Enabling Innovation 2025: Building the Future, Not Waiting for It
Each year, Enabling Innovations, Kahua’s annual conference, sets the pace for where the construction industry is headed. At this year’s event, held October 20-23 at our Alpharetta, Georgia, headquarters, customers, partners and the Kahua team focused on one goal: to lead through innovation and build technology that raises expectations for what’s possible.
Like everything else at Kahua, that feeling of anticipation and camaraderie is no accident. We come together each year to talk about where the industry is headed, what challenges are holding us back and how to move forward faster.
The keyword here is faster: The challenges that owners and builders face today will not be solved by incremental change. They will be solved by rethinking how we connect people, processes and technology, and leaning into change.
As Manny Innamorato, Kahua consultant and EI favorite, said, “Change management is not about training people on how to use the new tech. Change management is about the why.”
So why change? Why innovate, why automate, why ask your teams to do the hard work of adopting to new processes? Because the future demands it, and those who will be successful in the future must get tech-enabled today.
Making history with Kahua AI
My biggest observation at the conference was the excitement our attendees showed when we revealed the new Kahua AI. It's more than exciting.
The new Kahua AI we announced at EI 2025 wasn’t just a product release—it is a fundamental shift in how construction software is designed, developed, and delivered.
The current AI-enabled workflows include:
- Automated Data Collection: Extracts and organizes information from unprocessed sources such as invoices, equipment nameplates and specification documents.
- Agentic Data Entry: Leverages chat and voice AI to streamline input, ensuring accuracy and completeness in project records.
- Intelligent Information Access: Provides users with quick, conversational access to the right data at the right time.
Using kBuilder Canvas, customers can build an app in seconds by describing what they want in a sentence or two.
And because Kahua leverages a single host, kBuilder Canvas can be run across devices; we saw demos on an iPad and a desktop and web.
Kahua AI is and will continue to fundamentally change construction in the very near-term: Several other big advances are currently in development and will be released in the coming months. Even skeptics saw the potential.
“I’m an AI hater, and I have been for a long time,” said Robert Connor, Program Manager at Procon. “When I was watching the announcement, I was awed like everyone else…but the thing that impressed me was the message started with the security.”
Security remains a core conversation, and it should be. The use of AI brings a host of security concerns regarding how data is shared and stored. We had a lot of conversations with customers and partners about security at the conference. Kahua takes security very seriously: In the Kahua platform via our FedRAMP authorization and CMMC alignment, and in our new AI offering, which is hosted within a private infrastructure, rather than using widespread public models.
In another conference session, author and AI evangelist Hugh Seaton, put it this way: “I’ve heard people comparing the AI change to construction as similar to BIM. But there’s a fundamental difference … your teenage daughter wasn’t using BIM to plan her weekend. AI has a billion users already.”
That is, AI adoption isn’t coming; it’s already here. It’s up to us to thoughtfully integrate AI into customer workflows, rather than expect customer workflows to adapt to their technology.
See my takeaways from Enabling Innovation 2024
Kahua Customers are Leading the Way
But the best ideas this year didn’t come from Kahua. They came from our customers.
Our customers are building on Kahua, extending workflows, creating new business applications and owning their innovation journey. On stage, several customers walked us through some apps they built using kBuilder Canvas and impressed the crowd with their vision, innovation and tenacity.
One customer presented their “Road Report” app, which helped project teams plan scheduled closures to highways, bridges and infrastructure; which let the permitting team know when permits were needed for oversized/overweight carriers.
Another highlighted customer app was a project request/approval workflow application that creates a request to Congress to fund specifics projects, incorporating a large amount of data that included approvals from an external process.
In the session “There’s an App for That,” Director of Solutions Jordan Hoff and Chief Evangelist AJ Waters used a Simpson’s example: Some simple “Homer” apps can be built easily in-house. More complex “Lisa” apps—and highly complex “Professor Frink” apps—may need the aid of a technical parter or Kahua.
Iterate and repeat. Innovation never stops with Kahua.
Technology in Action
I was glad to see the excitement our customers had for the Kahua AI announcement, and the future implications and possibilities with this technology. We’re not reacting to trends. We are making history.
In addition to the innovation and the fun—which included a mystery dinner theater and a ‘80s dance party in the evenings—was a “sweet baby angel” comment from our customer Rivian, causing laughter through the room and long after the sessions ended.
Our customers and partners are not just adopting technology, they’re building the future with Kahua. And we’re not waiting for the industry to change—we're fundamentally changing the industry, together.
Learn more about Kahua AI.
