Kumari: Construction projects allocate only 1% to 5% of budgets to technology
Sneha Kumari · Why Construction still Runs on Spreadsheets (And How AI Fixes It) | Sneha & Graham, Merlin AI · Apr 9, 2026 · at 26:12
Sneha Kumari, co-founder of construction software startup Merlin AI, explains tech budget benchmarks across developer and industrialized construction projects.
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“Clearly you can see two to three percent of the overall project is going to technology and doesn't have to be just Merlin. There's a lot of other stuff, but then people who are recurring building this Technology sits at the core of what they are building, right? It could be, you know, five percent depending, but I mean, definitely not more than that. I haven't seen them spending more, and then rightly so, because the margins are thin, but then if you're doing repetitive modeling, technology has to be there to enable them see the efficiencies through but then bigger projects where we're talking about developer projects, I do see one to two percent of the spend going.”
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