AI in Construction: Adalia Zhao on BuildTrace - Change Orders & Innovation
Construction veteran and AI startup founder Adalia Zhao joins Felipe on the final 2025 episode of The EBFC Show to share her bold vision: eliminate inefficiency and guesswork in construction change management. Discover how her company BuildTrace uses AI to save months of tedious work, reduce costly mistakes, and bring real-time clarity to plans, pricing, and scope. From humble beginnings to big breakthroughs, Adalia’s story is one of hustle, humility, and high-tech impact.
In the FINAL EBFC Show episode of 2025, host Felipe Engineer-Manriquez sits down with Adalia Zhao, founder and CEO of BuildTrace, to talk about how AI is reshaping the future of construction—starting with change management. Adalia’s journey from counting 4,823 windows on a set of plans to becoming a Microsoft engineer and now AI startup founder is nothing short of inspiring.
Together, they dive deep into:
* Why “this doesn’t make sense” is the best way to spot innovation opportunities 🚨
* How BuildTrace automates drawing comparisons, estimates, and change tracking in minutes, not months ⏱️
* The power of learning on the job and betting on yourself 💪
* Overcoming barriers as a woman and immigrant in construction tech 🌍
* What GitHub for blueprints really looks like (hint: it’s amazing)
💡 Plus, Felipe reveals why he became an advisor to BuildTrace and why Adalia’s solution is exactly what construction needs right now.
🔥 If you’ve ever been buried in RFIs, confused by change orders, or frustrated by endless PDFs, this episode will hit home.
👉 Ready to build smarter in 2026 and beyond? Listen now, then connect with Adalia to explore if your team qualifies as an early design partner!
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Connect with Adalia via
LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adalia-zhao/
Website at https://build-trace.com/
Connect with Felipe via Social media and Free Lean and Scrum Training Resources at https://thefelipe.bio.link
RSM Podia Course Link: https://store.theebfcshow.com/rsm
Subscribe to never miss new videos here: https://click.theebfcshow.com/youtube
Watch The EBFC Show Podcast https://click.theebfcshow.com/YouTube-Podcast
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Adalia Zhao
CEO
Adalia Zhao is the founder of BuildTrace, an AI platform that functions as “Git for construction drawings,” bringing version control, change detection, and collaboration to one of the world’s most complex industries.
Raised in a poor family in China, Adalia developed a competitive spirit from an early age, excelling in sports, math and dance competitions where she loved to win. With no family connections to lean on, she hustled her way through college—launching a tutoring business from her dorm room that grew to generate over $100,000 per month. With that success, she funded her own education and earned admission to the world’s leading construction management program at UC Berkeley.
After graduation, Adalia spent three years in the trenches of the U.S. construction industry as a project engineer at a top general contractor. There, she experienced firsthand the inefficiencies and bottlenecks that plague large projects and became convinced that the industry held massive untapped potential for technology-driven change. Determined to be part of that solution, she taught herself to code and, within five months, joined Microsoft Azure, where she built cloud and AI infrastructure at scale for four years.
Today, Adalia is channeling her combined expertise in construction and software into BuildTrace, driven by the conviction that the construction industry deserves the same kind of transformation that software development has undergone with AI and version control.
