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How Alston Construction Put AI in the Hands of Field and Office Teams with Kroo
Alston Construction used Kroo to unify data from CMiC, Procore, HammerTech, Unanet, Phoenix CPM, and Oracle Primavera Cloud into a single data warehouse — operationalizing AI across field and office teams.
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Alston's operational and financial data were siloed across CMiC, Procore, HammerTech, Unanet, Phoenix CPM, and Oracle Primavera Cloud with no way to reconcile them.
Alston had committed to rolling out Claude enterprise-wide across field and office teams, but they had no data warehouse or core data infrastructure to support it.
Solution
Alston partnered with Kroo to operationalize its data and deliver AI to field and office teams with data connectors, a managed data warehouse, Kris, and the Kroo MCP.
Alston now uses Claude enterprise-wide and leverages the Kroo MCP to operationalize all of its data sources as a scalable AI layer for field and office teams.
Results
Rolled out Claude to 125+ users with strict row-level security
Weekly active users grew 60x in 11 weeks with 94% retention
Eliminated data engineering requirements, saving mid-six figures annually
Notable Team Members
Kevin Shah
Director of Construction Technology
Kenneth McNutt
Director of Construction Technology, Mission Critical
Adam Nickerson
Chief Financial Officer
Background
Alston Construction is a national general contractor headquartered in Atlanta with more than 20 offices coast to coast. Founded in 1986 and formerly known as Panattoni Construction, Alston delivers general contracting, construction management, and design-build work across industrial, e-commerce and distribution, food and beverage, healthcare, office, retail, and athletic facility markets. Alston is an ENR Top 400 contractor, ranked #108 in 2026, and has built for clients including Amazon, FedEx, Caterpillar, Clorox, Volvo, and Porsche. More than 85% of Alston's work comes from repeat clients, with projects ranging up to $100 million.
$1.2B
2025 Revenue (ENR Top 400)
500+
Employees
20+
Offices Nationwide
Alston's construction technology stack spans six core systems: CMiC as their ERP, Procore for project management, HammerTech for safety, Unanet for CRM, and a combination of Phoenix CPM and Oracle Primavera Cloud for scheduling. That technology stack sits across a highly distributed organization, where project teams operate out of regional offices and job sites nationwide.
Kevin Shah, Director of Construction Technology, led Alston's data and AI initiatives and the successful enterprise rollout of Claude to both field and office teams. His goals were to set up a data warehouse for their core systems, develop the cross-system contextual layer for AI, ensure strict user-level permissions, and deploy AI across the company to the field and office. Those goals led Alston to select Kroo as their data & AI infrastructure partner.
“Our data lived in silos — CMiC, Procore, Unanet, HammerTech, Phoenix — and getting a full view of a project meant manually pulling from all of them. Kroo solved that by bringing everything into one data lake, which is exactly the kind of consolidation we needed.”
— Kevin Shah, Director of Construction Technology
“Kroo and Claude have truly changed how we do business. Connecting it to all of our enterprise software links information in ways I never could have anticipated. It does far more than make us more efficient at accessing data — it lets us synthesize information across systems that, before Kris, were siloed.”
— Adam Nickerson, Chief Financial Officer
Challenges
A company-wide AI commitment with no data layer underneath it: Alston had committed to rolling out Claude across the company, recognizing what AI could do for every team member. Without a centralized data layer from all of Alston's core systems — with data security and cross-system context — a successful rollout of AI would be impossible.
No data warehousing and pipeline infrastructure: Alston had data siloed across multiple systems but no unified data layer connecting the dots — no data warehouse, no pipelines, and no modeling layer for cross-system reconciliation. Building and maintaining that infrastructure would require dedicated data engineering resources, substantially increasing overhead and delaying data & AI initiatives.
Data locked in silos: Job costs and financial data live in CMiC. Field data lives in Procore. Safety data lives in HammerTech. Schedule data spans Phoenix CPM and Oracle Primavera Cloud. Business development data lives in Unanet. Cross-system analyses required manually stitching data by hand.
Data permissions and governance at scale: With project teams across 20+ offices, Alston needed strict data permissions so staff could only see data relevant to their jobs when using AI. Building and maintaining permissions at that level of granularity was not work Alston wanted to own internally.
“Kroo has been a very agile partner in a very rapid moving space. No matter the ask, Kroo was able to step in and rapidly adjust as needed on the fly!”
— Kenneth McNutt, Director of Construction Technology, Mission Critical
Solution
Alston implemented Kroo as its end-to-end data and AI infrastructure solution to fully operationalize its data across field and office teams. Kroo's pre-built connectors covered Alston's entire construction technology stack, eliminating the need for custom API development and ongoing pipeline maintenance. Kroo delivered a cloud-based data warehouse that now serves as Alston's single source of truth, including the cross-system data modeling logic to create the core semantic layer on top of their data to support AI tooling.
Using that data foundation, Alston deployed Claude enterprise-wide, with the Kroo MCP bridging their data and their AI use cases. Within 11 weeks, Alston fostered fast-growing AI adoption with weekly active users growing 60x after rolling Claude out to 125+ users and counting.
Project teams with knowledge at their fingertips: Teams can query data from CMiC, HammerTech, Procore, or Phoenix CPM in plain language and generate permissions-aware cross-system analyses without logging into multiple systems.
Office teams with business intelligence within seconds: Finance, marketing, and preconstruction teams can query their data directly and eliminate manual stitching for custom or recurring reports.
A managed single source of truth: Kroo centralizes data from six systems with a cross-system modeling layer on top, handling pipeline maintenance, schema updates, and other data engineering work out of the box.
Enterprise-grade row-level security: Alston controls data access at a granular level so project engineers see the jobs they run while financial and payroll data stays limited to authorized users — configured once and scaling automatically.
“The most powerful part of the Kroo rollout is that once our data is consolidated, we can query it directly through Claude and get answers instantly — insights that used to take a team hours or days to pull together across five systems now happen in seconds. That's had a real impact on how fast we can make decisions, and it's a huge step toward our broader goal of becoming a truly data- and AI-driven organization.”
— Kevin Shah, Director of Construction Technology
Results: ROI for Alston Construction
Growing, sustained adoption of Claude across the enterprise
Successful rollout to 125+ users across field and office teams, with continued user growth.
Weekly active users grew 60x in 11 weeks with 94% user retention and near-zero churn.
Permissions-aware AI in the hands of field and office teams
Project teams get answers spanning the entire construction technology stack in seconds, in plain language, without logging into specific systems.
Row-level security allows Alston to securely roll out Claude at scale without risking exposure to sensitive data.
Significant cost savings versus building in-house
Eliminated upfront and ongoing data engineering costs, saving mid-six figures annually on internal data resources.
Pre-built connectors eliminated months of custom API development, and Alston's warehouse was stood up in weeks rather than years.
Hours of manual reporting eliminated in the office
Cross-system reconciliation that previously took hours of manual work is now a single query.
Finance and operations teams can create portfolio-level, division-level, and project-level business intelligence on demand instead of waiting on specific reports.