Nine Procore and OpenSpace insiders speak on-floor at the 2023 Canadian Concrete Expo — on the generational gap, the SMB timing problem, and the single ROI story that converts a grizzled site super faster than any demo.
Most software panels talk about adoption in the abstract. This one was recorded in the booth. At the fifth annual Canadian Concrete Expo — held at the International Centre on Airport Road, just west of Toronto — ACP host Daniel Arsenault pulled nine people off the floor for short, unfiltered conversations: Procore marketing, sales, and customer-success staff, an OpenSpace account executive, and a business analyst from Toronto GC Urbacon who had spent five years managing exactly the problem everyone else was selling a solution to.
The through-line across all nine interviews is the same: digital tools for construction are genuinely useful, but getting them off the vendor floor and onto a real job site runs straight into a human problem that no feature set solves on its own. Here's what you take away from the hour.
The industry event as a levelling mechanism
Ali Halak, who works directly with GCs and subcontractors on concrete for Procore, opened the episode by naming what a trade show is actually good for. It isn't just leads. Events like this one, he said, “really come in really level set in terms of what's Happening across the industry for Trends not just technology specific.” GCs, specialty subs, suppliers, and tech vendors share the same floor for two days. That compressed information exchange matters because the industry is fragmented by firm size, geography, and specialization — and a lot of knowledge that circulates in enterprise GC circles never reaches the $5M specialty sub.
Halak also flagged that Procore is building its own SMB-focused networking chapters across Canada, a move that acknowledges the same gap from the vendor side: if the people who most need the platform aren't at the big industry events, you bring the event to them.
Simple surface, complex underneath
Jason Kokolakis from OpenSpace made the clearest product argument of the episode. OpenSpace puts a 360-degree camera on a hardhat and passively documents the job site as the wearer walks — no additional steps, no dedicated survey crew. The AI backbone that stitches footage to floor plans and enables side-by-side comparisons is sophisticated. The MIT Media Lab researchers who founded the company in 2017 built the core computer vision during their doctoral work, and the MIT origins of the platform are documented and verified.
But Kokolakis’s pitch wasn't about the AI. It was about what the user actually sees. “the UI so what the users what our clients are interacting with is really simple to navigate and use,” he said. For concrete specifically, the comparison tool is concrete: “compare job site passed to present and really see the progress side by side uh really cool to see for concrete you know free poor post poor.” Pre-pour versus post-pour documentation, viewable remotely, without asking anyone on site to do extra work. The complexity stays under the hood.
That design decision is a principle, not an accident. Construction software that presents complexity to field users doesn’t get used. The platforms that stick are the ones where the hardest part happens automatically.
The $5M–$20M window
Cadman Turner, an executive sales rep who relocated from Australia to sell in Western Ontario, laid out Procore’s SMB logic precisely. The contractors who most need to get off spreadsheets and disconnected tools are often the ones who haven’t yet decided they need to. Turner’s job at the $5M–$20M revenue band is partly education and partly urgency creation.
The urgency argument is real. “getting into the businesses getting involved with procore early like when you are at like the 5 10 million like 20 million marks we have that Foundation,” he said — and the implicit flip side is what happens if you don’t. The episode surfaces this directly: “what happens when you start doing 30 40 million right yeah does that software keep up.” At $35M, migrating off a cobbled-together system mid-growth is painful and expensive. The platform you should have bought at $10M now costs multiples more to adopt under pressure. The pitch to a smaller contractor isn’t that Procore is for big GCs. It’s that getting on an enterprise-grade platform now avoids a migration you won’t want to run later.
The change-management tax
Omer Younus, a business analyst at Urbacon for five years, brought the operator perspective. Urbacon uses Procore across its projects — design-build, general contracting, construction management — and Younus manages what happens after the software decision is made. That’s a distinct problem from buying the software.
The generational gap he described isn’t a complaint about older tradespeople. It’s a structural reality: “from clipboards and I'm just telling you what to do the knowledge is all up in my head yeah to you know I gotta sign into here.” Decades of tribal knowledge encoded in one person’s head, now expected to migrate into an integrated platform with a user account. The resistance isn’t stubbornness. It’s a real cost in cognitive overhead and habit disruption.
His prescription was direct: front-load the setup investment instead of fighting it. “it may be 30 minutes of work now but you're saving hours down the line.” That framing — stating the time trade explicitly, not as a vague future benefit but as a concrete swap — is what actually moves people. The operators who present software adoption as a long-term investment and then hand the user a login without context are the ones who see the platform sit unused.
The ROI story beats the demo every time
The episode’s best material came from Thomas Del Orario, a former site superintendent who became an OpenSpace sales rep. He was the reluctant camera-on-head guy first: he wore the device on his own sites before he sold it. What converted him wasn’t the product pitch from a vendor — it was a water-damage claim.
Documented 360-degree footage of the site before the water event gave him the evidence he needed to close the claim cleanly. The financial payoff was immediate and unambiguous. He described “getting texts saying hey you know has ended up saving me uh you know maybe three or four K on rework costs” — messages from supers who’d seen the same thing happen on their own projects after he’d convinced them to try it.
That’s the mechanism: not features, not a product roadmap, not a case study from a contractor in another province. A concrete dollar figure, in a text from someone the prospect knows, attached to a problem the prospect has had. Del Orario’s field background is what gets him into that conversation at all. “I understand the pain points of building and construction and I think that does help.” An office-only rep can describe the problem. A former site super has lived it, and that’s a different kind of credibility with a grizzled sub.
“I've built a personal relationship with those guys and we're relatable to them as well yeah,” he said. The technology doesn’t close the sale. The relationship makes the close possible; the ROI story does the work.
What the inside of a vendor booth actually looks like
Arabi Siva, Procore’s Canada marketing lead, and Kimberly Corlett, field marketing manager, filled in the texture of what it takes to run an event presence at this scale. Procore was the title sponsor of the Canadian Concrete Expo, and the footprint — the booth setup, the coordinated team of seven, the cross-functional scheduling — was significant.
Corlett brought eight years of field and construction background before she moved into tech marketing, and that experience read directly in how she talked about the job. For Siva, the measure of success was less about impressions than about what she heard on the floor: the moment a customer says they love the platform is the moment the marketing investment pays off. It’s a customer-success signal wearing a marketing hat.
Brianne Price, hired during the pandemic and fully remote for nine months before meeting her colleagues, described Procore’s culture from the perspective of an outsider who became a believer: she joined with no construction background and was won over by the mission. That’s a meaningful recruiting signal for a company that needs to convince construction lifers to take it seriously.
The businesses behind the conversation
Procore Technologies (NYSE: PCOR) is the platform at the centre of this episode — a publicly traded, cloud-based construction management system connecting owners, GCs, and specialty contractors across the project lifecycle, from preconstruction and financials to quality, safety, and resource management. For Canadian contractors evaluating platforms at any revenue level, the place to start is procore.com.
OpenSpace.ai is the 360-degree documentation tool described across two interviews here. Hardhat-mounted cameras, AI-driven floor-plan mapping, pre/post comparison — built by MIT Media Lab graduates and designed to be used by people who don’t have time to think about software. More at openspace.ai.
Two long-standing ACP sponsors were also featured at the top and close of this episode. Payzant Building Products is an Atlantic Canada building-materials retailer and contractor supply operation running under the Home Hardware Building Centre banner across the Halifax region and Hants County. FCA Insurance / FCA Surety is a Canadian insurance brokerage whose surety division places bid, performance, and labour-and-material payment bonds for contractors across the country.
The line that doesn’t change
Every interview in this episode circles the same obstacle: the technology works, the ROI is real, and the field doesn’t trust either claim until someone with dirt on their boots says so. The fastest path to adoption isn’t a better UI or a bigger booth. It’s a former super with a documented story, standing next to a skeptic, saying this is what it saved me. The chasm this episode is really about isn’t between enterprise and SMB. It’s between a sales pitch and a person.
Episode 42 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, recorded live at the 5th Annual Canadian Concrete Expo, International Centre, Toronto, February 2023. Guests: Ali Halak, Jason Kokolakis, Arabi Siva, Omer Younus, Cadman Turner, Aaron Shean, Brianne Price, Kimberly Corlett, Thomas Del Orario. Watch the full episode. OpenSpace MIT origins verified: MIT News, Oct 2020. Venue confirmed: The International Centre.