Three years ago I sat for five contractor license exams, including the National Association of State Contractors Licensing Agencies exam, accepted in 18 states. Together the exams took 27 hours to complete and 45 books for preparation.
I had a master’s in architecture from Yale and years of actual building behind me. I assumed the licensing exams would be straightforward. They weren’t. I studied nights and weekends, reading every sentence five times. That’s because I saw the words switch order, skip, or be substituted entirely, and the building code doesn’t forgive that. I passed all five exams on the first try.
A year later, a friend suggested I get tested for a learning disability. Out of curiosity, I did. The result: severe dyslexia.
I was relieved. Growing up, I had no explanation for why I was different. I thought I was stupid, because some teachers said that I was unteachable and not smart. The diagnosis didn’t change my brain, only my understanding of it. The habit I built at 11, immigrating with no English and reading everything slowly and multiple times, was the workaround my brain needed.
In construction, my story is not unusual. It is just rarely said out loud.
A TALENT ACCESS PROBLEM
In 2023, UK trade group On The Tools asked tradespeople whether they considered themselves neurodivergent—52% said yes. A separate Association for Project Management study found the same was true of 31% of construction project professionals. From the trades to project management, the industry runs on minds like this, against a general rate of 15 to 20%.
Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the U.S. industry must attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 more in 2027 just to keep labor supply and demand in balance. Combine a shortage in the hundreds of thousands with a workforce where thinking differently is already common. Instead of an availability gap, we need to consider what we make people do to get in, and what we make them do all day once they are in.
A CONVERSION PROBLEM, TOO
Accenture Song’s Applied Creativity research splits creative thinking in two: inventive creativity (systematic and option-generating), and expressive creativity (which senses what lands before the logic catches up). Only 16% of leaders reliably convert creative ideas into growth, and those who do outperform peers by 53% in revenue.
I think about spatial intelligence the same way—a form of expressive creativity applied to a home or a building, sensing how pieces fit before the drawing proves it. Construction is full of this thinking and has the same conversion problem. The instinct exists. Almost nothing in how we hire, train, or measure people carries it through to value.
WHERE THE FILTERING STARTS
Sir Ken Robinson argued that schools run on an industrial model that ranks subjects and rewards the taught answer over the untaught one. This educates people out of their creative capacities. In construction, that filtering starts in a classroom. Can you read a paragraph at grade level and answer questions about it, on a clock? That measures linear, timed processing, not intelligence.
Construction measures something else. Can you read the plans before the building exists and catch the conflicts across every trade’s drawings? Can you hold a job’s whole sequence in your head and know what happens if step four goes wrong? That is spatial intelligence, measured by whether the building stands.
The research backs the distinction. Catya von Karolyi at the University of Wisconsin found that dyslexic participants identified impossible figures faster and more accurately than neurotypical peers, a finding that was subsequently replicated. A later brain-scan study by Diehl and colleagues found that neurotypical participants processed print more efficiently; dyslexic participants process visuospatial information more efficiently.
Spatial intelligence isn’t exclusive to neurospicy minds; plenty of neurotypical builders are excellent at it. That previously cited research shows something narrower: Dyslexic minds show disproportionately elevated spatial ability.
WHAT AI CHANGES
A neurospicy mind runs multifaceted, five or 10 threads at once, connected and firing. The connections are often where the insight lives. That is the same wiring behind 3D judgment and spatial reasoning: They catch conflicts before they become change orders and holds a job’s whole sequence in our heads at once. That is a remarkable operating system.
We all need a linear side, to turn those threads into a report somebody else can follow. Building that by hand is slow for a multifaceted mind, because then our most productive hours go to the part of the job that takes longest and returns least.
AI is excellent at exactly that: linear, sequential, structured, fast enough to stop being the bottleneck. It works as a thinking partner, taking a problem in whatever order it comes and pushing back. It also works as a tutor, breaking dense material into one idea at a time. The thinking stays ours.
The spatial, expressive side was always the advantage. AI just gave it enough speed to get out of its own way.
In construction, we already use tools to amplify physical strength. A crane lifts what no crew can. AI does the same for mental strength, and it gives the time back. When linear work stops eating the day, neurospicy individuals can use those hours to focus on what matters: catching a problem early, making a creative design decision for a family, or walking an apprentice through a detail to train future builders.
I spent decades building a workaround just to do work with meaningful impact. I don’t have to spend the next several decades that way, and neither does anyone else wired like me.
That matters beyond any one career. The homes we build and retrofit now have to stand up to storms, wildfires, and extreme heat, cost less to run, and stay affordable to live in, maintain, and upgrade. These are not documentation problems. They are judgment problems, and they need every mind we have working at the top of its ability. Give this industry’s neurospiciest minds their hours back and we will build the communities we would be proud to hand to the next generation.
Grace Tsao Mase is founder and CEO of HomeRES.ai.