2026 · State of the Field
0%
of companies use AI somewhere in their business.
The industry that builds everything is at 27%.
Not a rounding error. The largest unautomated surface left in the economy — seven percent of global output, still run on phone calls, spreadsheets and photographs taken from a ladder.
CIELLIE
Where intelligence meets infrastructure
The least tapped market in AI, in three numbers.
What construction produces every year — $13 trillion of output, 8% of the world's workforce.
Scale is not the problem
Over the same 22 years the wider economy gained 50% and manufacturing gained 90%. In the US, construction productivity went backwards.
Construction · Economy · Manufacturing
Across all industries the figure is 89%. Of the AEC minority already using it, 94% are increasing spend this year.
AEC · All industries
The gap between what the world will need built by 2040 and what the industry is on pace to deliver. Productivity is the only lever that closes it.
The reason
Software got very good at the desk.
None of this work happens at a desk. It happens on a roof at a 10/12 pitch in the rain, in a truck that left at 6:40, in a photograph that has to hold up in a dispute eighteen months later. The least tapped market in AI is not one nobody noticed. It is one nobody could reach.
Reaching it means capture, not dashboards — instruments that put an accurate record into the system the first time, from the field, without asking a crew to become data entry.
The truck leaves before anyone has confirmed the second stop.
The pitch an adjuster reasonably declines to walk in the wet.
How long after the fact the documentation has to survive scrutiny.
How many dispatchers were told yes for the same slot.
Founded 2025
CrewLink
Schedule crews around the drive, not around the calendar.
For HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing and solar companies still coordinating crews by phone and group text.
crewlink.ai →A hold has to block every door at once. If a slot is offered three ways, it locks the moment one of them takes it — otherwise two dispatchers both get told yes.
Dispatch, as a transactionFounded 2019
Solar Survey AI
Predict the economics before it’s built. Protect them after.
For solar asset owners and O&M teams whose cost, performance and maintenance records live in separate systems.
solarsurvey.ai →Every system answers its own question. None of them connects action, cost and consequence — so financial decisions get made on heuristics.
Operations, pricedFounded 2026
Aero Claims
Settle roof claims in days, not weeks.
For carriers, adjusters and roofing teams — autonomous flights, AI damage detection, adjuster-ready reports.
aeroclaims.ai →Nobody budgets for the second inspection. Carriers track cycle time closely and re-inspection barely at all — which means the cost is real, and invisible.
The ledger nobody keepsOne group, three companies
Different customers. The same failure, priced three different ways.
A slot promised twice. A roof designed from an image that was never meant to be measured. A claim reopened because the first set of photographs did not hold. Every one of them is the same defect — the record of what happened in the field was wrong, or late, or absent.
CIELLIE builds and operates the companies that fix that defect at the point of capture — each one sold into its own industry, each one built on the same conviction about where the leverage actually sits.