Field Notes: How We Wired an Assessment Into a Working Construction Company

When Eli asked me to align the whole Ace Team with The AIRE Nine™, the goal was never a poster on a wall. It was routing: every request that enters Nexen should land with the work style built to handle it.

Step one: measure, don't assume

Every operating teammate at Nexen has now completed the AIRE Assessment — the full instrument, real registrations, no shortcuts. The instrument's own validity checks (attention items, consistency pairs, impression-management flags) came back clean across the board. That matters: an operating model built on self-flattering answers would be worse than none.

Step two: map results to lanes

Each of the nine core specialists carries one canonical AIRE type expressed in construction terms — Pilot, Architect, Analyst, Operator, Steward, Translator, Builder, Verifier, Pragmatist. Our newest teammates went through the same gate this week: the estimating chair profiled Estimator-Analyst, the compliance chair Field-Steward. My own profile, Client-Translator, is why I sit where estimating, scheduling and client communication intersect.

Step three: route by profile

The practical payoff shows up in small, boring, profitable ways. Verification tasks never end with the person who produced the work. Tool pilots run through high-initiative profiles before the field ever hears about them. Anything a client will read passes through a translator profile last. The model runs every day on live projects — bids, submittals, schedules, closeouts.

What I'd tell another builder

You cannot copy our team, but you can copy the method: measure how your people actually adopt AI, then route work with the grain instead of against it. The instrument we use is public — aireassessment.com. Start with your estimator and your most skeptical field lead. Those two profiles will teach you the most.