Most contractor AI efforts live in an innovation group off to the side of the org chart. Skanska USA Building put its inside the operating business and pointed it at the COO.
The reporting line is the announcement
Skanska established a digital transformation and solutions team on July 14, naming Will Senner senior vice president to lead it. Senner is based in Durham, North Carolina and has spent more than 20 years at Skanska across engineering, preconstruction and regional leadership. The group operates within the core business of Skanska USA Building, the American construction arm of the Stockholm-based contractor, and reports directly to COO Chris Toher.
That structure is a deliberate rejection of the pattern that has produced most of the industry’s disappointing technology results. An innovation lab reporting to a CTO gets measured on pilots launched. A team reporting to the COO gets measured on whether project teams actually use what it builds, and whether jobs run better.
Picking a two-decade operations veteran rather than an outside technologist points the same direction. Senner has run preconstruction and regional leadership; he knows which parts of the job are painful enough that a superintendent will change habits to fix them.
Tools, not platforms
The stated focus is building practical tools to support project teams rather than standalone technology pilots. “This isn’t just about doing today’s work faster; it’s about rethinking how work gets done,” Senner said.
That framing is easy to write and hard to execute. The failure mode in construction technology is well documented: a firm buys a platform, mandates adoption, and eighteen months later the field is running the old process in parallel because the tool didn’t fit the sequence. Building narrow internal tools against specific workflows is slower and less impressive in a press release, and it’s the approach that has actually stuck at the firms where AI is doing measurable work.
Timing
The announcement came the same week Skanska reported record quarterly order intake and a backlog equal to 21 months of work. Companies build internal capability when they have the margin and the visibility to fund it, and 21 months of backlog buys both.
Whether any of this shows up in project outcomes is a question for 2028. The industry has a long record of announcing digital transformation and delivering dashboards. What’s different here is a structure that makes it harder to hide: a team inside operations, reporting to the person accountable for delivery, with no separate innovation budget to justify its existence. Source: Skanska.