Construction AI: McLaren puts robot dogs on its sites at scale, and the office finally captures what gets said on Teams

McLaren Construction is one of the larger privately owned contractors in the UK, the sort of name that turns up on London commercial towers and big residential schemes. On 6 July it said it would deploy autonomous robots "at scale" across its UK sites through a partnership with FieldAI, the robotics-AI company. FieldAI describes this as its first UK deployment, having already run in Europe, Asia and North America. The hardware is familiar, Boston Dynamics Spot, the quadruped everyone calls a robot dog. The part that matters is what's driving it.

FieldAI's pitch is its Field Foundation Models, which it says combine AI with physics-based reasoning and something it calls "uncertainty quantification", so the robot can operate on a site that's changing under it rather than following a route someone pre-loaded. On a construction site that's the whole game. A fixed patrol route is useless the moment a delivery lands in the wrong bay or a scaffold goes up. So the robot walks, captures 360-degree imagery and point-cloud data over time, and feeds progress verification, model-to-site deviation analysis, safety compliance patrols and quality assurance. McLaren's stated aim is to shrink the gap between an installation going in and a defect being spotted, tighten tolerance management and cut rework. Before committing, it trialled a Spot unit fitted with FieldAI's technology on the Passivhaus refurbishment of the London School of Economics' 35 Lincoln's Inn Fields building, which is a telling choice, because Passivhaus lives or dies on airtightness and tolerances a human walk-round misses.

Now the honest bit. "At scale" is McLaren's framing, not a robot count, and I'd read it as intent rather than a fleet already deployed. The comparison only goes so far, but this is roughly where drone photogrammetry was five years ago, impressive on the day, patchy in the rollout, and then suddenly standard once the data pipeline behind it stopped being a science project. What's different this time is that the value isn't the pretty capture, it's the automatic comparison against the model, done often enough that a 15mm drift shows up this week instead of at handover. That's what it's about. And it lands on people: the subbie whose setting-out is now checked continuously, the site manager who gets a deviation flag on a Tuesday, the person doing the QA paperwork who now has a point cloud backing every line.

For your board pack: if your firm works with or alongside McLaren, assume model-to-site comparison becomes routine on those jobs, and get your BIM setting-out and as-built tolerance regime honest now. The robot doesn't argue about whether the wall moved.

On 13 July, Newforma introduced a Microsoft Teams connector for Newforma Konekt, the platform it markets as the golden thread of AEC information management. On the surface it's a tidy convenience: link a Teams channel to a project and the messages flow into the project record without anyone changing how they work. Underneath, it's doing something more useful than convenience. It syncs public and shared Teams channels to their matching project, capturing messages, replies, reactions and attached files, and it keeps the version history. Edit a message and Konekt holds both the current and the prior version with timestamps. Delete a message in Teams and it stays in the Konekt record, clearly marked as deleted.

That last detail is the one worth pausing on. Most of the important decisions on a project aren't made in a formal RFI or a signed instruction, they're made in a chat thread, half in shorthand, and then they scatter when the project closes and people move on. Two years later a Building Safety Act matter or an adjudication turns up and the question is always the same, who knew what and when, and did anyone change the story afterwards. A record that preserves edits and retains deleted messages answers exactly that question. Newforma is an American AECO software house, not a UK compliance vendor, so this isn't pitched at the golden thread in the Building Safety Act sense. But it lands there anyway, because a durable, searchable, tamper-evident communication trail is precisely what the dutyholder regime is asking you to be able to produce.

I'd temper the enthusiasm with one thing. Sweeping every message, reaction and deleted line into a permanent record is a data-governance decision, not just a features decision. It's a lot of information about your people and your project sitting in one searchable place, and on a dispute it cuts both ways. So the boring questions come first: which channels get captured, who can search the archive, where does it live, and how long do you keep it.

Worth doing: before switching a capture tool like this on, agree a simple retention and access policy with whoever owns your information management, so the audit trail helps you rather than becoming disclosure you didn't plan for.

Take the two together and you can see where this is heading. A month ago the golden thread was a documentation problem you solved with effort, someone marking up as-builts, someone else keeping a decision log that was only as good as their diligence. This week you've got a robot capturing the physical record on site without being asked, and a connector capturing the communication record in the office without anyone typing it up. The record is starting to make itself.

That doesn't let anyone off the hook, and it's worth saying plainly given where the regime now sits. Wales made the digital golden thread a statutory duty on 1 July, England's dutyholder rules already bite, and none of this technology signs anything. A point cloud isn't a compliance decision and a Teams archive isn't a competence declaration. What both tools do is remove the excuse that the record was too hard to keep. So the standing discipline holds: decide what your defensible record is, decide who owns it, and make sure the capture tools feed that, rather than leaving you with three data lakes and no single version of the truth. On a higher-risk building, the person who can produce both what was built and what was decided, on demand, is the one who's ready when the Gateway questions come.

A practical step: pick one live project and write down, in a page, what your golden-thread record actually consists of and where each part lives. If a robot or a connector can feed a box on that page, good. If it just makes another silo, you've bought a gadget, not a record.