Byggherrarna, the association of the organisations that order and pay for Swedish construction, gave their Almedalen seminar this June a title of their own choosing: "Vi bygger i blindo", we build blind. Not a critic's phrase. The buyers' own.
The admission
The clients themselves. Byggherrarna organises Sweden's building clients: the public and private organisations that commission, finance and own construction projects. On 23 June 2026, during the Almedalen political week in Visby, the association put its own name on a seminar with this title:
Vi bygger i blindo – behov av spårbarhet, kontroll och uppföljning
No panel transcript is needed to read the message: the title carries it. When the side of the table that pays for construction says it lacks traceability, control and follow-up, that is not an attack on the industry. It is a confession from inside it. Other industries go to Almedalen to display their strength; the clients' association went to say it cannot see what it is buying. And notice what the three missing things have in common. None of them is concrete or steel. All of them are information.
Upstream
Before anyone builds. Whether a project can be traced is settled when its documents are written: the investigations, plans, cost estimates and requirement specifications that define what is being bought, why, and at what price. By the time a contractor mobilises, the information that makes the project traceable either exists in those documents or does not exist at all. An assumption that never makes it into the record cannot be recovered on site afterwards. A requirement that changes without a trail leaves the follow-up question, did we get what we paid for, with nothing to check against.
Volume makes it worse every year. The mass of documents around a construction project has grown for decades while the human capacity to read it has stayed flat. A client organisation signs off on tender documents, design deliverables and review rounds that nobody on the client's side has the hours to read in full. Nobody is careless here; there are simply more pages than hours. But a buyer who cannot read everything it commissioned cannot trace what it agreed to, and follow-up on documents nobody read is a ritual, not control.
The state's version
Afterwards, by hand, in Excel. Riksrevisionen, Sweden's national audit office, examined cost control in the national transport infrastructure plans. Before 2019, Trafikverket's project cost estimates were not even documented systematically. The routine since then: when a project closes, its estimates are collected in a shared Excel document on a shared drive. The audit also found no systematic evaluation of what causes the cost increases, and no consolidated account of them published to parliament or the public. The auditors' overall verdict: the follow-up of cost development is deficient, and transparency about the increases is lacking.
Those spreadsheets sit downstream of real money. The same audit found that projects in the national plan grew 39 percent in estimated cost in four years, before construction started. In April 2026, the government fixed the next national plan: 1,171 billion kronor for 2026–2037. The follow-up instrument behind those billions is, per the routine the auditors describe, a spreadsheet filled in once each project is already over. The clients' seminar title fits the state as well as it fits any private buyer.
| Finding | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Project cost estimates before 2019 | Not documented | RiR 2021:22 |
| Follow-up routine since 2019 | One shared Excel file | RiR 2021:22 |
| Systematic evaluation of cost-increase causes | Not carried out | RiR 2021:22 |
| Consolidated account to parliament and public | Not published | RiR 2021:22 |
| Cost growth per project while in the plan, 2014–2018 | +39% in four years | RiR 2021:22 |
The turn
Read the seminar title once more: traceability, control, follow-up. All three presuppose the same underlying capacity: that someone can actually read what the project produces, at the pace it is produced, and hold the trail together across years and revisions. Humans lost that capacity when document volume grew past what a project organisation can absorb. Machines now have it.
This is not an argument for less scrutiny. It is an argument for more: requirements that stay traced from the first investigation to the final account, and cost estimates compared against their predecessors while decisions can still be changed. Follow-up becomes a living record instead of a closing ritual in a spreadsheet. The clients have named exactly what is missing. The means to supply it now exist. What no longer holds is the assumption behind today's routine: that nobody could read everything anyway, so nobody planned for it.
Sources
Yesper is the AI civil engineer for construction and infrastructure. AFRY, COWI, NRC Group and other Nordic firms use it to halve the time on a study, rerun calculations in minutes, and catch errors that would otherwise slip through. Get in touch if you'd like to see what it can do for you.
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