Gilbane’s plan to deliver services to clients across the full building lifecycle, from design to construction and management, helped lead the firm to revenue growth in 2025, according to the company’s 2025 annual report.
The Providence, Rhode Island-based parent company of Gilbane Building and Gilbane Development reported approximately $8.7 billion in revenue in 2025, per the report. That’s a nearly 13% increase from 2024’s approximately $7.7 billion.
As a private company, Gilbane is not required to report quarterly or annual financial results. Instead, the 156-year-old, family-owned firm opts to release an annual report, the contents of which can vary. Gilbane reported approximately $14 billion in construction backlog in 2025, for example, while 2024’s nine-page report didn’t highlight that metric.
Indeed, 2025’s report spans 62 pages and covers the firm’s safety goals, sustainability endeavors, artificial intelligence plans and other topics. CEO Ed Broderick, a fifth-generation executive at Gilbane, signaled optimism about the state of the company in an interview with Construction DIve.
“We have a path that we're confident will continue double-digit growth as we go,” Broderick told Construction Dive.
In particular, Broderick touted Gilbane’s ability to help customers across the life cycle of a building project. Given its structure, Gilbane contains the “foundational pieces” of both a real estate development firm and a construction company that does significant work with clients in high-growth areas, such as data centers.
On a typical building industry project, Broderick said, one firm may perform construction, while another handles financing and a third focuses on design. Gilbane, by contrast, provides those parts together under one roof.
“What we have done is we have put together a strategy that allows us to pull all those services together and offer them to the clients that we have, so that we can go much deeper in helping them find end-to-end solutions, or to package and deliver projects faster and more efficiently, because we're doing more,” Broderick said.
Broderick added that the company is also in this position because of its size and scale, with 45 offices across the country and the two arms of Gilbane Building and Development, alongside its public-private partnership team. That aspect of the business advanced more than $2.3 billion in public-private partnerships in 2025, particularly in the higher education and student housing sectors, according to the firm’s website.
“There aren't a lot of companies that have all of those skills in house, and we have the ability to choose what skills are going to serve that client the best,” Broderick said.
An AI-driven future
In the report, Gilbane also emphasized its own technological journey with AI, as larger contractors continue to figure out how and when to add technology to their jobsites and make enterprise deals with tech giants.
“We see in the end an agentic AI system that will help us connect this entire platform that we have, so that we have information that comes in the front end of projects that never has to be re-entered into a project and can be found at the end of the project, so we have consistency across the delivery model,” Broderick said.
Gilbane uses Microsoft Copilot and has worked with startups including Trunk Tools to track tens of thousands of documents on complex construction jobs. Gilbane Building entered an enterprise agreement with Trunk Tools in September 2024.
However, Gilbane is also working on its own solutions in-house. Broderick told Construction Dive the firm’s AI Boost team, a group of internal experts, will help the firm build AI agents that will aid the contractor across the project lifecycle. This initiative mirrors steps other contractors, such as Suffolk Construction with its Jobsite of the Future plan, have taken in recent months.
The balance is familiar to contractors who have had to weigh the calculus of the build vs. buy phenomenon: As a builder, do you outsource what you need to a startup to solve problems? Or train staff to create their own solutions?
Broderick said that one of the reasons Gilbane assembled the Boost team was so that when the company partnered with other firms, the company would have the expertise in-house and could transfer that information. Thus, it wouldn’t be hindered by an outside system that is subject to sudden change.
There’s a saying Broderick thinks of in that case, relating to AI: People are overestimating the immediate impact, and underestimating the long-term outcomes.
“When we look at build vs. buy specifically, we now have the expertise in-house to take a good, hard look at, is this something we should build? Is this something we should buy?” Broderick said. “Or maybe it's something we should buy that eventually we're going to build, because we see it in the future, but we're able to do that with our own expertise.”
