Despite advances in AI and digital tools, construction productivity remains stuck at 1 % growth a year. Vitalii Pelypkanych of INBICOM reveals why the future of construction depends not on adding more digital tools, but on connecting them intelligently.
Few industries have a more profound influence on modern life than engineering and construction. The homes we live in, the workplaces we build, and the infrastructure that links them together form the backbone of today’s economic and social reality. Almost every other sector relies on this foundation. Because nearly all value creation begins within, or is enabled by, the structures we construct.
Economically, the construction industry represents around 6 % of its systems, still relying on outdated processes. The U.S. construction sector has quietly crossed a turning point. Federal infrastructure funds are being allocated to projects that require not only speed but also transparent digital accountability, including emission tracking, waste reduction, and data-verified performance. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has encouraged contractors to adopt technologies such as BIM and LiDAR, while investors are starting to tie project financing to sustainability metrics.
The pressure is clear. It’s no longer enough to build fast; one must build intelligently. Vitalii Pelypkanych, a strategist whose cross‑continental career echoes the transformation now defining the industry. As Director of Strategic Development at INBICOM LLC (Florida, USA), and previously a leader at Ukraine’s EVERSCAN LLC, he has spent over fifteen years translating abstract innovation into construction logic. His trajectory isn’t a tale of global GDP. Environmentally, its footprint is even more striking. It is the world’s largest consumer of raw materials, and buildings and infrastructure together generate an estimated 25 to 40 % of total carbon emissions. In short, it is an industry that both builds modern life and bears a heavy share of responsibility for its sustainability.
Naturally, solid structures rise from blueprints, but innovation lags behind the dust of tradition. Engineers and executives alike are expected to deliver precision, despite personal success; it’s a snapshot of an industry undergoing digital transformation.
From Experiment to Industry Standard
Leadership in construction doesn’t just mean managing plans and procurements. It means decoding complexity. Vitalii calls his leadership model “structured autonomy”, a balance of clarity, trust, and motivation. He recalls, “Being a leader means giving people clarity and purpose. Innovation isn’t only about new tools; it’s about how people think. The hardest part was convincing people that technology isn’t replacing skill, it’s amplifying it. Data only becomes powerful when humans understand what it means.” So, his teams follow decision frameworks rooted in measurable principles: quality, timing, efficiency, and profitability. However, inside that structure, autonomy is encouraged. The goal is not control but alignment.
The industry’s current obsession with digital twins and automation echoes work Vitalii began years earlier at EVERSCAN (2020–2025). His team introduced LiDAR 3D scanning, terrestrial metrology, and BIM into daily workflows, technologies now entering mainstream policy frameworks. Back then, these were risky experiments. Now, they’re requirements in global tenders.
In Ukraine, his LiDAR‑based coal‑volume measurement project with DTEK, the nation’s largest energy company, became one of the clearest demonstrations of this system-level shift. The LiDAR equipment provided an accuracy of up to 2.5 cm, which corresponds to a 1:500 cartographic scale and is confirmed by control measurements. This initiative replaced manual surveying with digital mapping, eliminating almost all field-level hazards and dramatically accelerating data delivery – resulting in more than 80 % in overall efficiency. What had previously required at least two days of on-site work and post-processing was reduced to just 2.5 hours of digital cycle, setting a new benchmark for both safety and operational speed. What’s more, the project’s success prefigured the very safety‑productivity balance now being pursued globally.
At present, at INBICOM, he applies similar precision to strategic partnerships across the United States, using data platforms to assess supplier reliability, mitigate risk, and ensure regulatory compliance. His current initiative involves creating a digital framework for evaluating partners by transparent metrics, blending American ESG standards with European pragmatism. As digital tools track performance in real time, the alignment between promises and actions has never been clearer. This visibility is transforming decision‑making, replacing intuition with verifiable evidence. Nowadays, sustainability is not something organisations can simply claim; it must be demonstrated, measured, and continuously earned.
When Change Becomes a Measure of Progress
While construction headlines feature mega‑projects, Vitalii points to something less visible but far more transformative: the discipline of digital modelling. Since joining INBICOM, he has begun implementing BIM-based coordination practices and early-stage 3D planning workflows aimed at bringing long-needed structure to project execution. Instead of treating BIM as a visual add-on, he positions it as a decision-making tool – a single source of truth linking designers, engineers, suppliers, and field teams. Although these initiatives are still in their initial phase, the impact is evident – project teams operate with fewer ambiguities, design conflicts are identified earlier, and planning risks are reduced before they reach the construction site. In an industry where small errors scale into multi-million-dollar delays, this shift is significant. He says matter‑of‑factly, “We chose execution over exhibition. Strategy has to become behaviour, how people plan, negotiate, and collaborate daily.”
Colleagues describe his management style as engineering precision applied to culture. His teams operate under what he calls living blueprints – BIM-integrated workflows that process continually refined through feedback and data. The outcome is efficiency with empathy: projects are delivered faster, but with a human rhythm intact. Increasingly, industry peers view this model as a microcosm of the wider shift across the construction‑tech spectrum: less glamour, more governance. In a market now judged by ESG scores and digital transparency, reliable improvement often matters more than record‑breaking skyscrapers.
Learning Through Work, Not After It
Beyond figures and systems, Vitalii is preoccupied with people. His management trinity, clarity, confidence, and motivation, functions not as slogans but as daily architecture. He encourages what might be called operational learning habits. Teams document outcomes, analyse errors without penalty, and convert findings into reference models for future projects. The result: consistent skill transfer and surprisingly low turnover, rare in a high‑pressure industry.
From his perspective, mentorship transcends formal training. From Lviv Polytechnic’s 3D Technologies in Architecture and Construction conference to executive workshops in Florida, he advocates a model where knowledge moves horizontally, not hierarchically. He notes, “Innovation becomes culture only when people can share it laterally. Leadership must scale beyond one individual. Otherwise, every success dies upon completion.”
The Coming Decade of Digital Ethics
As smart cities grow into policy ambitions from Washington to Warsaw, Vitalii argues that their success will depend on how ethically technology is integrated. His forecast isn’t technological determinism, but technological accountability. Because we’re entering a stage where construction metrics must include environmental impact as naturally as they include cost or time. That is digital ethics, the new foundation of credibility.
Long‑term, he aims to make INBICOM LLC a hub for this shift, a model of strategic development where corporate profitability coexists with ecological restraint. Besides, his plans include nurturing a new generation of hybrid professionals: engineers fluent in business logic, managers conversant in data analytics. He believes the next revolution will come not from new machines, but from new mindsets connecting existing ones.
In 2025, construction finds itself at an industrial‑scale reckoning. With global emissions scrutiny tightening and public projects demanding data‑verified efficiency, the sector is redefining success metrics once based purely on concrete output. Ukrainian Engineers like Vitalii encapsulate this transition from building fast to building responsibly, combining digital intelligence with structured decision-making. As a member of the AITEX Summit Fall 2025, he extends this vision beyond his own firm, shaping the next wave of digital transformation, engaging with global equivalents who are equally determined to design a sustainable future. This experience strengthened his belief that construction’s next breakthroughs won’t come from a single tool or software, but from the ability to integrate diverse technologies into coherent operational logic. As he notes, “The future of infrastructure will be shaped not only by builders but by the leaders who can translate cross-industry innovations into practical, scalable systems.”
After all, Vitalii doesn’t claim to be redefining the industry alone. Nevertheless, through his steady implementation of digital intelligence and human‑centred leadership, he exemplifies the path forward for a profession learning to think in systems. “Every great structure starts with a clear blueprint. Today, that blueprint includes people, data, and the planet,” he commented.
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