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 27 /May 15, 2026
Why Field Materials' CEO left big tech to fix construction's most expensive, least talked-about problem
Eldar Sadikov, Field Materials
May 15, 2026 /Construction & Delivery
Why Field Materials' CEO left big tech to fix construction's most expensive, least talked-about problem
Eldar Sadikov is the CEO and co-founder of Field Materials, an AI company that automates how contractors buy and track building materials. A Stanford-trained AI researcher who worked at Google and Microsoft, he grew up around construction: his father ran a self-performing contractor and his mother was a construction CFO. He chose the industry's least-discussed cost.
Eldar Sadikov, CEO and co-founder, Field Materials
In this conversation
Why an AI researcher from big tech chose construction, and what his parents' businesses taught him about where money is lost.
How the company started in one corner of a fragmented process and expanded project by project.
The scale it reached: more than $1.3 billion of purchasing a year running through the platform.
His prediction that within two years procurement becomes agentic, with hundreds of manual hours a month collapsing to a fraction.
Procurement and materials represent easily 30, even up to 40% of all costs.
Eldar Sadikov
Chapters
Why construction
What drew a Google and Microsoft researcher to construction.
Where to begin in a fragmented industry
How to enter a fragmented, multi-step industry as a startup.
The materials explosion
Why materials became the largest and fastest-growing cost on the job.
By the numbers
Rise in producer prices for construction inputs since early 2020
Eldar says materials are 30 to 40 percent of construction cost and nobody talks about them. Their price has climbed faster than almost anything else on the job.
Source: AGC analysis of BLS producer price indexes (2024) ↗Advice to a recent grad
Eldar's advice to a graduate entering an industry AI is reshaping.
On our platform right now, more than 1.3 billion is being purchased every year.
Eldar Sadikov
Takeaways
Procurement and materials are 30 to 40 percent of construction cost in a multi-trillion-dollar industry, and almost nobody talks about them.
Field Materials was built AI-native from day one: agents read an invoice, find the purchase order, match line items, code the cost and push it to accounting.
Look for the major trend and build what fits its distribution, the way the first GPS-equipped phone made a parking app obvious.
If you can do something that actually fits into the trend and into that distribution, you have a successful business right there.
Eldar Sadikov