Construction Intelligence Summit

A welcome from our hosts at the CBIZ Indianapolis office: Ken Hedlund, Brian Muncy, and Jason Bainter.

Most subcontractors treat pay-when-paid as the cost of doing business and price it accordingly. The interest on the line of credit they'll need to bridge 60, 90, or 120 days of waiting gets built straight into the bid. It's a hidden tax nobody talks about, and it's optional.

This panel makes the case for a different posture: proactive, not reactive. Some subs are using early payment on individual progress invoices to buy materials at bulk rates. Some are using it to fund growth they couldn't otherwise finance. Others aren't chasing an edge at all; they just want cash flow they can actually plan around, rather than the guesswork of pay-when-paid. Our panelists, representing capital, construction finance, technology, and business development, will unpack how subcontractors are taking control of when they get paid, without locking themselves into an all-or-nothing factoring arrangement.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating payment acceleration options against what pay-when-paid is actually costing them today.

Most construction platforms still expect your team to hunt for answers: pull a report, build a spreadsheet, cross-reference three systems, and hope the numbers agree. Nova works differently. Beyond the dashboards and visualizations, Nova lets you ask a direct question about any project or financial matter, in plain language, and get the answer. No report to build first.

That shift matters more than it sounds. It's the difference between a team spending its time chasing numbers and a team spending its time thinking about what the numbers mean. Kevin Bright and Denver Sperry will show what that looks like in practice and unpack why it's possible: Nova was built AI-first, not retrofitted with an AI feature bolted onto an existing system.

That distinction, AI-first versus bolt-on, is also behind a decision more contractors are facing right now: build a custom AI financial tool in-house, or buy one already built for the job. This session touches on what separates a platform that holds up under real financial scrutiny (audit trails, data reconciliation, security) from one that only works in the demo, and why that gap is wider than it looks.

Your CPA sees more than your books. Across their client roster, they see which contractors are using technology and AI to get ahead, and which ones are still doing everything the hard way. This session puts that vantage point in the room.

In this round-robin discussion, led by John O'Bryan, various CPA professionals will share what they're actually seeing across their client base: how their best-run clients are using technology and AI to manage their financials, where the rest of their clients are falling behind, and what they'd tell every contractor in the room if they could speak freely. Expect a direct, unfiltered perspective on the gap between contractors who are ahead of the curve and everyone else.

Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of what their own CPA might be thinking but hasn't said out loud, and a starting point for closing the gap.

Human problems that lead to financial problems often start as conversations. A superintendent venting about a client who keeps changing scope, a subcontractor where the tone shifts from collaborative to defensive, a municipality that repeatedly asks for the same things and can't get straight answers: those signals exist in email and Teams, and nobody is reading them, because nobody can.

This session is about finding sentiment, red flags, and risk in your corporate communication. Not keyword flags and not surveillance theater; pattern and sentiment analysis across the full body of a company's communications, surfacing client relationships going sideways, employees heading for the door, harassment and compliance exposure, and project friction that hasn't reached leadership yet.

The framing matters as much as the technology. Monitoring has a reputation problem, and it's earned; most of it was built on mistrust. Greg will make the case for the opposite posture, one built on celebrating what's working, protecting people who need it, and intervening early enough that intervention is still cheap, along with what implementation actually looks like on a Microsoft 365 tenant and where the legal and cultural lines sit.

Attendees will leave able to assess what risk signal is already sitting unread in their own systems, and what it costs to keep not looking.

Whether it's the jobsite or the office, today's construction workforce often has Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z working side by side, each shaped by a completely different set of formative events, communication habits, and expectations of work itself, which is the root of most of the friction people chalk up to personality or attitude.

This session breaks down what's actually driving those misunderstandings: the values, communication preferences, and biases that come standard with each generation, and why what looks like resistance, entitlement, or disengagement is often just a different operating system for how someone was wired to work. Attendees consistently leave this session with a moment of “oh, that's why this keeps happening” with someone (or some generation) they've been struggling to work with.

From there, the session gets practical: how to communicate in a way that actually lands with each generation, where technology fits into closing the gap (and where it doesn't), and how to build mentorship and knowledge-sharing structures that turn generational differences into a strength instead of a source of friction.

Artificial intelligence is moving construction from reactive, experience-dependent processes toward more predictive, connected, and data-informed operations. This session will highlight real-world AI applications across estimating, project management, jobsite intelligence, scheduling, cost control, safety, financial reporting, and workforce productivity. Attendees will learn where AI can reduce administrative effort, surface project risk earlier, improve operational visibility, support more consistent decisions, and strengthen margin and project performance.

The session will provide an actionable approach for turning promising use cases into sustainable business capabilities. Construction leaders will be encouraged to begin with a defined operating problem, prioritize a small number of high-value opportunities, establish measurable outcomes and accountable owners, and scale only after value has been demonstrated. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of where to begin, what foundations must be in place, and how to connect focused AI adoption with long-term construction transformation.

Join us at Top Golf from 5:30 to 8:30 pm to close out the day with food, drinks, and networking.