There’s no shortage of software companies promising to revolutionize the way you build. Project management platforms, AI document tools, reality capture technology, procurement systems; the construction tech space has grown fast, and the noise around it has grown even faster.
Today, Procore is the operating system for most commercial construction firms. The depth of how a firm uses it, though, varies enormously. Because we’ve grown with the platform, our project teams don’t just use Procore — they’ve built their daily workflow around it. RFIs, submittals, daily logs, drawings, and cost management all flow through a single environment, so nothing gets tracked twice or lost in a separate spreadsheet.
At GRYCON, we’ve been navigating that landscape for a long time. We were among the first general contractors in the country to adopt Procore when it was still early-stage software in the early 2000s, before it became the industry standard it is today. That history gives us a useful lens: we know the difference between tools that change the way you work and tools that just add another login.
Here’s an honest look at the technology we’ve leaned into and why.
SubBase: Bringing Order to Procurement
Construction procurement has historically been one of the most fragmented parts of the business — phone calls, spreadsheets, PDFs, and a lot of institutional knowledge that lives in individual project managers’ heads. SubBase is a centralized procurement platform that changes that.
GRYCON uses SubBase to digitize the full procurement cycle, from material ordering and vendor management to price visibility and invoice reconciliation. The result is better data, fewer gaps in the paper trail, and a more defensible record for ownership groups and auditors alike. For large projects with significant material volume, the operational lift it removes shows up on the bottom line.
Document Crunch and AI-Assisted Contract Review
Contract documents in commercial construction are long, dense, and consequential. Missing a key clause during preconstruction can create exposure that plays out across the entire life of a project.
GRYCON has integrated AI-assisted contract review tools, including Document Crunch, into our preconstruction process. These platforms surface risk provisions, highlight non-standard language, and flag areas that warrant closer attention from legal and project leadership — highlight non-standard language, and flag areas that warrant closer attention from legal and project leadership. They also make onboarding easier — when a new project manager takes over mid-project, they can get up to speed on contract risk fast instead of re-reading hundreds of pages cold, which cuts down on the ambiguity that usually comes with a scope handoff. None of this replaces the human judgment required to act on what they find — and let’s be honest, in this industry a scope handoff or a contract surprise is inevitable at some point. The goal isn’t automation for its own sake. It’s making sure nothing falls through the cracks when it happens.
Procore: Getting In Early Mattered
GRYCON’s relationship with Procore goes back to when most GCs were still running projects on spreadsheets and shared drives. Being an early adopter wasn’t just about access to features; it meant we had real influence over how the platform developed. Our teams participated in beta testing, provided feedback that shaped product decisions, and built internal workflows around the system before most of the industry had even heard of it.
Procore went public in 2021 and is now a multi-billion-dollar company by market value — a useful reminder of just how far “industry standard” software can go. But the depth of how a firm actually uses it varies enormously. Because we’ve grown with the platform, our teams treat it as the system of record, not just another login: RFIs, submittals, daily logs, drawings, and cost management all flow through it, and everyone from the field to the ownership group is working off the same information.
Oculo: Seeing the Whole Site (And Everything On It)
“One piece of technology that’s made a big difference for us is a program called Oculo. The 360-degree jobsite scans utilizing the Insta360 camera make it easy to document progress, verify existing conditions, and quickly reference areas of the project without having to walk the site. It’s been a great tool for improving communication and keeping everyone on the same page.
The coolest feature, in my opinion, is the ability to overlay the building’s BIM model onto the 360 scan. This provides a visualization of where future mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, framing, structural elements, and other building components will be installed, making coordination and planning much more efficient.” — Patrick Camden, GRYCON Assistant Superintendent
Oculo is a reality capture and site documentation platform that allows project teams to conduct virtual walkthroughs of a jobsite at any stage of construction. Think of it as a living photographic record of the project: one that lets owners, architects, and remote team members move through a site as if they were standing on it.
For complex builds, this shifts how teams communicate. Instead of an RFI description or a decontextualized photo, you can walk someone directly to the problem. Accountability improves, documentation improves, and the record is there long after the project closes.
That same photographic record solves a problem that’s plagued jobsites for as long as construction has existed: tracking what’s actually on site. Staged material, delivered equipment, stored inventory. It’s easy for these things to get logged on a delivery ticket and then quietly disappear into the shuffle of an active site, whether that’s from misplacement, theft, or just poor recordkeeping. With Oculo’s timestamped walkthroughs, GRYCON project teams can look back at exactly what was on site and where, on any given date. If material goes missing or a dispute comes up with a vendor or sub, we’re not relying on memory or a paper trail. We’re looking at the actual visual record.
GRYCON uses Oculo across active projects as part of our commitment to transparency with ownership groups and design partners. It’s one of those tools that once you’ve had it on a project, it’s hard to go back.
As Oculo founder and CEO Tom Kotecki put it: “GRYCON is exactly the kind of forward-thinking contractor we built Oculo for. Since 2024 they’ve embraced our Reality Capture, BIM modules, and Procore integration as a core part of how they run complex, high-end projects, giving their teams a clear, shared visual record of every site and a reliable point of reference as work progresses. It’s the mark of a builder that takes technology seriously, and it’s been a genuine pleasure to support that, and to continue developing our product with them.”
BIM and LiDAR: Precision From the Start
Building Information Modeling has been part of GRYCON’s preconstruction and coordination process for years, but the integration of LiDAR scanning has taken that work to another level. LiDAR allows our teams to capture as-built conditions with a level of accuracy that traditional field measurement can’t match — particularly valuable on renovation projects, complex structural conditions, or any project where the existing conditions drive the design. At Brickell Key Center, the entire curtain wall facade was engineered using LiDAR data. The precision that scanning provided wasn’t just useful — it was foundational to how that system was designed and executed.
When LiDAR data feeds directly into the BIM environment, the coordination between trades becomes sharper. Clashes get caught in the model, not in the field. For owners who want to carry that model forward into facilities management after construction, the data is already there.
The Standard Is Getting Smarter
The question for any GC isn’t whether to engage with construction technology; it’s whether to engage with it strategically. Chasing every new tool wastes time and resources. Ignoring the right ones creates competitive disadvantage.
GRYCON’s approach has always been to evaluate technology against one question: does it make our teams more effective and our projects better for the owners who trust us with them? The tools above have cleared that bar. We’ll keep looking for the ones that do.
