Innovation Is How We Move Forward

Crowdbuild Is Another Great Example for Component Manufacturers

CROWDBUILD IS ANOTHER GREAT EXAMPLE FOR COMPONENT MANUFACTURERS

INNOVATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN PART OF THE structural building components industry. Long before artificial intelligence, robotics, automated saws, or sophisticated production management systems entered our collective vocabulary, component manufacturers (CMs) were constantly looking for better ways to design and build. In many ways, the industry itself exists because people were willing to rethink how structural framing could be designed, manufactured, and delivered. That willingness to change remains just as important today.

CMs continue to face many of the same pressures confronting the broader construction industry: a limited skilled workforce, rising costs, tighter schedules, increasingly complex projects, and customers who expect more information in less time. At the same time, technology is creating opportunities to address those challenges in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.

CMs have historically been early adopters of technology within construction, embracing computer-aided design software, automated saws, jigging systems, and increasingly sophisticated manufacturing equipment. Today, software, automation, and integrated systems are allowing manufacturers to push those efficiencies even further. The question is no longer whether our industry will innovate, but where the next meaningful improvement will come from.

Creating a Place for New Ideas

That question was one of the reasons SBCA created its Innovation Grant in 2023. Because innovation is one of the pillars of SBCA’s strategic plan, the grant was developed to encourage companies and individuals both inside and outside the industry to bring forward products, equipment, software, and ideas capable of advancing component manufacturing and framing. The program also acknowledges an important aspect of innovation: developing a good idea is only the beginning.

Innovators need an opportunity to put their solutions in front of the people who understand the problems they are trying to solve. The SBCA Innovation Grant provides recipients exhibit space at BCMC, access to industry decision-makers, and opportunities to receive direct feedback from CMs and others throughout the supply chain. In 2026, recipients received exhibit space and passes valued at more than $5,000, but arguably the greater value was exposure to the more than 1,500 industry professionals who attended BCMC.

The four 2026 Innovation Grant recipients were Cadynce, Crowdbuild, Shelfmark, and Stiles Machinery, each bringing a different solution to challenges facing component manufacturers and the broader construction industry. As part of Innovation Alley at BCMC, attendees had the opportunity to see the innovations firsthand, ask questions, learn how the solutions work, and vote for the innovation they believed had the greatest potential. Crowdbuild’s CB Quote was ultimately selected as the 2026 People’s Choice Innovator, with the winner announced during the Industry Celebration in Columbus, OH.

That interaction matters because innovation rarely follows a straight line from idea to finished product. Rather, it is an iterative process: someone identifies a problem, develops a solution, puts it into practice, listens to feedback from the people using it, and makes it better. Crowdbuild is an excellent example of this process.

Innovation does not necessarily mean inventing something entirely new to the industry. Often, it involves identifying a persistent problem, applying technology in a new way, and continuing to improve the solution based on what users need.

Building on an Idea

Crowdbuild’s 2026 Innovation Grant recognition is particularly notable because it reflects the continued development of an idea the company first brought to the program two years earlier. In 2024, Crowdbuild was a recipient of the SBCA Innovation Grant for TwinBuild LVM, which used advanced vision models to perform whole-house quantity takeoffs from construction documents. Rather than stopping with that capability, the company continued building on the underlying technology and the problems it was intended to solve.

Crowdbuild’s CB Quote represents the next step in that progression. Whereas the earlier technology focused largely on extracting building information and generating quantities, the 2026 submission expands how that information can be used throughout the preconstruction process. The goal is to connect building data not only to estimating, but also to sequencing, labor, cost, quoting, and procurement, creating information that can support decisions across multiple parts of a project.

At the center of that evolution is AIM-E, Crowdbuild’s domain-specific building-intelligence engine. Instead of simply viewing architectural plans as lines, symbols, and pixels, AIM-E interprets elements such as spaces, walls, openings, assemblies, roof systems, levels, and structural relationships. From that information, CB Quote can generate a digital representation of the structure along with quantities that can ultimately be connected to scheduling, labor, cost, quoting, and procurement.

The significance to the industry is not necessarily any single function, but the possibility of reducing how often the same project information must be recreated as a job moves through different parts of a component manufacturing operation. That should be music to the ears of almost every CM.

Information originating in architectural and structural drawings eventually influences estimating, design, material purchasing, scheduling, and production. Every time that information must be manually interpreted, transferred, or entered into another system, there is the possibility of consuming valuable employee time or introducing an error. Crowdbuild’s approach is to interpret that information once and make the resulting structured building data useful across multiple downstream applications.

Giving People Better Tools 

There is another important point worth emphasizing: automation does not necessarily mean replacing people. Crowdbuild Product Owner Nouran Ghaly explains that one potential benefit of the technology is reducing the significant amount of manual effort involved in generating quantity takeoffs. The objective is to allow estimators to spend less time performing repetitive work and more time applying their expertise to higher-value activities. Better information earlier in the process can also help teams identify problems sooner and make decisions about quantities, schedules, and costs with greater confidence. That idea extends well beyond Crowdbuild.

Software improves communication, automation can reduce repetitive material handling, and better production equipment can improve throughput. Digital quality control can make inspections easier, while integrated business systems can give managers better information with which to make decisions. The goal is not technology for technology’s sake, but rather finding better ways for people to do their jobs.

That distinction will become increasingly important as artificial intelligence develops. Crowdbuild’s Nouran Ghaly sees AI evolving from primarily a productivity tool into a decision-support tool capable of helping construction professionals turn enormous amounts of project data into useful information more quickly. In her words, the opportunity is to help professionals spend less time gathering information and more time making informed decisions.

A Software Trend Worth Watching

The People’s Choice results from the past three BCMC shows provide another interesting indication of where opportunity lies for CMs. In 2024, attendees selected Paragon’s D.A.N., a cloud-based AI-powered wood truss design platform. The following year, in 2025, they chose Alpine’s AI-powered Plan Comparison Tool, which identifies differences among versions of architectural plans. In 2026, they selected Crowdbuild’s CB Quote. That’s three years of selections with very different software solutions.

This doesn’t mean that the future of innovation is exclusively digital. Far from it. Robotics, automated material handling, cutting equipment, and manufacturing systems continue to advance rapidly, and SBCA’s Innovation Grant has recognized solutions across those categories as well. The association’s efforts to expose members to manufacturing technology in Europe have similarly demonstrated how automation and offsite construction can reshape production.

The recent People’s Choice selections suggest that CMs recognize a significant opportunity in what occurs among physical manufacturing processes: how information is captured, interpreted, transferred, and used. The machinery on the fabrication floor has become increasingly sophisticated. The next opportunity may be in making the information flowing through those plants equally advanced.

Keep Looking for the Better Way

The most important lesson from the SBCA Innovation Grant may be that innovation doesn’t have to begin with a revolutionary invention, but with a frustrating task, an inefficient handoff, a repetitive process, or the simple question, “Why are we still doing it this way?”

Crowdbuild illustrates that progression. The technology behind the company reflects nearly a decade of development, while CB Quote builds upon ideas Crowdbuild brought to the Innovation Grant just two years ago.

The lesson for the rest of the industry is straightforward: Pay attention to the problems your employees solve every day. Listen to your customers. Talk with your peers. Look outside the industry for technologies that might be adapted to component manufacturing. Experiment. Measure the results. Share what works. Most importantly, keep asking whether there is a better way.