At PropTech Connect Middle East, a senior construction panel made one thing clear: technology is no longer the hard part of transforming mega-project delivery. The real challenge lies in mindset, process, and alignment across a fragmented ecosystem.
Moderated by Leyla Abdimomunova, head of Real Estate & Construction at the Public Investment Fund, the session brought together delivery and digital leaders from across the region’s development and contracting landscape to unpack what it truly takes to scale innovation on giga-projects.
The panellists were Roger Fatovic, group chief projects delivery officer at ROSHN; Fady Sleiman, group chief information & digital officer at Albawani Holding; and Zakria Osman, corporate engineering lead at El Seif Contracting.
Opening the discussion, Abdimomunova challenged a common industry blind spot: construction talks endlessly about innovation, but adoption is where strategies usually fail.
For ROSHN, Fatovic said the motivation is not novelty, but necessity. “Scale, productivity and certainty,” he said, describing the three forces driving the developer’s technology agenda as it delivers thousands of homes across Saudi Arabia.
Sleiman echoed that sentiment from the contractor side, pointing instead to “optimisation, digitisation and data,” and the need for a single source of truth. Osman framed the driver more broadly as sustainability, digital transformation and smart solutions.
Across the panel, there was consensus that technology must serve clearly defined business outcomes, not act as a standalone objective.
From pilots to productivity
Fatovic outlined how ROSHN is deploying tools across the full project lifecycle, from AI-assisted document review during design and procurement to modern methods of construction on site. While precast remains a relatively traditional solution, he said the difference lies in scale.
ROSHN has partnered with China Harbour to build one of the Middle East’s largest precast factories in Riyadh, producing tens of thousands of panels and hundreds of columns each month. The ambition, however, goes beyond prefabrication. Fatovic stressed that testing, iteration and repeatability are central to achieving productivity gains.
At Albawani, Sleiman described a more foundational challenge. When he joined the company, he was struck by how little digital hardware was visible on active sites. Rather than rushing into platform selection, the company paused.
“We don’t want to just put a system in for the sake of putting a system,” he said, explaining that Albawani is redesigning core business processes and standard operating procedures before committing to large-scale construction management platforms.
That approach has already delivered tangible results in areas such as overtime management, where simple tablet-based tools helped address millions of riyals in monthly overruns. The company is also exploring real-time location systems and vision-based technologies, while acknowledging their current limitations.
El Seif’s experience offered a different perspective: what sustained commitment looks like over time. Osman traced the company’s digital journey back to 2019, when leadership set a clear objective to move from traditional to digital construction through an end-to-end transformation.
Rather than isolating innovation within engineering or IT, El Seif developed a roadmap covering every department, from tendering and procurement to construction and handover. BIM certification in 2020 marked a turning point, enabling company-wide alignment with international standards.
From there, the company expanded into prefabrication, robotics for tasks such as plastering, drone-based surveying and fully digital RFI workflows. Crucially, Osman said, no department was allowed to operate digitally in isolation while others remained analogue.
Why scaling still breaks down
Despite progress, scaling innovation remains difficult. For developers like ROSHN, cost structures can work against modern methods. Fatovic argued that years spent optimising traditional supply chains have distorted comparisons with MMC, especially when master purchase agreements are already delivering aggressive pricing.
But he identified a deeper issue. “Technology doesn’t fail because it doesn’t work. It fails because the ecosystem around it doesn’t change,” he said, pointing to examples where broken processes were simply digitised, or where MMC was introduced without standardising designs or addressing local regulations.
Sleiman expanded on that theme, framing transformation through four lenses: people, process, technology and data. Culture and capability, he argued, are the most underestimated risks.
“You’ve got people that have been working 20 years in construction in the same company,” he said. “It’s most likely they’re not the ones that are going to do a solid business process re-engineering exercise.”
To address delivery risk on mega-projects, Albawani is now evaluating advanced work packaging, a method borrowed from oil and gas that links modular construction to the critical path and improves coordination across subcontractors.
Osman highlighted the importance, and complexity, of owner–contractor relationships in driving technology adoption. Early engagement during concept design can unlock significant value, but resistance often emerges when innovation is perceived as risk or cost-shifting.
To overcome this, El Seif often pilots new technologies on its own projects, including its headquarters, before presenting data-backed results to clients. That track record has helped build trust, particularly on giga-projects aligned with Vision 2030.
Looking ahead, Osman argued that regulation has a decisive role to play. Drawing parallels with Dubai’s 2014 BIM mandate, he said markets often need to be pushed before benefits become obvious.
“Sometimes you need to force the people to go in this way,” he said, noting that once standards become mandatory, few stakeholders want to revert to old methods.
Mindset before machinery
As the session closed, the panel converged on a shared conclusion. Scaling construction technology is less about discovering new tools and more about changing what the industry values.
From Fatovic’s call to reward certainty and quality over lowest cost, to Sleiman’s emphasis on collaboration and standardised technology stacks, and Osman’s case for regulatory leadership, the message was consistent.
Industrialising construction at scale will require aligned incentives, disciplined processes, and leadership willing to rethink how success is measured. The technology, the panellists suggested, is already waiting.
Read: GCC construction salaries to rise modestly in 2026: FPA
