Alan Dunn is Managing Director and Co-founder of Cintech, a construction technology business focused on helping project teams leverage digital tools, data, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies to improve project delivery and operational performance.
With extensive experience leading technology transformation programs, Alan has held senior executive technology and CIO leadership roles, giving him firsthand insight into the challenges organisations face when adopting new technologies at scale. His career has focused on aligning digital strategy with business outcomes, driving technology adoption, and helping organisations extract greater value from their data, systems, and operational processes.
Today, Alan works with construction and infrastructure businesses to integrate AI into project workflows, reduce administrative burden, improve collaboration, and deliver better decision-making for both project teams and executive leadership. His particular interest lies in the practical application of AI and automation on live projects, ensuring technology delivers measurable outcomes rather than simply adding to the hype.
Alan will join the Construction Technology Leaders Summit (CONTECH26) as a panellist for the DRAGONS’ DEN PANEL – Separating hype from delivery: What construction AI, automation, and robotics achieve on real projects and how prepared is business for the change that is coming.
In advance of the session, we asked him three questions on his current work focus.
Q1. AI is generating enormous interest across the construction sector, but many organisations are still trying to understand where it can deliver genuine value. From your experience, where are you seeing AI make the biggest difference on projects today, and how can it make life easier for project teams while improving decision-making at leadership level?
Alan – The path forward that we see isn’t replacing people, we have a labour shortage of skilled workers as it is, the opportunity is to reduce or minimise friction and low to no value tasks that consume skilled resource time, they can then focus more on the higher value tasks.
Construction already generates an enormous amount of information across drawings, RFIs, emails, meeting minutes, commercial records and project systems. There isn’t a lack of data, it’s just scattered across dozens of platforms, which makes it difficult to find and then use it to make informed decisions.
AI is making the biggest difference by helping project teams spend less time searching, reconciling and reporting, and more time making informed decisions. It can quickly surface project context, help identify emerging risks, and then bring information that is typically siloed together to help more informed decision making.
For stakeholders, that means decisions can be based on what’s actually happening on projects today, not based on what was surfaced in the last reporting cycle.
The important point is that AI has to be grounded in trusted project information and traceable. In construction, every recommendation needs to be backed by evidence. That’s where real value is created.
Q2. One of the biggest barriers to adoption is often not the technology itself but integrating it into existing workflows. What lessons have you learned about successfully embedding AI into construction operations, and how prepared do you believe the industry is for the changes that are coming?
Alan –The biggest mistake organisations make is starting with AI instead of starting with the problem they’re trying to solve. It’s the classic ‘solution looking for a problem’.
The most successful projects focus on removing a specific source of frustration, whether that’s finding information, reducing administration, improving reporting or identifying risks earlier.
If AI saves people time every day through a path of least resistance, adoption follows naturally.
The second lesson is that AI shouldn’t force people to change the way they work or operate without keeping the human judgement involved. It needs to fit into existing project workflows and work with the systems teams already use.
I think the industry is far more ready than many people assume. Construction has successfully navigated the move to cloud platforms, mobile devices and digital project management over the past decade. AI is simply the next evolution.
The organisations that will lead aren’t necessarily those investing the most—they’re the ones building trusted data foundations and solving real operational problems.
Q3. Looking ahead, the conversation is rapidly expanding beyond AI assistants and analytics toward automation, robotics, and increasingly autonomous project delivery. What future applications excite you most, and how do you see AI, robotics, and intelligent systems reshaping construction projects over the next decade?
Alan – I think we’re moving beyond AI as something you just ask questions to, and towards AI becoming part of how projects actually operate.
We’ll see intelligent systems continuously monitoring project information, identifying risks before people notice them, highlighting contractual obligations, forecasting programme impacts and automating routine administrative work, all of which should be done with a degree of confidence that the technology has the capability and traceability to do this correctly.
We’ll see the level of complexity that AI can execute effectively on improve over time, so the variety of suitable tasks and opportunities to leverage that capability will increase.
At the same time, robotics, drones and computer vision will start to provide a much richer understanding of what’s happening on site, feeding real-world progress directly into project controls and decision-making.
I don’t believe construction will become fully autonomous any time soon. It’s too complex, too dynamic and too dependent on human judgement.
What I do see is a future where AI handles the repetitive work, intelligent systems continuously monitor project health, and people spend more time on higher value tasks, collaborating and making better decisions that can actually move the needle on projects.
Ultimately, success won’t be measured by how much AI a business has. It’ll be measured by whether projects are safer, more productive and deliver better outcomes.
Join Alan Dunn and other industry leaders at The Construction Technology Summit on 28-29 October in Sydney as we explore how AI, automation, and robotics are moving from experimentation to practical implementation across the construction sector.
