Although the construction industry is expanding so rapidly, it is still grappling with significant operating issues for contractors and construction managers. These include massive communication gaps between the office personnel and various construction sites, inability to measure how productive their labor force is, laborious material waste with no record of such costs being incurred, and time being wasted due to old methods of reporting construction progress. The contractors and construction managers are failing miserably to get a real-time perspective of everything that is happening; this culminates into disputes over payment, miscalculated bills, and extremely unpredictable cash flows.
In 2020, Powerplay was formed to specifically target this inefficiency that has long existed in the construction business and is specifically creating a single platform which will manage all operations. The operations include all those day-to-day things like following through, following up on staff attendance, as well as following up on the movement, payments, and control of finances. Most importantly, it eliminates all those unstructured methods like WhatsApp chit-chat, which forms an important part of all those operations.
In an exclusive interview with The Realty Today, lesh Dixit, Co-Founder and CEO of Powerplay, shares his insights on how technology is reshaping construction in India. Dixit, recognised in Forbes 30 Under 30 and Business World Disrupt 30 Under 30, discusses why digitisation has become essential, how small and mid-sized contractors can run operations like top-performing firms, and why a system-driven approach is replacing reliance on individual expertise.
Here are the excerpts from the conversation
1. Construction has traditionally been slow to adopt technology. What key challenges are finally pushing the industry towards digitisation today?
Construction wasn’t slow because it resisted change. It was slow because most tools never reflected how work actually happens on site. Conditions shift daily. Decisions get made in the moment, often under pressure. For years, experience and instinct filled the gaps systems couldn’t. That stopped working once projects got bigger, timelines tighter, and financial pressure real. Contractors today are juggling more jobs at once, margins have thinned, working capital is stretched, and clients want answers. The old manual ways buckle under that load. Digitisation isn’t coming from ambition. It’s coming from necessity. At this point, execution risk shows up directly as financial stress.
2. How is the use of technology helping construction companies improve project predictability, especially around timelines, costs, and execution quality?
Most projects don’t collapse overnight. They drift. Small misses pile up until there’s no room left to recover. The root issue is visibility. Technology helps by tightening the gap between plan and reality. When work is broken into clear activities and tracked daily; time, cost, progress, you see deviation early. That changes behaviour. Delays don’t surface months later during billing. Costs don’t stay buried in roll-ups. Quality issues show up while there’s still time to fix them. Predictability here isn’t about flawless planning. It’s about staying in control day by day, so problems stay small.
3. India is witnessing a massive infrastructure push. In your view, how critical is tech adoption in closing the infrastructure execution gap?
Infrastructure is often talked about as a funding or approvals problem. The deeper issue is execution at scale. Projects are announced with intent, but delivery breaks down because coordination is fragmented. Without technology, execution depends on individual capability and informal communication. That doesn’t scale nationally. As projects grow larger and more interlinked, fragmentation compounds delays and overruns. Technology matters because it creates a shared execution language across teams, agencies, and contractors. It allows standardisation and accountability at scale. Without that, the gap between ambition and delivery keeps widening, no matter how much capital goes in.
4. What role do data, real-time visibility, and standardised processes play in transforming construction from a people-dependent to a system-driven industry?
Construction is still heavily people-dependent, which makes outcomes fragile. When performance lives in someone’s head or in constant follow-ups, consistency is hard. Data and real-time visibility remove ambiguity. When everyone is looking at the same numbers, conversations shift from opinion to fact. Standard processes mean execution doesn’t reset with every new site or team. Best practices replicate. New engineers ramp faster. Organisations actually learn over time instead of repeating the same mistakes. Moving from people-dependent to system-driven execution is what makes predictability and scale possible.
5. Powerplay positions itself as a ‘playbook’ for construction companies. What does that mean in practical terms for contractors on the ground?
Calling it a playbook means contractors don’t have to reinvent execution every time. In practice, it gives a structured way to plan work, track progress, and control costs based on patterns seen across tens of thousands of real projects. Site teams know exactly what to track and how. Managers get visibility without constant chasing. Business owners understand project health without relying only on verbal updates. It turns tacit know-how into explicit systems, so execution quality improves consistently, not occasionally.
6. How does Powerplay help small and mid-sized construction businesses operate with the same efficiency and discipline as the top 1% of companies?
Top performers aren’t just working harder. They run disciplined systems. Smaller contractors usually don’t have the bandwidth or capital to build those from scratch, even though their execution challenges are similar. Powerplay embeds that discipline into daily workflows: planning, monitoring, controls, without adding overhead. That lets smaller firms operate with execution maturity closer to much larger organisations. Over time, performance depends less on size and more on how systematically work is run.
7. Can you share specific ways in which Powerplay has helped reduce delays, control costs, or improve cash flows for construction businesses?
The pattern is consistent. Delays reduce because slippages are visible early and action happens sooner. Costs stabilise because labour, material, and activity spend are tracked against planned work, not rough assumptions. Cash flow improves because execution data strengthens billing accuracy and cuts down disputes, which speeds up payments. None of this comes from aggressive optimisation. It comes from removing blind spots. When execution is transparent, inefficiency has nowhere to hide.
8. What do you see as the biggest challenge in digitising India’s construction workflows, and how can technology help contractors deliver projects more predictably in terms of time and cost?
The hardest part isn’t software. It’s behaviour. Teams trust experience because past systems didn’t reflect site reality. For technology to stick, it has to fit naturally into daily site work, reduce effort, and show value immediately. When tools align with how construction actually runs, rather than forcing artificial processes, adoption follows. Predictable delivery then becomes a side effect of better execution, not something imposed from the outside.
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