Streamlining construction with AI

Information moves fast on complex construction sites, and hundreds of small decisions are made daily. But without expert care, these critical details can easily be lost in translation. For Alex Park, B.S. construction engineering management '18, founder of the construction AI company DAERO, the gap between the field and management isn’t just a nuisance; it’s an opportunity to solve one of the industry’s biggest problems.

“Most job‑site challenges aren’t about how to build,” Park said. “They’re about communicating real, accurate data from the field.”

Park founded DAERO with the vision that construction works best when the people closest to the work are supported, not burdened, by technology. Rather than forcing tradespeople to adapt to office-focused software, DAERO’s tools meet them where they are — on their phones, using photos, voice, and text the way they do in their everyday lives.

Fixing a broken data flow

Throughout his early career, Park saw the same issue repeat itself across every project he worked. Whether it was a sports arena, hotel, or historic theater, the challenge was never a lack of technical know‑how. It was translation.

“The farther you get from the field, the more dependent you are on data, but the less accurate the data becomes,” he said.

Traditional construction software is typically designed with dashboards, forms, and dropdown menus — interfaces familiar to office staff but not necessarily as widely used by workers in the field. As a result, critical and dynamic details about project tasks — such as safety reporting, QA/QC inspections, and daily logs — can be generalized or missed as they move from the field to the office.

DAERO’s first product, Zero Punch, flips that model on its head. The platform acts as a digital apprentice, capturing unstructured inputs — photos, voice commands, informal notes — and uses AI to extract relevant information. With ZP, tradespeople don’t have to label, sort, or format the data. It’s the first app to democratize AI among construction tradespeople.

“They simply document their work the way they already do,” Park said. “That’s the crux of ZP.”

The result is higher‑quality documentation, faster reporting, and quicker resolutions — without adding an extra administrative burden to the workday.

Built by someone who lived the problem

DAERO’s credibility comes directly from Park’s professional experience. Before founding the company, he worked as a project manager on various major projects at Mortenson, a Minneapolis-based national construction and development company, including a semiconductor plant and a solar farm.

“You would think these projects are completely different,” he said. “But across the board, our challenges were rooted in the same problem.”

Park’s work history helped him understand that a solution would need to be addressed at an input level, by tradespeople in the field. “Investors have a term for this understanding: founder–market fit,” Park said. “It isn’t a fabricated solution — it comes from lived experience.”

He says most AI solutions repackage existing data to support managers with data retrieval, matching, and low-intelligence synthesis. The problem is that AI models’ performance can only be as good as the data they’re fed. ZP is reenvisioning the construction data landscape by letting those who hold decades of institutional knowledge and intuition define the data they collect.

Today, DAERO is experiencing exponential growth across the construction industry, in both adoption and revenue. The company’s approach is consistent: value is created across the entire construction ecosystem from the ground up by breaking the technology barrier for those doing the work.

Leadership before entrepreneurship at Oregon State

Long before founding DAERO, Park’s leadership skills were taking shape at Oregon State and later at MIT, where he was working toward an MBA before leaving the program after getting significant backing for his company from a prominent VC firm.

While Oregon State prepared him technically for the industry, he credits his development outside the classroom as equally formative.

“At Oregon State, there were always opportunities to reach for more,” he said.

As a student, Park immersed himself in leadership roles, industry partnerships, and service projects. As president of the Associated General Contractors student chapter, he helped organize a service trip to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, raising tens of thousands of dollars, coordinating volunteers, and making a positive impact on others far from campus.

“That leadership muscle was built early,” Park said. “It taught me to jump at opportunities — and to expect to fail sometimes.”

Advice for the next generation

Park, who serves on the Civil and Construction Engineering Industry Advisory Board, also offers advice to students and recent graduates who hope to start companies someday.

“You have to be patient and put in the time,” he said. “You can’t fake it.”

To Park, that means learning about industry, identifying real problems, and honing the discipline to lead before trying to innovate. OSU, he believes, is an ideal place to build those strong foundations.