The 2026 CII (Construction Industry Institute) Annual Research Conference runs July 20 to22 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. This year's theme is workforce challenges and innovation in capital project delivery, drawing an expected 400+ attendees from roughly 150 companies, including 7 research teams and a 15-presenter Innovation Showcase runningJuly 21-22.
Our NA President, Heitor Gartner, will be on site at the KEWAZO booth.
What the research says about the workforce gap
CII's workforce theme sits on top of a documented industry problem. In the 2025 WorkforceSurvey run by the Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER across nearly1,400 firms, 92% of firms that are hiring reported difficulty finding qualified workers, and 45%said worker shortages had directly delayed a project in the past year. Separately, NCCER's construction workforce age research projects that about 41% of today's construction workforce will retire by 2031, a demographic timeline that outpaces how fast new trades workers are being trained.
More open positions and a retiring workforce together push capital-project owners and contractors toward automation that lets a smaller, less specialized crew do the same scope, the same labor-shortage question CII's research teams and Innovation Showcase are built to study this year.
What LIFTBOT's deployment data shows
Crew-size efficiency is one of the specific topics LIFTBOT, KEWAZO's battery-powered material handling robot, has direct deployment data on. At Flint Hills Resources' Corpus Christi site, Turner Industries built a 125-foot pre-turnaround scaffold running LIFTBOT with a 50% smaller crew than the operator's baseline called for, removing 330 hazardous man-hours over a 2.5-week build. At PBF Torrance, BrandSafway scaffolded four vessels with four to five scaffolders per vessel instead of the six-to-seven baseline, which also required a rigger and a crane operator, cutting total scaffold-builder hours from 2,940 to 1,270 across the campaign.
Further deployments across refining, petrochemical, and civil-construction sites are on KEWAZO's industrial case studies page. Every lift also feeds ONSITE, KEWAZO's field analytics platform, logging cycle time and utilization automatically, giving capital-project teams a measured record to plan crew size against, instead of the estimates most programs currently rely on.
Meet the KEWAZO team at the conference
If you research workforce or productivity questions in capital project delivery, or you are evaluating material handling automation for an upcoming program, stop by the KEWAZO booth. If you cannot make it to Denver, the contact page is the fastest way to reach out.
*Workforce statistics from the AGC/NCCER 2025 Workforce Survey and NCCER's construction workforce age research.
