Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

How Inflation, Experience Gaps, and AI Are Reshaping Education Construction and Cost Control

  • 03/23/26

Scott Creekmore, VP of Customer Engagement at Gordian, explains how Gordian evolved from Job Order Contracting into planning tools for facility condition assessments and asset recapture, plus estimating through RSMeans price data. He outlines major challenges facing education construction today: rapid inflation driven by geopolitics, an industry-wide experience gap as seasoned professionals retire without enough backfill, and resulting cost-control volatility where prices swing dramatically over short periods. Creekmore describes how advancing technology—especially AI—along with CMMS and cost-tracking software can help agencies do more with less by improving scope detail, reducing change orders, tracking labor on site, and enhancing cost benchmarking and predictive insights, including regional price differences. He also advocates for longer-term planning, economies of scale, and reexamining procurement laws and options such as cooperative purchasing and job order contracting to improve cost control.

00:00 Meet Scott and Gordian
00:22 Gordian Origins and Services
01:14 Industry Challenges Today
03:14 Tech Trends and AI Tools
05:11 AI for Better Scopes
07:42 Long Term Planning in Education
09:22 Smarter Procurement and Cost Control
10:05 Closing Thoughts

Additional resources:

Sponsored by Gordian

Featured

  • Indiana University Launches Capital Campus in D.C.

    Indiana University recently held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new IU Capital Campus in Washington, D.C., according to university news. The eight-story facility will provide a central hub for the university’s existing programs and business operations based in D.C., uniting them under one roof and providing the opportunity to expand.

  • Classical building columns display digital data streams

    The Campus Nervous System: Why Facilities Risk Is Now a Leadership Issue in Higher Education

    Facility performance now intersects with safety, compliance, on-campus experience, institutional reputation, and financial resilience. That places it firmly on the leadership agenda.

  • California High School Opens New Classroom Building for 7th-, 8th-Graders

    Santa Rosa City Schools in Santa Rosa, Calif., recently announced the completion of a new classroom building for Piner High School. As the campus transitions to a Junior/Senior High School, the facility will play home to the school’s new population of seventh- and eighth-grade students.

  • Designing for Every Mind

    Learning environments have the power to shape not just what students know, but who they become. When a school is designed with genuine empathy—for the full range of ways students think, sense, and engage with the world—it becomes more than a building. It becomes a catalyst for growth, confidence, and belonging. That is the animating idea behind neurodiverse design, and it is one that is transforming how more architects and designers are thinking about school design.