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Not only is Brett Poulos looking for office experts for his pre-construction teams, he wants on-site experience as well.
Poulos, national director of preconstruction and estimating for Kansas City, Mo.-based Burns & McDonnell, he wrote in the company’s Q1 2026 update that owners want faster deliveries and better visibility, which has made preconstruction take on another level of importance in the construction lifecycle.
To that end, Poulos has argued that adding tradespeople to a builder’s pre-construction team creates a level of understanding unattainable without people who have built a job themselves.
Hands-on experience also helps as builders continue to leverage artificial intelligence; Poulos advocates for room trade workers to step back and review the technology and the answers it provides.
Here, Poulos talks to Construction Dive about how preconstruction took on this new level of importance, how Burns & McDonnell is using AI in preconstruction, and the value that trade workers add to the process.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Construction Immersion – You wrote in your post that preconstruction is the “new center of gravity”. Can you elaborate on this?
BRETT POULOS: Clients are constantly asking construction and design-build companies to deliver faster. They want certainty of costs beforehand. They want to better manage market volatility in terms of rates and price volatility, commodity volatility – obviously we’re seeing that right now – and the price of fuel.
So, the earlier a team can provide this input into the design process, the more capable these customers will be.
From a center of gravity perspective, your schedule, your costs, how you’re going to build it, what media and methods you’re potentially going to use, all of that is determined in the pre-construction phase of the project. The more confidence and more data you have in this phase of the project, the greater the deliverable for that client or owner.
How does Burns & McDonnell use AI when it comes to preconstruction?
We have a sort of progressive road map. We use large language models, as everyone does today. But we’ve also created agent capabilities, or agents that have discipline-specific tasks.
Brett Poulos
Permission granted by Burns & McDonnell
We still have human oversight to be able to look at it and review it, but with the documents and data that we have as a design builder and EPC company, having everything in house and having access to it directly under one umbrella is really powerful.
We have implemented AI technology across the company and everyone within the company has gone through this training. We have a roadmap to be able to also have future capabilities at work that aren’t necessarily being deployed today, but AI is absolutely at the forefront. All of our decisions, all of our technology spending, is about how things will fit into the AI roadmap over the next five years.
How does Burns & McDonnell’s use of AI in preconstruction set it apart from other builders?
I think it’s our ability to inject our design data and preconstruction and estimating metadata, so our historical costs from past projects, understanding our productivity rates on past projects.
Being able to add that data to the design model is what we’re working towards as a future capability, and how can we approach our ability to develop cost models in real time, rather than waiting for an engineering result at specific milestones?
This is the value we see in AI as part of our roadmap. It’s how we bring in our cost history, our schedules, our procurement timelines and combine that with our design data and design knowledge well in advance of the process.
You said the pre-construction and estimating teams need more professionals. how is that
Within our pre-construction team of approximately 100 people, we have 17 people without university degrees who came directly from the trades. I don’t want to say it’s necessarily an anomaly, but it’s not common practice.
What we’ve found is having teams injected into the early life cycle of the project that have been there, that have actually built it, that know the size of the crew that would be required to install this type of work, the exact type of equipment, how they would do it, having that direct field experience within your team is invaluable.
Having someone who understands the cost, or maybe understands the technology very well, is important, but it really comes down to accuracy and the knowledge that someone can provide who has actually physically done this in the past is huge. The value is extreme.
And as we and other companies continue to deploy AI, having troops on the ground who have the ability to challenge it with confidence and know “I wouldn’t do it that way” only gives you even more capability. This is how you properly challenge AI exits, by having someone who has physically done it on the field in the past.
