Connected World

The future of construction depends on the industry rethinking how we build the workforce that will construct the homes, buildings, cities, and infrastructure of tomorrow. As we move closer to the year 2030, the industry’s greatest competitive advantage won’t just be AI (artificial intelligence), automation, or robotics. It will be people with the skills to work alongside these technologies.

Road infrastructure is entering a new era as research and technology continue to improve the safety, sustainability, and performance of transportation networks. Through collaboration between industry leaders and academic researchers, innovative solutions are helping shape the future of road construction and maintenance. One example is the Roads Research Alliance, a partnership led by National Highways that is advancing breakthrough technologies for safer, greener, and smarter roads.

The freight rail industry is one of the most critical yet often overlooked pillars of the global economy. In the United States alone, railroads move roughly 40% of long-distance freight when you measure it by 10 miles, transporting everything from agriculture products and chemicals to automobiles and consumer goods to so much more.

Even the most sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) models are constrained by data trapped in information silos and legacy systems. The challenge is every new data source requires its own custom implementation, making connected systems difficult to scale, which is something that could slow building the next-gen infrastructure projects we so desperately need. Enter MCP (model context protocol).

Twice this year, my home has gone dark in the middle of what used to be ordinary summer thunderstorms. Quite frankly, I am over it. Our nation’s infrastructure should be strong enough to withstand your typical Midwest thunderstorms. This isn’t the first time I have written about storms knocking my power out. Back in 2020, I wrote about a tornado that tore through my town, when entire neighborhoods were left without power for days.

Smart water metering is entering a new phase of growth. According to Berg Insight, the installed base of water AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) endpoints in Europe and North America reached 79.1 million units in 2025 and is projected to grow to 154.5 million by 2031. That’s nearly double in just six years. Who said the IoT was dead? Could water utilities become one of the next major drivers of IoT (Internet of Things) adoption?

As researchers work to develop new cancer treatments, one of the biggest challenges is identifying promising drug candidates quickly and efficiently. Now, researchers at Purdue University have developed a next-generation technology platform designed to dramatically speed up the early stages of cancer drug discovery. By combining chemical synthesis, biological testing, and mass spectrometry into a single automated workflow, the platform can reduce processes that once took weeks down to just hours.

For decades, manufacturers have been on a journey to greater automation, connectivity, and intelligence. First came digitization. Then came the IoT (Internet of Things), enabling machines, systems, and people to share data in realtime. Today, we are entering the next phase of that evolution: agentic AI (artificial intelligence). Across many industries, companies are moving beyond using artificial intelligence simply to analyze data.

Peggy Smedley and V Krishnan, industry advisor for manufacturing and mobility, Microsoft, talk about the operational challenges the rail industry is facing today and how AI (artificial intelligence) can help. The Peggy Smedley Show The future is happening now—are you keeping up? Subscribe to The Peggy Smedley Show, the #1 podcast covering IoT, AI, and the Future of Work. With 150,000+ listeners and top industry experts every week, this is where innovation lives.

It is the last day of June, and we are wrapping up our summer blog series for National Safety Month. We have already examined the importance of the underlying foundational culture, top construction hazards to prevent, the cost of ignoring safety, particularly in small businesses, the elements of a good toolbox talk, and the importance of near miss reporting. We can’t do a summer blog series without mentioning a big risk: summer heat.