Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 36 /Aug 11, 2026
The existing conditions came from Google Earth
Chris Faulhaber, EARTHBRAIN
Aug 11, 2026 /Construction & Delivery
The existing conditions came from Google Earth
Chris Faulhaber is the director of digital transformation at EarthBrain, Komatsu's construction-technology company, and a professional engineer who ran earth-moving job sites before he ran software. Earthwork is where most projects start and where much of the money quietly disappears. He argues the waste is not a time problem at all.
Chris Faulhaber, Director of Digital Transformation, EARTHBRAIN
In this conversation
Chris's fear that AI has become the easy button, and his insistence on understanding what the site looks like today and next month.
What digitizing dirt moving actually involves, from machine control to ortho images used to settle disputes in hours.
The Salt Lake City contractor whose drone images turned change orders into quick decisions.
Why AI in contracting is driven by necessity: nobody can backfill the twenty-year veteran, and company loyalty is gone.
Every contractor finds themselves and they describe themselves as unique.
Chris Faulhaber
Chapters
Where the waste actually is
Where the money on a job actually leaks, and why it is not time.
By the numbers
Cost of construction rework caused by bad data in 2020, 14 percent of all rework
Chris says the waste on a job is not a time problem but a gap between the plan and the field. Rework is where that gap shows up on the invoice.
Source: Autodesk and FMI, Harnessing the Data Advantage in Construction (2021) ↗Digitizing dirt
What it means to bring data to earthwork.
A story about trust
A story about an owner and a contractor who trusted each other.
The projects that excite him
The projects Chris finds most exciting now, and his advice to a young engineer.
They're pulling up Google Earth and they're trying to grab existing ground data from Google Earth.
Chris Faulhaber
Takeaways
Every contractor calls itself unique, and the reason is real: how it moves material from A to B is what wins it jobs. The waste is in the gap between the plan and the field.
Designers are so far behind that they use fifteen-year-old surveys or pull existing ground from Google Earth. Bid economics never match field economics because no job goes the way it was supposed to.
Projects fall apart when everyone holds their cards to their chest. The contractor who has spent ten years building trust with an owner works in a different industry from the one arguing over a truck hood.
Never does a job actually go the way that it's supposed to.
Chris Faulhaber