Why AI investment is outpacing the governance to defend it
Construction and real estate boards are signing off on AI investments at above-average rates. What has not followed is the policy, oversight and capability to make that investment perform. This is the AI proof gap.
Grant Thornton’s 2026 AI Impact Survey of business leaders explains why that gap exists and what firms need to do to move from board-approved investment to defensible, measurable performance.
The foundation hasn’t caught up with the ambition
Construction and real estate leaders are bought in on AI. Seventy-nine percent of boards have already approved major AI investments, above the cross-industry average. What is lagging is the foundation: the governance frameworks and workforce capability needed to turn that investment into performance.
The challenge is compounded by the sector's complexity. There is no standard AI playbook for an industry that differs significantly across asset classes, ownership structures and business models. What works in a general contractor does not translate to a REIT. Leaders are still working out where it creates value in their specific operation.
That is where the proof gap opens. The firms that close it will be the ones that define where AI applies in their business first, build the infrastructure to support it, and measure whether it delivers.
Investment approved. Governance pending
The approval seems to be coming before the infrastructure: boards are among the most active approvers of AI investment in the survey, but below average at establishing governance policies. This suggests that board conversations tend to stay at the investment and curiosity stage: what tools exist, where to begin and what peers are doing.
The consequence shows up in CRE’s position on the maturity curve. Half of respondents are still piloting AI in selective use cases; only 4% describe it as fully integrated into operations, against 14% across the full survey. That carries a potential performance cost as organizations with fully integrated AI are nearly four times more likely to report AI-enabled revenue growth than those still piloting (58% versus 15%).
Only 13% of CRE respondents are very confident they could pass an independent AI governance audit within 90 days, compared to 22% across the full survey. Seventy-two percent are somewhat confident controls exist but evidence is fragmented across teams and tools.
What that maturity gap reflects, in practice, is a sector deploying AI into environments that were not built to support it. Many vendors are embedding AI into products organizations already use, often without anyone internally owning oversight of what those tools do or how they perform. Data sits in fragmented systems across asset classes with no consistent definitions underneath.
Only 9% have a tested AI incident response playbook, less than half the full-sample rate of 20%. In a sector where the network is tight and reputation travels, the cost of a misstep without a plan to contain it is real. Every investment made without addressing this adds to the exposure and sets the conditions for a capability gap.
AI coherence is the new enterprise performance gap
The governance gap described above has a potential explanation in the data: the sector has not yet deployed AI at the scale where governance becomes the constraint.
Competitor moves are the top external pressure driving adoption, cited by 40% of respondents, but the sector is moving on that pressure without the foundations to act on it well.
Insufficient training is the leading cause of AI underperformance in CRE, cited by 41% of respondents against 31% across the full survey. Governance and compliance barriers, by contrast, rank second but the figures here are actually below the full-sample rate (39% versus 46%).
Nearly half of CRE leaders say they need more external knowledge about AI capabilities, eight points above the full-survey rate. Talent enablement and upskilling is the second-most cited need, 11 points above the full sample. The sector is still asking what AI can do rather than how to govern what it is doing.
That question is harder to answer in CRE than in most sectors. A general contractor optimizing project scheduling is solving a different problem than a REIT using AI to model asset valuations.
There is no deployment that travels cleanly from one asset class to the next. Until organizations define the specific problems AI should solve in their context, training programs and governance frameworks built on top of that uncertainty will underperform regardless of how well designed they are. The governance infrastructure CRE is starting to build will only hold if the capability underneath it is sound.
“AI comes up in every board meeting now. Everybody is asking questions. But there is no killer app that works across this sector. What works in data centers is not what works in a high-rise office. The firms that get this right will be the ones that stop asking what AI can do and instead ask, where does AI fit in my business.”
Three actions to turn AI ambition into scalable success
The survey data clearly shows that organizations are building exposure faster than they are building control.
Every deployment made without governance adds risk. Every capability gap left unaddressed narrows the window to catch up with firms already moving. The distance between the organizations closing the proof gap and the ones still planning is already measurable.
These are the problems Grant Thornton works with construction and real estate firms to solve every day: building governance infrastructure around the AI already running in the stack, designing capability programs grounded in how businesses actually operate across asset classes, and helping leaders define where AI creates value in their specific context before committing to scale. The insights in this report reflect what we see and build in this sector.
A successful AI journey may begin with board approval and curiosity, but real value won’t be realized until firms can prove that deployments are understood, governed and delivering measurable returns.
Methodology
Between Feb. 23 and March 18, 2026, Grant Thornton surveyed 950 business leaders, a group restricted to CFOs, CIOs/CITOs, COOs, and VPs, department heads, and directors who report directly to the C-suite. The construction and real estate subgroup comprised 100 respondents.
Contact:
Head of Construction & Real Estate Industry
Grant Thornton Advisors LLC
Partner, Audit Services, Grant Thornton LLP
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