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A year ago on The Risky Planner, Albert Brier and Nate Habermeyer made a series of predictions about where capital projects were headed.

Mining electrification. AI adoption in project controls. Autonomous equipment risk. Data center energy. Nuclear deals. Mega project cost performance.

This episode puts each prediction on trial against sourced data from 2025 and early 2026.

What you will learn:

00:00 Cold Open

03:00 News: Belt and Road Initiative hits $213.5B in 2025 construction deals

06:00 China's energy advantage and SMR race

12:00 Mine electrification: market tripling to $10.51B by 2033

15:45 Cogeneration: mining companies become power generators

17:00 Grid stability as a scheduling dependency

22:00 Mining vs. AI: competing for energy

26:00 Autonomous haul trucks: near-zero incidents with fleet separation

33:00 AI adoption: 12% usage, 29% unprepared, 40% price increase by 2027

39:00 AI job displacement: 37% of US companies replacing roles

43:00 Nuclear for AI: Meta signs 6GW deal in January 2026

44:00 Data center growth: 14% CAGR, $3T investment by 2030

48:00 Fiber optic demand: AI data centers need 36x more fiber

51:00 Mega projects: 9 out of 10 exceed budget

54:00 California High Speed Rail: 59% of segment complete

57:00 Advice for project executives on AI-driven planning

Key stats from the episode:

- Mining equipment electrification: $3.05B to $10.51B by 2033

- Each battery electric vehicle: 600 tonnes CO2 reduction/year, 20% productivity increase

- Texas power requests nearly quadrupled in 2025, 73% from AI data centers

- Meta: multi-gigawatt nuclear deals signed January 2026

- AI data centers: 36x more fiber than traditional builds

- 109 of 302 AI models had price changes in January 2026

- Rail projects: 44.7% average cost overrun

- 9 out of 10 mega projects exceed budget

The Risky Planner is produced by Dokainish & Company.

Music by Thompson Egbo-Egbo: egbomusic.com

Presented by Dokainish & Company www.dokainish.com

The Risky Planner podcast delivers expert insights on project controls, capital project management, and strategic planning for today's complex business environment. Subscribe for regular episodes featuring industry leaders and practical advice.

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Most capital projects do not fail during execution.
They fail when early approvals accept uncertainty that later becomes unmanageable.

In this long-cut episode of The Risky Planner Podcast, Nate Habermeyer and Albert Brier revisit well-known megaprojects to examine what information was available at the start, what risks were visible, and what teams and executive sponsors could reasonably have challenged before work began.

The discussion covers projects that were large, complex, and governed by formal PMOs. Many ultimately delivered assets now considered successful in operation. All experienced severe cost growth and schedule delay.

Key themes include:

Why early estimates systematically understate cost and duration

How optimism bias shows up in capital project approvals

What “first-of-a-kind” risk really looks like in practice

Why some risks exist in registers but still go underpriced

What executive sponsors should ask at the first decision gate

This episode is relevant for executive sponsors, PMO leaders, and project controls professionals working in regulated, multi-stakeholder environments where early decisions carry long-term consequences.

Listen to understand where leverage actually exists—and why it is highest before construction starts.

Presented by Dokainish & Company www.dokainish.com

The Risky Planner podcast delivers expert insights on project controls, capital project management, and strategic planning for today's complex business environment. Subscribe for regular episodes featuring industry leaders and practical advice.

Send us a text

Hosts Nate Habermeyer and Albert Brier recorded this finale in person — a first for the show — to reflect on what shaped the world of capital projects in 2025, which episodes hit hardest, and where they're headed in 2026.

Season 1 covered ground: AI tools and their real-world limits in project controls. SMs, BIM, climate risk. Tariffs and political uncertainty rippling through supply chains. The most downloaded episode featured live interviews from the AACE conference floor, where Albert spoke with practitioners like Dr. David Hewlett about what's changing in the field.

Albert shares a preview of an upcoming AACE paper on program risk management — co-authored with Roger Bradfield and Rachel Fleming. The core problem: most mega-projects are actually programs made up of hundreds of smaller, interrelated projects. Each brings its own risk setup. No consolidated framework exists. Nuclear waste management projects illustrate this perfectly — individually small, collectively worth hundreds of billions, and loaded with scope uncertainty until work begins.

The hosts also pull back the curtain on their production setup (a lot of help from Perplexity) and tease plans for 2026: audience polls, feedback loops, and deeper engagement with listeners.

This episode is for project controls professionals, schedulers, risk analysts, and anyone tracking where the industry is headed. If you followed Season 1, this wraps the themes together. If you're new, it's a roadmap to what we covered and why it matters.

Subscribe now for Season 2. Visit riskyplanner.com to explore every episode. Connect with us on LinkedIn — we want to hear what topics you want covered next.

Presented by Dokainish & Company www.dokainish.com

The Risky Planner podcast delivers expert insights on project controls, capital project management, and strategic planning for today's complex business environment. Subscribe for regular episodes featuring industry leaders and practical advice.