Construction Trends Report 2025

Coming off the back of what has been a relatively strong year for the construction industry, analysts are optimistic about what 2025 is set to bring.¹

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) has resulted in funding for numerous construction projects across the United States,² and we can expect to see investment in major infrastructure continue under the new government, with a particular focus on roads, pavements, bridges, utilities, and some housing. Data centers, to service the increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI), looks set to be another growth area for construction.³ Meanwhile, the incoming administration has promised significant regulatory reforms, which could streamline infrastructure project approvals, accelerate timelines, and reduce costs.

Elsewhere, the incoming administration has signaled a strong intent to support domestic industry. While this could mean more contract opportunities for US-based construction businesses and materials suppliers, it will also bring challenges for some in construction. Those reliant on global supply chains may be forced to reassess their sourcing at short notice, to be able to remain competitive.

Costs are also likely to come under increased pressure, while policy changes may see certain construction and infrastructure projects have their funding reduced, or be cancelled altogether. Programs relating to electric vehicle infrastructure could well be one example. And the aforementioned regulatory changes are likely to require construction businesses to shift their priorities and how they present themselves when competing for government contracts.

To succeed against this backdrop, sales and proposals leaders in construction businesses will need tools to boost their teams’ efficiency and agility, to ensure they can continue to win work as the policy and regulatory landscape develops.

If your business is built around global supply chains, it would be wise to start putting in place domestic alternatives.

Equip your teams with tools that combine online search with generative AI to research potential suppliers and partners and summarize key information.

The ability to answer multiple variants of the same question, using variables, is a particularly powerful time-saver when conducting supplier analysis.

Reach out to suitable businesses and gather information ahead of time so you can swiftly to pre-qualification questionnaires (PQQs) and RFPs.

Details of how the regulatory landscape will evolve are yet to
emerge. Changes may be sudden and significant, requiring fast and
fundamental shifts to the way you position your products and
services in proposals.

It’s essential that you monitor the situation closely. Check for updates on SAM.gov, Federal Register, Acquisition.gov, and other government procurement websites. Subscribe to alerts from the agencies relevant to your business, and attend events with acquisition teams. Equally importantly, develop relationships with key stakeholders, which can help your teams keep abreast of forthcoming changes.

As new government policies and priorities are announced, it’s essential that you’re able to tell a powerful and winning story around them.

Ensure your teams have sufficient time to develop these narratives and key statements, which are likely to be different from how you may have positioned your products and services in the past.

Once your messaging around any new or emerging government priorities is approved, make sure it’s available to anyone working on your proposals.

It pays to ensure your proposals and pursuits teams are proficient with the main e-procurement platforms that you’ll be using to submit proposals.

SAM.gov is the obvious one to start with if you’re competing for government projects, and there’s a range of publicly available training videos, user guides, and webinars on the Integrated Award Environment (IAE).¹¹

Vendors of commercial tools, such as the ones mentioned above, will typically have similar training sections on their websites as a starting point.

To get through initial rounds of computer-based assessment, it’s essential to fully understand all compliance requirements. You don’t want to inadvertently miss something that’s hiding in an appendix, for example.

Tools that can quickly shred RFP documents to pull out the requirements will be key, firstly to help you create a compliant proposal, and secondly to free up more of your writers’ time to focus on boosting the quality of your responses.

To optimize your proposals for automated and AI-driven evaluations, structure and readability are both essential.

AI evaluation tools often scan documents for keywords, phrases, and section names to assess the extent to which a document meets evaluation criteria. Ensure your response mirrors the RFP’s language, headings, numbering, and scoring criteria. Keep language clear and as jargon-free as possible to help NLP tools process your answers more easily. Where you need to include lots of data, present it in tables rather than embedding it in paragraphs of text.

Stick to fonts that will be simple for OCR technology to read — Arial is always a good bet. Keep formatting consistent when it comes to things like heading sizes and weights.

And if you’re including visuals in your proposals, incorporate meaningful alt text and metadata.

To compete successfully for work in highly secure sectors, your own security requirements need to be in order and aligned to frameworks such as the CMMC.

This includes any software as a service (SaaS) products you’re using for the preparation of proposal documents. Does the vendor offer its product from a truly secure environment? The sensitivity of the information the tools may be handling means you cannot afford to compromise here. The environment should offer technical controls and meet the compliance requirements for Department of Defense Impact Level 5 (IL5) — the highest level of security available without being classified as “Secret.” This is sometimes referred to as “FedRAMP High Equivalent.”

When selecting any tooling for use in proposal preparation, pick vendors that adhere to robust security and data protection standards.

Whether you’re competing for public or private sector work, the gold security standard to look for in a proposal-support tool is an Authority to Operate (ATO) designation, provided by a federal government agency. This demonstrates that the software has been validated by government officers and approved for use in federal systems. Achieving an ATO also means the software complies with CMMC 2.0.

Certification to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are also must-haves for any proposal-support software you procure.

Meet ever-greater requirements for detailed security and data protection information in your proposals without over-burdening your security subject matter experts.

Proposal support software that can intelligently surface relevant security details from past proposals and other organizational information, and then curate this into answers aligned to the RFP’s requirements, will enable your proposal team to produce good-quality first-draft answers. These can then be reviewed and refined by your security specialists, thereby making optimal use of their time.

And with security in mind, when using tools that incorporate generative AI, make sure your data is not being used to train or fine-tune the underlying large language models.

Your commercial proposal will form a significant part of buyers’ decisions — and is likely to grow in importance over the coming years.

If it isn’t already, then thorough cost and ROI analysis needs to become an integral part of your design process. This will help you price as competitively as possible while maintaining profitability.

Combine this with innovative technical and commercial approaches that help cut costs while preserving quality and performance.

With assessors looking for value, make sure your proposal clearly demonstrates how your solution will deliver against the criteria the RFP has set out. How will you ensure quality? What innovation will you bring to the contract? How does your technical expertise stand out? And how will all of this support the government’s wider agenda?

Strengthen your proposal by ensuring you quantify long-term value-add beyond initial costs. Factors such as efficiency gains, cost savings, and quality improvements will help you tell a compelling story, particularly where there’s a higher upfront price tag.

A powerful way to back up claims in your proposal is to showcase real-world examples — both related to your own organization and your competitors.

Make sure your organization is collecting data and documenting outcomes on live projects so that you can use this as proof of past performance in your proposals (more on this below).

Collect data on your competitors’ performance in similar contracts using publicly available information, such as the Government Accountability Office’s Bid Protests decisions.¹⁷

Look for tools that can search through project performance reports (both internal and publicly available), proposals, and other sources of information, and then help highlight your strengths and competitors’ weaknesses. Better still is software capable of aligning these findings with the questions posed in the RFP you’re responding to.

Those creating your designs will require access to suitable analytics tooling that can support accurate forecasting of project plans, risks, and outcomes.

If you’ve already invested in data tooling elsewhere in your business, it makes sense to extend this to your proposal team. Make sure you embed data-collection and reporting tools into every part of your project lifecycles, and make the insights available internally for use in future proposals to support more accurate planning and forecasting.

Embedding a more data-driven approach to the way you design construction projects and produce proposals will likely mean upskilling your proposals and presales teams.

Engineers will need to be able to use the tools to model and predict how their designs will perform, and how this will impact project and organizational KPIs.

Proposal writers and managers will need to become confident at interpreting forecasts and other data, and layering them into your proposals. Larger organizations may opt to have a dedicated data analyst on their proposal team for this purpose.

It should become standard practice to back up any performance or benefit claim in a proposal using data.

If your solution promises to save the client money, quantify this, and provide the underlying numbers to substantiate it, should an assessor wish to validate your claim.

This means ensuring your proposal writers have access to tools that can easily surface relevant data. This could be from project forecasts, past performance reports, or historical proposals.

Traditional 1970s methodologies follow a rigid, sequential process where each stage has to be completed before moving on to the next. This linear approach makes it difficult to adapt to changes once the process is underway.

In contrast, Parallel Proposal Development allows for modifications at various stages of the process. Teams can adapt their strategies and proposals based on real-time customer data and feedback without needing to restart or significantly backtrack, thereby increasing the relevance and potential success of the proposal.

Sequential methodologies typically lack mechanisms for continuous refinement once a stage is completed. Feedback often comes too late in the process to be effectively integrated.

Parallel Proposal Development incorporates continuous feedback loops, allowing for real-time adjustments. This ongoing refinement process not only enhances the quality of the proposal but also ensures that the final product is highly optimized and aligned with current market demands.

In the 1970s methodologies, the completion of one phase is required before another can begin. This significantly lengthens the response time to market changes.

Agile-inspired parallel development operates under an iterative cycle that allows different phases to overlap and proceed concurrently. This not only speeds up the overall process but also enables organizations to respond more swiftly to opportunities and threats, providing a competitive edge in fast-paced markets.