I started in this industry in 1994. Back then, dispatch was a grease board, a phone, and a guy named Larry who could tell you where every truck was without looking. The tickets were paper. Quality control meant a slump cone, a thermometer, and 20 years of gut feel.
Thirty years later, I’ve watched this industry digitize slowly, then all at once. And now everybody wants to know what AI is going to do to us over the next decade.
So, here’s my honest take on what 2035 looks like. Not the vendor’s hype version. The version from somebody who’s spent time in the lab, in the plant, and in the boardroom.
Dispatch stops being a job and becomes a supervision role
This is the big one, and it’s already starting.
By 2035, AI will handle the core of dispatch. Order scheduling, truck assignment, load spacing, rerouting around traffic and plant breakdowns. The machine will do it faster and better than any human, because it’s an optimization problem with thousands of variables, and that’s exactly what AI is good at.
But here’s what people miss. Dispatchers won’t disappear. The role changes. The 2035 dispatcher is an exception manager. The AI runs the board, and the human handles the stuff machines can’t: the contractor who’s furious, the pour that’s going sideways, the judgment call on whether to service a customer who’s 90 days past due.
The best dispatchers I’ve known were relationship people first and logistics people second. That half of the job survives.
The driver shortage forces the technology question
I’ve written before about the CDL driver shortage. It’s not getting better. The demographics are brutal, and the competition from other industries is real.
By 2035, I don’t think we’ll have driverless mixer trucks running residential pours. The last 100 feet of a concrete delivery is chaos. Job sites are unpredictable. But I do think we’ll see autonomous or semi-autonomous trucks on defined routes. Plant to plant transfers. Large infrastructure jobs with controlled site access. Aggregate haul from quarry to plant is probably first, because it’s the simplest use case.
The bigger near-term impact is AI making existing drivers more productive. Better routing, automated ticketing, in-cab coaching on fuel and safety. If AI gets each driver one more load per day, that’s the equivalent of hiring thousands of drivers the industry can’t find.
Quality control goes from reactive to predictive
This one’s personal for me because I spent 20 years on the technical side.
Today, most QC is still rearview mirror work. You break cylinders at 7 and 28 days and find out if you had a problem a month ago. That’s insane when you think about it.
By 2035, in-truck sensors plus AI will predict strength, slump, and set time in real time, and adjust the mix on the fly. Technology exists now. What’s missing is adoption and trust. Both are coming, because the economy is very good. Every yard of overdesigned concrete is money left on the table, and AI-driven mix optimization will let producers shave cement content safely.
Which leads to carbon conversation. Cement is one of the largest industrial CO2 sources on the planet. The pressure isn’t going away. AI-optimized mixes using more SCMs, performance-based specs instead of prescriptive ones, and real-time verification will be how this industry meets carbon targets without giving up performance. The producers who figure this out early will win spec work the others can’t touch.
The back office quietly gets automated
Nobody writes LinkedIn posts about accounts receivable. But this is where AI pays for itself first.
Invoicing, ticket reconciliation, credit management, demand forecasting, pricing. All of it is pattern recognition on structured data, and AI eats that for breakfast. By 2035, a mid-size producer will run a back office with a third of the headcount they have today, and the people who remain will be doing analysis instead of data entry.
Demand forecasting is the sleeper here. Concrete is perishable. You can’t inventory it. A producer who can predict tomorrow’s demand accurately runs leaner on trucks, drivers, and raw materials. AI will get scary good at this by blending order history, weather, project schedules, and local construction data.
What won’t change
Here’s where I push back on the futurists.
Concrete is still going to be a local, relationship-driven, perishable-product business in 2035. You can’t ship it far. You can’t stockpile it. The contractor still needs to trust that when he schedules a 500-yard pour at 4 AM, you’ll be there.
AI doesn’t replace that trust. It protects it. The producer who never misses a pour window, whose tickets are always right, whose quality never surprises anybody, that’s the producer who keeps the business. AI is how you become that producer at scale.
My advice if you’re in this industry today
Three things.
First, get your data house in order now. AI is only as good as the data underneath it, and most producers are sitting on years of dispatch, batch, and ticket data they’ve never done anything with. That data is about to become your most valuable asset after your aggregate reserves.
Second, stop thinking of AI as a project and start thinking of it as a capability. You don’t “do an AI project” any more than you “do an electricity project.”
Third, invest in your people. The winners in 2035 won’t be the companies that replaced humans with AI. They’ll be the ones that used AI to make good people great. The dispatcher who manages exceptions. The QC tech who reads the models. The salesperson is armed with pricing intelligence.
I’ve been in this industry for over 30 years. I’ve seen paper tickets die, GPS arrive, and digital transformation goes from buzzword to survival requirement. AI is the biggest shift yet. But the fundamentals I learned in 1994 still hold: deliver on time, deliver in spec, and take care of your people and your customers.
The tools change. The business doesn’t.