We spent three days at Geo Week 2026 talking to contractors, PMs, and municipal engineers. The sessions were packed. The hallway conversations were better.
Here’s what actually came through.
The Line That Kept Coming Up
You heard it in panels, in booth demos, in conversations over coffee:
“AI won’t replace you, but someone using it will.”
That’s not hype. It’s a warning about where the industry is heading. The contractors and owners who figure out how to use AI to shrink admin time, tighten QA, and speed up documentation will pull ahead. The ones waiting for perfect tools will keep losing margin to manual processes.
The AI that matters isn’t flashy. It’s the kind that auto-tags photos, pulls quantities from scans, and flags discrepancies before they become disputes. One PM told us: “I don’t need a chatbot. I need to stop spending two hours on Sundays typing up quantities from my notes.”
Reality Capture Has Grown Up
Reality capture was one of the most talked-about tracks at Geo Week. But the conversation has shifted.
Old pitch: “Look at this cool scan.”New pitch: “This becomes the source of truth for your asset.”
Sessions emphasized integration across the project lifecycle, design through construction through operations. The focus wasn’t on capture quality anymore. It was on data longevity, interoperability, and what happens after handover.
The buyers we talked to are asking harder questions:
- How does this integrate into our existing systems?
- How does it persist after the project closes out?
- Who owns this data long term?
Translation: scanning something isn’t the deliverable anymore. A connected, verifiable record is.
Owners Are Treating Documentation as Risk Management
The digital twin conversation used to be about visualization and marketing demos. Not anymore.
At Geo Week, sessions focused on DOT digital delivery programs, infrastructure resilience, and subsurface modelling. Governments and owners are increasingly treating digital documentation as a risk-management tool rather than an innovation project. The Common Ground Alliance reports that excavation-related damage costs the U.S. about $30 billion annually. That number is why “we have records somewhere” doesn’t cut it anymore.
One public works director told us: “If you can’t show me exactly where, exactly when, and exactly what was installed, I’m not signing off. I’ve inherited too many problems from contractors who couldn’t prove their work.”
That’s not a technology preference. That’s the new baseline for getting paid.
The Winners Aren’t Tool Specialists
A core theme this year: convergence.
The future isn’t LiDAR vs. drones vs. GIS vs. BIM. It’s how they work together. The vendors getting attention aren’t the ones with the best single tool. They’re platform players, workflow integrators, ecosystem builders.
Hardware differentiation is shrinking. Software orchestration is what matters.
For contractors, the implication is clear: the value isn’t in having the best scanner or GPS. It’s in whether your locate, scan, redline, and quantities end up in the same place—linked to the same stationing, ready for the same pay app.
The Trend That Actually Matters
If Geo Week 2026 had one message, it’s this:
Capture is cheap. Coordination is expensive.
The industry generates more data than ever. What we can’t do well is make that data useful across the project lifecycle. Design doesn’t connect to as-builts. Field reports don’t tie to quantities. Every handoff is a chance for information to disappear.
The contractors winning aren’t the ones with the most advanced capture tools. They’re the ones who’ve solved coordination, who can pull up the GPS-tagged photo, the scan, and the daily report in the same view.
Where vSite Fits
vSite exists because we saw this problem from the inside. Field crews capturing data in one place. Office staff re-entering it in another. Photos on phones. Quantities in spreadsheets. Redlines in Bluebeam. None of it connected.
We built one system where scans, photos, redlines, quantities, and daily logs all tie to the same stationing. When you need to prove something, you pull it up in seconds. The closeout package builds itself as the project runs.
If you’re heading into your next project with fragmented field systems, we should talk.
