural aspect.
The biggest thing I’ve learnt over the past few years is that you need to bring people with you. You need to demonstrate the benefits of what you’re doing and gain a vested interest from the audience you need to make the change happen.
I’m finding that the more people I involve in the things we’re trying to do, and the more ideas we gather from people around the business about where they think we can make an impact, the more it becomes a shared vision rather than something driven from the top down.
We’ve just completed an AI study at Skanska, which I presented at our Technology and Sustainability Conference last week. AI is a great example of something happening quite organically because people are very interested in it.
What was quite telling was the demographic response. I had thought that people from an older generation might be less interested in AI, which was perhaps naive of me, but they weren’t. They were very interested.
Finding those early adopters to help push changes through is extremely important. We also need to give people the time and space to learn and embrace that change, while reassuring them that AI isn’t going to replace their jobs tomorrow, because it absolutely isn’t.
Our approach to AI is that it will give our people more capacity to work on higher-value activities and help Skanska, for example, grow its revenue with the same number of people.
Giving people that reassurance is also very important. Sometimes people resist change not because they’re afraid of the change itself, but because they’re afraid of the effect it might have on them. Providing a reassuring message is therefore extremely important.
Jason Foster:
It’s personal. Whether you have people with you makes or breaks transformation. It sounds as though you’re doing some good work to make sure that happens and continues to happen.
38:18 — Conclusion
Jason Foster:
It’s been fascinating talking to you about this. There’s a lot to explore and it sounds as though it has been a fun journey so far, with some innovative work. I think that innovation is going to continue.
Thank you for joining me on the show and talking about it.
Tom Gould:
Thank you for having me. I could talk about it all day.
Jason Foster:
Perhaps we’ll review where you’ve got to with the transformation in a couple of years and talk about the next digital twin you’ve built, or whatever its next incarnation is, and everything else you achieve. I’m sure there will be great things.
I hope everyone enjoyed today’s episode as much as I did. There are things here that apply across sectors, not only in construction, and I’m sure they will resonate.
It would be great to hear your thoughts. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you again soon.
