Hello Project AI enthusiasts,
Goldman Sachs put a hard number on entry-level pain this week, and it lands on an industry already short of QSs, planners and engineers. Alongside it, Bedrock's excavators went fully driverless on live jobsites, Anthropic pulled ahead of OpenAI in revenue, OpenAI hit the brakes on its biggest training run, and Microsoft quietly retired features half of M365 relies on.
Featured This Week
Goldman Sachs: AI is already weighing on employment in developed economies
Across 800+ occupations, Goldman finds US call-centre employment 39% below trend, Canada 33% and Germany 27%, with software publishing, consulting and advertising close behind. The sharpest cut falls on entry-level work: the routine, low-judgement tasks graduates use to build the judgement senior staff rely on.
For AEC, that's the capability pipeline, not just headcount. Automate the RFIs and takeoffs juniors currently learn on, and you automate the route by which people become the experts the industry will need in five years.
Editor’s Picks
This week's must-read stories on AI, project delivery, and infrastructure:
Bedrock Robotics puts fully autonomous excavators to work on live US jobsites
Bedrock's driverless excavators are now digging for Sundt on a Nevada water plant, Zachry on a 1.2m cubic yard sitework project, and Champion Site Prep on a Texas earthwork job, no cab, no operator. It follows a $270m raise in February. Site autonomy has moved from pilot to procurement decision.
Anthropic passes OpenAI in quarterly revenue as a $2T IPO looms
Anthropic booked ~$11.6bn in Q2 against OpenAI's $6.7bn, and posted a small adjusted profit while OpenAI's losses (which include stock compensation) widened to $12.3bn, ahead of a mooted $2T listing. Both figures are preliminary. For AEC buyers, the vendor pecking order and its pricing power are moving fast.
OpenAI pauses frontier training as cyber capabilities outpace safeguards
OpenAI paused its largest planned training run after Astra approached a critical cyber-capability threshold. Separately, a different OpenAI model breached Hugging Face's infrastructure during a security exercise, unrelated to Astra. New isolation, monitoring and a ‘Zero Data Retention’ commitment follow both incidents. Safety is still catching up with capability.
Microsoft is combining its two 'Copilot' apps, and ditching five features
Microsoft is merging consumer and business Copilot into one app ahead of a September "Super App," retiring Group Chats, Podcasts, consumer Deep Research, Copilot Labs and the Mico mascot along the way. For M365-based AEC teams: features you rely on can vanish with weeks' notice.
AI in AEC and Projects
Here are some intriguing reads, specifically for AEC and project delivery professionals:
Southeast Asia now accounts for half of regional build activity, with Johor's pipeline alone above 3GW.
AI use jumped from just over half to two-thirds in a year, while security concerns rose from 22% to 30%.
Gravis Robotics raises a $200m SoftBank round, the largest Series A in construction robotics history
The ETH Zurich spinout's retrofit kit makes excavators from nine OEMs autonomous, claiming up to 30% productivity gains.
The new RFI agent drafts a cited reply in minutes instead of hours, live across all plans.
AI colocation signings hit 420MW in H1, nearly five times last year, with two-thirds going to Nordic neoclouds.
Curated Links
Selected stories worth reading before you get back to delivery:
Stripe is reportedly in talks to acquire OpenRouter for $7bn+, per Bloomberg. Nothing's signed yet, but payment-style routing of AI tokens is becoming infrastructure worth owning.
Unitree closes up 542% on its Shanghai debut, the first humanoid maker listed on mainland China's market. Public markets want physical AI as much as construction robotics investors do.
WSJ: Big Tech's AI bill is $3 trillion higher than it looks. Nine firms carry that much in off-balance-sheet AI obligations.
Meta's self-inflicted resignation wave. $1m-plus retention offers, with Anthropic and OpenAI hiring from the fallout.
Tool of the Week
CostLogic: blueprint PDF to priced takeoff in one browser tab
Upload a drawing, get an auto-scaled takeoff, a priced estimate and an invoice, with an AI assistant, Onyx, drafting on request. Free trial, no press coverage yet, worth a test run on a low-stakes bid.
Governance
UK consultation on statutory workplace monitoring rules closes 30 September
The Make Work Pay consultation covers workplace monitoring technologies generally, not just AI, weighing options up to a full statutory code plus a possible duty to consult workers before rollout. Live compliance question for anyone using AI-driven scheduling or productivity tools.
Training
Claude Academy is now live
Anthropic's free official learning platform, courses from AI basics through to Claude Code, the API and MCP. An easy way to build baseline AI capability without a formal training budget.
Also This Week
Isabela Parisio, an AI policy and governance expert, discusses the complexities of AI regulation. [Podcast]
One More Thing
Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?
UK booksellers are getting mysterious bulk orders spanning random, unrelated titles, and they suspect it's feeding the AI training-data supply chain, though the BBC stops short of confirming that.
Event of the Week
UK Construction Week Birmingham, 29 September to 1 October 2026
Returns to the NEC under "The Construction Reset," with a dedicated Digitalisation & AI section and RICS and CIOB as partners.
This week's newsletter is sponsored by:
Morta — the controls and information platform for design and construction delivery.
Morta is the controls and information platform for design and construction delivery. We replace fragmented spreadsheets and disconnected systems with a single source of truth to structure information, track planned versus actual, and bring consistency to mission-critical workflows from design through to handover. Trusted by industry leaders across 10+ countries, including ALEC, Kier, Mott MacDonald, Mace, and the UK's Ministry of Justice, and deployed across more than £100bn of construction value worldwide.
Try Morta for free. Start with automating your information delivery planning and tracking by connecting with systems like ACC, Aconex, Procore, ProjectWise and Viewpoint at morta.io
Till next time,
Project Flux
All content reflects our personal views and is not intended as professional advice or to represent any organisation.