Rise Of The Robo Riveter

JOHN FISH created New England’s largest general contractor, SUFFOLK, on the backs of laborers. Now he’s betting the future is filled with hardwired hard hats and Al foremen.

- John Hyatt

It's well below freezing on this December morning and John Fish is outside, standing near the edge on the 33rd floor of South Station Tower, a half-finished skyscraper in downtown Boston. He points to a bright red crane below as it carries a pallet of metal panels through the frigid air and explains his plans to automate it.

"There's a camera on the crane itself that watches the boom and sees its swing and registers all that information," Fish says in a distinct Boston accent. He's dressed in black leather loafers, blue slacks, a neon construction vest, safety goggles and a hard hat. "How can you get more picks per hour in a safe manner? We've got to be very, very careful." Down on the busier 14th floor, over the relentless thumping of pneumatic nail guns and the din of grinding steel, Fish describes how the robotic revolution is changing his construction sites: Suffolk is introducing two-foot-tall machines (think miniature army tanks) that zoom around and print blueprints and layouts for workers to follow, speeding construction and reducing errors. "We're going to be putting it on all our jobs," he says.

A 63-year-old construction industry lifer, Fish made a fortune building high-rises from Massachusetts to California. He's worth $2.3 billion, thanks to his 100% stake in $6 billion (revenue) Suffolk, the Boston-based construction firm which in the last 20 years has built more than 150 million square feet of commercial real estate in the U.S., including much of Boston's skyline and hotels in Los Angeles and Miami.