For the last two years, the publication Civil Quarterly has surveyed civil contractors about their technology use. That's not a long timeline, but there are some trends to be seen.

One is that the big winner in technology type seems to be utility detection. As you might guess, things like ground-penetrating radar, pipe location, concrete scanning, and so forth are used to identify where cables, pipes, and the like are underground. They want to know before they dig. It's a common enough need, especially in civil engineering projects.

But big winner has a much different value than if you wanted to know whether carpenters used levels. Half of respondents said that they used some version of the technology, up from 40% in 2020.