The 3D Model looks fantastic. But the site looks like a swamp.
- Anthony Simpson
- Jan 18
- 2 min read
If you walk into any Tier 1 HQ in January 2026, those big, quad stacked monitors are impressive.
You’ll see ‘Digital Twins’ - perfect, rotating 3D models of the asset, colour-coded by trade, with live metadata feeds and AI-driven predictive maintenance schedules.
It looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
But if you drive 20km down the road to the actual site, you find a very different reality.
You find a Foreman standing in the mud, squinting at an iPad glare he can't read, trying to upload a defect photo to a cloud server that has just crashed because the site wi-fi is rubbish.
He swears, chucks the iPad in the ute, and writes the defect in his notebook.
The Digital Lie
This is one of the great disconnects of 2026 and construction in the modern age (and one of the reasons we’re not getting on top of productivity).
According to the Autodesk State of Design & Make Report 2025, the industry is adopting tech at a record pace. 37% of firms are now using AI (up from 26% in 2024), and digital maturity is the number one KPI for boards.
But here’s the problem: we’re buying the software before we’ve sold the solution to the people building the job.
The same report reveals that the median construction firm is now running 11 different data environments.
Eleven...!!
That means the Site Engineer has to update the Daily Diary (System A), the Safety Stats (System B), the QA Lots (System C), and the Programme (System D).
The Cost of Garbage In, Garbage Out
When you make the process too hard for the site team, they don't stop building. They just stop reporting.
They feed the ‘Twin’ the bare minimum data to keep the dashboard green. This leads to what we call the ‘Digital Lie’, where the Management Report says the project is 45% complete and on budget, but the Site Reality is we’re 3 weeks behind and the rebar ordered for Tuesday is 3 tonne short.
The cost of this bad data is staggering. Global estimates suggest data fragmentation and bad data caused a $1.8 trillion loss in the sector globally.
In a market where 95% of projects are experiencing delays, you just can’t afford to be steering the ship with a broken compass.
The View from The Bench
We love tech. But we love truth more.
A Digital Twin fed by an annoyed Foreman is worse than a paper map. It gives you false confidence.
Our advice to Digital Managers in 2026:
Kill the App Stack: if your site team needs more than 3 logins to do their day job, you’ve failed.
The Thumb Test: if the Foreman can't update the record with his thumb while holding a coffee in the other hand, the UX is wrong.
Train the People, not just the Model: spend 50% of your tech budget on change management.
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