AI and tech in construction: why small wins matter

Search “AI in construction” and the pictures that come back are drones surveying sites, robots laying bricks, and dashboards tracking machinery nobody in a 100-person electrical contracting business actually owns. For a lot of specialist contractors, none of that reflects the problem they're actually trying to solve day to day.

Rob Candler is CEO of Fixatex, a family-run electrical contracting business specialising in social housing across London. He joined the business his dad started back in 2010, and has grown it from around 15 staff to more than 100 in the past five or six years. Geeks CEO Lindsay Jessup sat down with him on a recent episode of the Innovation Room podcast to talk about what technology actually looks like inside a business like his, not the drone footage version, the real one. It's a useful case study precisely because it isn't glamorous. There's no robot, no dashboard demo, no AI buzzword. Just a genuine bottleneck and a fix that actually worked.

Rob's honest answer, when asked how much technology is actually impacting his sector, was that it's getting there, but it still feels slow. Fixatex isn't a stereotypical contractor on a building site. It's classed as a specialist contractor, focused on servicing and maintaining electrical installations in period properties, largely around statutory compliance work for landlords, fire alarm servicing, electrical testing, and emergency lighting.

That distinction matters, because it changes where AI in construction is actually useful for a business like his. Drones surveying a site, or robotics on a build, simply aren't relevant. What is relevant, in Rob's view, is the administration side of the business, the repetitive, document-heavy, time-consuming back-office work that eats hours every week without anyone really noticing. It also explains why a lot of generic AI in construction content doesn't land for businesses like his. The framing usually assumes a building site. Fixatex's daily reality is closer to an office managing hundreds of appointments and compliance documents.

A large portion of Fixatex's revenue comes from EICR programmes, electrical installation condition reports, which means sending engineers into properties to test installations and confirm they meet safety standards. Booking those appointments used to run entirely through a team of office staff phoning residents, working standard 8-to-5 hours to reach residents who were also working 8-to-5 hours. As Fixatex took on more contracts, that approach simply stopped scaling.

The fix wasn't complicated. Working with Geeks, Fixatex built an online booking system integrated with OneServe, their existing job management system, so residents could book an appointment themselves, at a time that actually suited them, without a phone call at all. Rob was clear it never needed to be more elaborate than a resident scanning a QR code, entering a reference number, and picking a date and time.

“It didn't have to be any more complicated than someone being able to scan a QR code, put in a reference, and pick a date and time.”

— Rob Candler, CEO, Fixatex

It was built in a matter of weeks, not months, and had only been live two to three weeks at the time of recording. Even in that short window, the system had already handled more than 100 bookings, work that Rob estimated would otherwise have taken roughly two days of phone time for someone in the office. Residents could book at any hour and reschedule themselves, and the team kept the phone line open for anyone who preferred to talk to a person, because some still do.

There's a wider point in that dual-channel approach worth sitting with. The assumption is often that automation strips out the human side of a service. In Fixatex's case, it did the opposite. Freeing the office team from routine booking calls gave them more room to focus on residents who genuinely needed a conversation, rather than less.

Rob's read on why his industry lags behind is straightforward. People generally resist change, whether that change is a new process or a new piece of technology, and resistance grows sharper when a change feels like it's taking something away from someone. Cost is the other major factor. New technology needs budget, and budget is harder to justify when the return isn't obvious yet.

Lindsay's experience echoes that from working across the sector more broadly. The technology itself is almost always the easy part. Bringing a team along on the journey, getting genuine buy-in rather than passive compliance, is the harder and more time-consuming work, and it's rarely something businesses budget time or money for in the same way they budget for the tools themselves. None of this is unique to electrical contracting either. It's a pattern that shows up across construction more broadly, and it's worth any specialist contractor recognising in their own business before assuming technology itself is the obstacle.

It's also the question most likely to shut a technology conversation down before it starts, which is exactly why a straight answer from someone actually running a construction business carries more weight than a vendor's reassurance. Rob's answer is grounded rather than dramatic. He doesn't see AI replacing the person who actually goes into a property and checks the electrics any time soon. Where he does see genuine opportunity is in the admin and back-office side of the business, the repetitive, document-heavy work that takes people away from the jobs that actually need a human in the room.

The bigger workforce risk Fixatex is watching isn't replacement. It's the opposite problem: not enough people coming in. Construction has an ageing workforce, and attracting young people into trades has become genuinely difficult. Fixatex now sponsors a project called Building Skills for the Future, working alongside some of London's largest housing associations to map where skills gaps will actually appear over the next five, ten, and twenty years as experienced staff retire.

There's a quieter risk sitting inside that same problem: the knowledge that leaves with people who retire without ever writing down how they actually do the job. Documenting that kind of tacit, experience-based knowledge is unglamorous work, but it's exactly the foundation that makes future technology, from better training tools to AI-assisted processes, genuinely useful once a business is ready for it.

Asked what he'd build next with no constraints, Rob didn't reach for anything dramatic. Certification, the paperwork behind every EICR, currently absorbs a huge number of man hours across the business: producing it, quality-checking it, sending it to clients. He sees real potential in AI-assisted certification software built specifically for how Fixatex actually works, rather than another off-the-shelf tool that does the job but nothing more. It's a modest ambition next to the AI headlines dominating the industry, and that's rather the point.

Further out, Rob sees more promise in VR and the metaverse for training than in the drones and robotics usually associated with construction technology, largely because Fixatex's engineers aren't working on the kind of large open sites those tools were built for. More realistic, immersive training is the application that actually fits a specialist contractor's day-to-day reality. It's a similar spirit to what we've explored in how AI creates measurable ROI in construction, starting with the win that's actually achievable, not the one that makes the best headline.

This article covers the case study and the practical lessons, but the full episode goes further into what it actually took to bring a 100-person team along on a tech change, and Rob's take on where AI, VR, and the wider construction industry outlook are heading over the next few years.