World of Concrete 2027: What to Ask About Jobsite Monitoring

World of Concrete 2027 runs January 19–21, 2027 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with education sessions from January 18. It draws around 60,000 industry professionals and 1,500 exhibitors, and it is the only annual international show dedicated to commercial concrete and masonry. Confirm exact hours and registration with the organiser — show details move.

The jobsite technology floor has grown every year, and a meaningful slice of it is now cameras. If you are walking it with site security or site documentation in mind, here is what actually separates the vendors worth a follow-up call.

1. "How does it get power on week one?"

This is the question that ends most conversations quickly, and it should be your first. A camera system that needs mains power and a network drop is useless during the phase when a site is most exposed — before the building is closed in, before the temporary power is distributed, when the compound is a gate and a container.

Follow it with: what happens after four overcast days in January? Correct solar sizing is done against the worst multi-day run in the darkest month at your latitude, not against an annual average. If the answer is a single generic figure with no reference to where the site is, they have not done the calculation.

2. "How does it get to site, and what does moving it cost?"

Most mobile surveillance in this category is trailer-mounted: a road chassis, a mast, ballast to hold the mast up. It works, and it means a truck, a hitch, a licensed driver, and a parking footprint on a site that may not have one to spare.

Ask specifically what repositioning costs — not the monthly rate, the cost of moving it in month three when the work has moved. On a job that changes shape every fortnight, a unit that needs a truck booked tends to stay where it was first parked and slowly stops being useful. We have written up the tripod-versus-trailer trade in detail, including the jobs where the trailer is genuinely the right answer.

3. "What does it do about false alerts?"

Every vendor on the floor will tell you their AI reduces false alarms. The useful follow-up is mechanical: what happens when a spider builds a web across the housing, when the IR illuminator pulls in insects, when headlights sweep the frame, when it rains?

A vendor who answers that well will talk about illuminator placement, exposure behaviour and detection persistence. One who answers it by describing their model is telling you they have not spent much time on sites. Most night-time false alerting is physical, not algorithmic — and the fix usually costs nothing.

4. "What's the contract, and what happens at the end of it?"

This category runs on multi-year agreements, frequently three to five years, sometimes with hardware that only works with that vendor's platform. On a two-year job that is a genuine mismatch worth surfacing in the aisle rather than in procurement.

• How long is the minimum term, and what happens if the job finishes early?
• Can the units follow us to the next project, and at what cost?
• If we leave, is the hardware usable with anything else?
• Can we export our own footage and event history?

What we would want you to look at

We build solar-powered analytics units light enough for one person to site — no chassis, no ballast, no truck — that ship internationally as ordinary freight and cost under $1,000 per unit per month. They run on cameras you already own too, which matters if you have an existing system on the compound.

On active sites the questions we get asked most are deliveries and standby time, trade headcount by day, PPE and work at height, and who was inside the fence after hours. If any of those are the two things you actually need to know about, tell us about the site and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right answer.