The ABC EdTech Summit, and the Session That Scored 9.8 Out of 10

ABC Central Florida's EdTech Summit bills itself as Florida's premier construction technology event, and this year it leaned into that with a simple framing on the program cover: C-suite leadership, tech experts, talent acquisition specialists, and industry leaders, all under one roof for a day, as "leaders of innovation." September 24, at Dr. Phillips Academic Commons in Orlando.

It's the kind of room that's hard to get right on purpose: people who sign the checks sitting next to the people who'll actually use whatever gets bought, with HR and talent folks in the mix too, since every construction technology conversation this year is also a workforce conversation.

The Session

ServiceIQ's Kevin led a session called AI in the Construction Workplace, built around five problems that come up on nearly every contractor's desk: change orders that trail the work, time lost looking for information, rework from outdated revisions, slow payment, and the expertise that leaves with the people who hold it.

Rather than pitch AI as a blanket fix, the session walked through each problem as a people problem first, who it actually lands on, what the real numbers say, and only then what a specific technique, document understanding, retrieval over your own records, document control, workflow automation, institutional memory, looks like in practice.

The back half covered the four ways a contractor can actually bring AI in, bring your own tools, buy a turnkey product, run a hybrid, or build in house, and the four questions worth asking any vendor before signing anything: where does the data sit, who can see what, what's on the record, and who approves. No pitch for a specific stack, just the questions a buyer needs answered first.

How It Landed

In the post-event survey, delegates rated the session an average of 9.8 out of 10. The room matched the event's own billing: C-suite leaders next to superintendents, HR specialists next to tech staff, all working through the same five problems from their own seat at the table.

That mix is usually the hardest part of a session like this to get right. A pitch aimed at the C-suite reads as abstract to the person running the job every day, and a pitch aimed at the field reads as too tactical for the person deciding the budget. Framing each problem around who it actually lands on, the PM, the superintendent, the controller, the estimator, before framing the technology, is what let one talk work for both ends of that room at once.

Get the Full Session

The complete slide deck is a free download, and the same five problems are written up in full, with sources, numbers, and what each technique looks like in a live implementation, in a standalone article.