By KERRY SMITH BUCK

A young person living in Africa today now has more access to technology than a U.S. President did 40 years ago.

Today’s smartphone is more powerful that the computer that was used to first put Americans on the moon.

The original Apple I motherboard’s contents now fit on a microchip the size of a human pinkie fingernail.

If the pace that technology is accelerating doesn’t make you feel disoriented, you might want to check your pulse.

These words came from AECTechCon™ opening keynote speaker Jeff Visnic, an alignment coach, public speaker and southwest regional discipline lead for electrical engineering for DLR Group.

AECTechCon 2026, a premier two-day conference hosted by the AGC of Missouri, took place May 6–7 at the St. Charles Convention Center in St. Charles, Mo. The conference brought together more than 400 architecture-engineering-construction professionals to focus on digital transformation, technology integration, BIM/VDC and industry innovation.

“We’re experiencing a pace of change in our industry that is nothing like anything we’ve ever seen,” said Visnic. “For so long in history, technology proceeded in a linear fashion. But then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we crossed a threshold.”

That threshold, Visnic says, showed itself in microprocessors, computers and a digital storage shift from mechanical systems to digital systems that scale exponentially.

“Like a frog in a pot of water, the pace of technology quietly outpaces us,” he said. “And by the time we feel overwhelmed, it has been going on for a long time and is impossible to stop.”

Twenty years ago, Visnic relayed to the AECTechCon™ audience, he worked for a company that didn’t have its own computers. “We’d have to lease time at a computer center,” he recalled.

Turning the clock forward to 2026, Visnic says the architecture-engineering-construction industry often embodies a theory known as Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. The theory states that the rate of technological progress is not linear but exponential, because each new generation of technology allows us to create the next, more advanced generation faster. As technology advances, the speed of change accelerates, leading to paradigm shifts in shorter timeframes and driving toward a future “singularity.”

“When the speed of change outpaces our ability to adapt, stress enters in and impacts our ability to perform,” Visnic said. “But what if stress isn’t the enemy? We treat stress as something that should be eliminated…but on any given day, when you’ve accomplished something great, stress has been a part of that.”

There are two kinds of stress – one positive and one not so positive, according to Visnic.

Eustress is the kind that improves human performance; it sharpens one’s focus and boosts motivation. Distress, on the other hand, is when stress shifts to a variety that lowers creativity, shrinks risk tolerance, shorts a communications span, decreases patience and impacts the brain’s ability to think long term.

“There are two types of stress that every a/e/c professional faces,” Visnic said. “There’s industry-related stress and then there’s the internal stress we put on ourselves. If we can learn to lower the internal stress, then when the external stress hits us, we’ll still have the capacity to deal with it. Companies that are going to succeed in technology adoption have leaders who understand that this stress gap exists and are able to help lead their people through it.”