ABC's Hensel Phelps Diverge partnership puts field tests ahead of vendor demos

Associated Builders and Contractors now has access to a test bench run by a contractor. On Oct. 15, 2026, Hensel Phelps formally named the trade group an official partner of its Diverge Innovation Center in Arizona. Members of ABC's Construction Technology and Innovation Committee attended the recognition, which Construction Executive reported on Oct. 21.

The ceremony itself was small. What it connects ABC to is bigger. Diverge exists to work out which construction tools hold up on a real jobsite. As a partner, ABC can pass those results to merit-shop contractors, including firms in North and South Carolina, before they commit crews and capital to a pilot.

ABC Carolinas published its read for members on Nov. 9. It says advanced construction technologies are increasingly being adopted in both states, driven partly by the industry's modernization amid population growth. It put the practical question this way: which tools are moving from demonstration to deployment, and how should contractors judge them without chasing hype?

Inside Hensel Phelps' tool filter

Diverge is Hensel Phelps' innovation and corporate venture arm. It is both a building and a pipeline. Ideas come in from startups, universities and the contractor's own R&D. They get tested in controlled pilots, then on active jobsites, and they scale only if they show measurable gains in safety, quality and schedule performance. ABC Carolinas says the Diverge Innovation Center opened in Phoenix in September 2025. It describes the center as being in Scottsdale, Arizona, where ABC was inducted as an official partner on October 15, 2026.

The test conditions are the point. A tool that looks sharp on a demo floor still has to get through weather, crew rotation, tight schedules and site safety rules. The center hosts demonstrations and pilots for robotics, advanced equipment integrations and drones. Each is judged against real construction workflows, not in a lab.

Contractor feedback drives the filter. Diverge links startups and technology providers to feedback loops led by contractors, and it weighs constructability along with safety and schedule. That applies to a purchase many firms already make. ABC Carolinas notes that many contractors are turning to AI-driven project management software to get more out of scheduling and productivity. According to the group, the partnership lets those choices rest on results from contractor-led testing instead of vendor marketing alone.

ABC's committee has made visits like this since 2021. It went to Autodesk in 2023, JLG in 2024 and Meta in 2025. Those trips showed what software, equipment and tech companies are building. The 2026 stop offers a different kind of evidence: what a builder decided was worth keeping after its own crews used it.

ABC Carolinas describes the arrangement in merit-shop terms: technology providers compete openly, tools are judged on performance, and firms of every size get an equal chance to learn from solutions that have proven themselves. For a mid-size Carolinas subcontractor without its own innovation arm, that last principle is probably the most important. Such a firm can read the results of a structured pipeline without building one. The group argues that validated results help firms bidding complex work, where clients demand digital accountability, with competitiveness, workforce attraction and client confidence.

Long backlogs, thinner margins in the Carolinas

The partnership lands in a market where work is plentiful and profit is less certain. GroundBreak Carolinas, summarizing October's economic data, reported that ABC's Construction Backlog Indicator rose to 8.7 months in September. More than one-quarter of contractors expect their profit margins to fall over the next six months.

A contractor with 8.7 months of work booked has time to pilot a drone program; one expecting thinner margins has less room to pay for a program that only worked in the demo. That is why a filter run on a contractor's jobsites matters more this year than a polished vendor presentation.

The backlog split also tests the argument. Contractors on data center work carry about three more months of backlog than everyone else, by simple subtraction of the two figures. In North Carolina alone, ABC Carolinas counted roughly 3,975 MW of data center capacity planned against about 509 MW operating in its September analysis. Many of the 2026 and 2027 campuses are designed in the 200 MW to 400 MW range.

Spending is climbing faster still. Citing Construction Executive's October 2026 Economic Overview, GroundBreak says data center spending rose 7.5% in August and more than 70% over the preceding twelve months, an annualized pace of roughly 149% since March. Data centers also accounted for much of the fifth straight monthly increase in nonresidential construction spending.

Those firms are working compressed, trade-stacked schedules on buildings held to Tier 3 uptime standards. ABC Carolinas says that puts redundancy expectations closer to hospitals or power plants than to typical commercial facilities, and rework is not tolerated. A tool proven on a Hensel Phelps job in Arizona may need retesting with a Carolinas specialty subcontractor's crew before it earns a full rollout. ABC Carolinas treats that translation to local markets as its own step.

The cost lines in the grid help explain why full order books are not producing confident margins. Input prices rose 2.2% in September alone, and tariff-sensitive materials, including steel and copper wire and cable, stayed under price pressure. GroundBreak flags electrical-intensive projects as especially vulnerable because they depend on copper, switchgear and transformers. That suggests the contractors with the longest data center backlogs are also the most exposed to rising costs.

Labor tightens the squeeze. In ABC Carolinas' analysis of BLS data, construction unemployment rose to 4.1% in May from 3.5% a year earlier, yet skilled craft workers, foremen and site leadership remain hard to find in most Carolinas markets. ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu warned that rate hikes look likelier than cuts. Tighter financing would make capital spent on a failed pilot harder to recover, which raises the value of evidence gathered before the spend.

Drones, robots and cameras under test

ABC Carolinas says robotics and automation are being put to work to offset labor shortages. Humanoid robots handle repetitive work. Autonomous material-handling robots move loads around a site, which reduces manual-handling risk and makes material staging more consistent. The stated goal is to move people out of physically demanding tasks and into supervision and quality roles.

Teleoperated machines let a worker do hazardous tasks, such as energized electrical work, from a safe distance. That group could matter most on data center campuses, where ABC Carolinas' safety analysis lists high-capacity electrical distribution and redundant UPS and generator systems among the scopes that set those jobs apart from typical commercial builds.

Drones come with the hardest numbers. ABC Carolinas cites a projected $19 billion global construction drone market by 2032 and says 35% of companies using drones work in construction and engineering. The jobs they are tested against are specific: 2D maps and 3D models for as-built documentation, stockpile volume reconciliation, inspections of elevated work and unstable structures, and tracking equipment on large sites.

Speed accounts for most of the claimed benefits. ABC Carolinas says drones can shorten timelines because they make inspections, progress monitoring and site planning faster, and they deliver visual updates to project teams more quickly than traditional methods. They also capture real-time footage of incidents for safety analysis, while equipment tracking helps with asset management and reduces downtime. The standard platform is shifting to multirotor drones with longer flight times. A time claim can be tested against the old method on the same job, and that is exactly the purpose of a field pilot.

AI tools complete the list. They include cost prediction for material and labor and real-time video analytics that flag missing PPE and site intrusions. Each category produces an output a field test can check: a stockpile volume that does or does not match the survey, a PPE alert that does or does not fire on the right worker. Diverge's case studies are useful for exactly that reason.

Questions before a Carolinas pilot starts

Diverge results can tell a contractor which categories have held up somewhere else. The local pilot is still the contractor's job. Three questions follow from the reporting:

1. Which measure decides it? Diverge scales tools on safety, quality and schedule performance. A local pilot should name its measure before the first flight or the first robot shift.
2. Who carries the risk if the work is outsourced? ABC Ohio Valley's October checklist on FAA drone rulemaking and drone vendor contracts points out that hiring out drone surveying or progress monitoring, which is common on commercial jobs, does not hand off the business risk.
3. Which crew absorbs the learning curve? Specialty trades are doing most of the hiring. Nonresidential specialty trade contractors added about 11,400 of the industry's 17,000 net new jobs in May, and GroundBreak says September hiring was again concentrated there. The pilot plan should show whose hours it uses.

South Carolina's two-agency check on 1099 specialists

The Ohio Valley checklist deals with outsourced drone vendors. South Carolina adds a separate check when outsourced pilot work depends on one individual specialist paid on a 1099, such as a freelance drone operator. The state uses a common-law right-to-control test, not the stricter "ABC test" (no relation to the trade group). But two agencies apply it differently, according to a worker-classification guide from Teamed.

The Department of Employment and Workforce uses a 20-factor analysis for unemployment tax. The Workers' Compensation Commission uses its own four-factor test: right or exercise of control, furnishing of equipment, method of payment and the right to fire. A worker can pass one and fail the other. Add the IRS common-law test for federal payroll tax and the FLSA economic-reality test for overtime, and one hire faces four tests.

Those factors line up closely with how a technology pilot is usually run. If the contractor supplies the drone or robot, the commission's equipment factor would lean toward employment. Teamed says behavioral control carries the most weight in the DEW analysis, and its factors include set hours and setting the order or sequence of work. A pilot plan that dictates when and in what sequence a specialist flies would push those factors the same way.

South Carolina has no civil penalty for misclassification. A 2013-2014 proposal, Bill 5221, would have set fines of $1,000 to $5,000 per misclassified worker, but it did not pass. The bill instead comes as back unemployment tax with interest, back federal payroll taxes, back state withholding and doubled FLSA overtime.

North Carolina has a clearinghouse that sends complaints to every agency at once. South Carolina has no equivalent body. A workers' comp claim after an injury and an unemployment audit after the job ends can each open on its own, and Teamed says the injury claim often comes first. On a pilot built around hazardous inspections, that sequence is reason enough to put the classification decision in the pilot plan itself.

The next thing to watch is ABC's own output: the field-tested case studies ABC Carolinas says the partnership opens to members. Once those reach Carolinas contractors, they will have evidence from a builder's jobsite to set beside each vendor's pitch.