Mortenson: Iconic Stadiums, the AI Boom and Thinking Decades Ahead
Mortenson: Iconic Stadiums, the AI Boom and Thinking Decades Ahead
David Mortenson is thinking years ahead about how construction needs to evolve as projects get bigger, more complex and more demanding.
In this episode of Building What Matters, David joins McKinstry’s Chief Client Officer Matt Allen to share how Mortenson, one of America’s largest commercial builders, is rethinking how projects get designed, built and delivered, from borrowing ideas from manufacturing to using AI to dramatically speed up work.
David and Matt dig into what that looks like in practice, from solar projects with 3 million panels to an R&D lab where teams can build and test their own equipment. They also explore the importance of ideas coming from people closest to the work and the willingness to invest today for where the company wants to be in the future, even if the pay off doesn’t happen right away.
What you’ll learn:
- Why David believes construction has more to learn from manufacturing, and how standardization and design for manufacturing could help the industry build at greater scale
- How Mortenson’s BLUlabs gives teams the space, people and tools to develop and test new equipment for problems they encounter in the field
- Why a solar project with 3 million panels requires builders to rethink everything from assembly to how materials move across a jobsite
- How AI helped reduce the time required to build a cost model from weeks to roughly 24 hours
- Why Mortenson practices “try-storming” instead of brainstorming, and how ideas from people closest to the work are now becoming patented products
- How long-term thinking shapes investment in R&D, new ventures and people and why David is focused on where the company needs to be in 2035
“We’re thinking about where we want to be in 2035, and how are we investing today to create the future that we want to live in?” — David Mortenson on thinking long term and investing ahead of where the industry is going.
Watch the full conversation above or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn More
David Mortenson: LinkedIn
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