Procore Groundbreak 2026: A Guide for Safety and Compliance Teams

Key Takeaways

• Procore Groundbreak 2026 runs October 21 and 22 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, with add-on Procore workshops on October 20 and 21. Procore CEO Ajei Gopal opens day one, and Zack Kass, formerly head of go-to-market at OpenAI, opens day two.

• The program is about AI, and Procore's last two Groundbreaks brought safety into it: an expanded Safety solution announced in 2024, and AI that reads jobsite photos for safety insights in 2025.

• AI can only work with the safety data your crews capture. Take seven questions into the Expo Hall and ask them of every safety tool you see, including the ones already in your Procore account.

Procore Groundbreak 2026 is Procore's annual conference, October 21 and 22 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, with optional Procore workshops starting the day before. Procore expected more than 4,500 people from over 35 countries at Groundbreak 2024, and this year's banner is "Build and win together in the AI era." The workshops are built for Procore admins and project managers.

This guide is for the person who owns safety and compliance, because Procore has spent its last two Groundbreaks building safety into the platform and its AI, and the Expo Hall puts tools that connect to Procore in one room for two days. Here's what's on the program, what Procore has shipped for safety so far, and what to ask before you come home with a new tool.

Groundbreak 2026 at a Glance

The conference and workshops run at the Orange County Convention Center, 9800 International Drive. Procore's featured speakers include Steve Davis, President of Product and Technology, Geoff Lewis, SVP of Product Management, Walt Hearn, Chief Revenue Officer, and founder and chairman Tooey Courtemanche, alongside Paul Zikopoulos, IBM's VP of Skills Vitality, and Fred Mills, founder of The B1M. The Bash comes with the Full Conference Pass. Student passes don't include it, and guests can buy a Bash-only pass.

The workshops are hands-on Procore training in budget management, configuration and customization, new products and features, updated best practices, advanced RFI and submittal management, and reporting. None of the listed topics is safety-specific, which makes the workshop day a better buy for whoever administers Procore at your company than for the safety director. Registration, the official hotel block, and the agenda are on Procore's Groundbreak site.

What Procore Has Shipped for Safety So Far

Procore's last two Groundbreaks are the best preview of what a safety team will hear this year.

At Groundbreak 2024, Procore announced a significantly expanded Safety solution with pre-task plans, jobsite hazard analysis, certification tracking, onsite orientations, and toolbox talks, connected to its project management suite. What has shipped since is narrower. Procore's core safety tools are still Observations, Inspections, and Incidents, alongside Forms, Action Plans, and the Daily Log.

Procore announced Safety Hub at Groundbreak 2025 and opened it to all customers as an open beta in May 2026: a dashboard that brings observations, inspections, and incidents together, plus a repository for safety SOPs. Pre-task plans, orientations, certification tracking, and toolbox talks aren't among the capabilities it lists as available today. Contractors who run pre-task plans or toolbox talks in Procore can build them as custom forms or inspection templates, and many upload the signed paperwork to the Documents tool.

At Groundbreak 2025 in Houston, Procore built its AI into an intelligence layer it calls Procore Helix. The parts that touch safety are photo intelligence in Procore Assist, which summarizes progress and provides safety insights from jobsite photos, support for Spanish and Polish speakers to ask questions and get answers in their own language, Procore Assist on mobile devices, and Procore Agent Builder, which entered open beta, for building custom AI agents.

Procore's Directory also tracks subcontractor insurance, with expiration dates, notification emails, and a status that turns non-compliant when a policy lapses.

Procore hasn't published its 2026 announcements, and this guide won't guess at them. Three threads are worth following in the keynotes: when Safety Hub reaches general availability and which of the 2024 capabilities come with it, how far Helix reaches into field and safety records, and whether that reach extends to data that lives in Marketplace apps as well as in Procore's own tools.

The AI Only Sees the Data You Give It

Every AI demo in Orlando will run on clean data. Jobsites don't produce clean data by default.

James Austen, SafetyClerk's Head of Digital Safety, uses an example from the field. One foreman logs the day's formwork with the crew size, the floor, and the task. The next day a different foreman on the same crew logs the floor and the task. "Two very different inputs," James said in a September webinar. "There's no benchmarking. There's no trends. There's nothing that AI can use to feed off those data points and give you real insights."

That's the part of an AI rollout that happens in the field, long before any keynote. When a pre-shift is a form with required fields and libraries to pick from, and every worker signs it on a phone, the floor, the task, the crew, and the signatures become data an agent can count, trend, and compare across projects. When the same pre-shift is a scanned page, the trend line depends on who held the pen that day.

Zack Kass's day-two keynote is billed around a point safety leaders already know: the hardest part of AI is preparing people to embrace it. On a jobsite, those people are foremen and crews, and the preparation starts with a form they'll actually fill out.

Six Questions to Take Into the Expo Hall

The Expo Hall is where the tools that connect to Procore set up. Ask each of them the same seven questions, and ask Procore's own team the ones that apply to its safety tools.

• If Procore already does it, what do you add?

  Procore's safety tools cover observations, inspections, and incidents, Safety Hub is in open beta, and its Directory tracks subcontractor insurance. Ask Procore which of the capabilities it announced in 2024 are live in your account, then ask each partner to name the gap it fills in one sentence.

• What lands in Procore, and where?

  Ask which records sync, in which direction, and whether a superintendent has to touch them on the way. Daily logs, documents, and manpower counts are good places to start.

• Who signed it, and can you prove it?

  Look for signatures by the individual worker behind a personal login, time stamps, and records that lock once they're signed. It's what an attorney asks about a pre-shift two years after the job.

• Does an expired credential stop anyone at the gate?

  Ask whether an expired card or a lapsed policy only triggers an email, or actually keeps the worker off the site.

• How fast can you pull a record from a closed project?

  Pick a toolbox talk from a random Tuesday on a job that's finished, and time the answer.

• What does a crew member do, on a phone, with no login?

  Participation decides whether any of the above has data behind it. If a subcontractor's worker needs an account and a password on a cold morning, the pre-shift is easy to skip.

How SafetyClerk Works With Procore

SafetyClerk's Procore integration is listed on the Procore Marketplace. At Wesbuilt Construction Managers, daily logs in Procore update from worker activity, documents transfer into Procore, and manpower counts reflect who's actually on site, so nobody enters the same record twice.

"The Procore integration was one of the biggest reasons we selected SafetyClerk," said Gordon Webb, Wesbuilt's Corporate Environmental, Health and Safety Manager. "Our superintendents aren't trying to figure out if they scanned the toolbox talk, renamed the file correctly, or uploaded it into the right folder. It removes all of that."

Underneath the sync, records belong to individual workers and companies. Each worker gets the day's pre-shift by text at check-in to review and sign, and orientations and toolbox talks are logged digitally for each worker. Access rules based on qualifications and certifications decide who gets through the turnstile, and the same records work with tablets and kiosks.

In New York, SafetyClerk checks a worker's SST card or Worker Wallet against DOB Training Connect data when it's first connected to their profile, which is how it can tell which certifications RedCode issued. And SafetyScore turns the daily activity into a 0 to 100 score per company, crew, and project, the kind of structured signal the AI conversation in Orlando depends on.

Meet SafetyClerk in Orlando

If you run safety on Procore projects and you'll be at Groundbreak, Stefano, James, and Patrick from SafetyClerk will be there too at booth 2916. Book 20 minutes before you land, bring a question from a closed project, and we'll answer it on a live project with the Procore integration running.

Book time at Groundbreak →

Plan the Two Days

• Bring one real question.

  Pick the last inspection request, claim, or audit that took too long to answer, and ask every vendor to answer it with their product, live.

• Bring whoever runs Procore at your company.

  Integration answers depend on how your account is set up, and your admin can test them on the spot.

• Go to both opening keynotes.

  Day one is Procore's view of where the platform is going. Day two is about getting people to use AI, which is the part safety teams already know best.

• Ask for numbers in writing.

  Retrieval time, participation rate on a live project, and an implementation timeline from a customer your size.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where is Procore Groundbreak 2026?

October 21 and 22, 2026, at the Orange County Convention Center, 9800 International Drive, Orlando, Florida. Optional Procore workshops run on October 20 and during October 21.

Who is speaking at Groundbreak 2026?

Procore CEO Ajei Gopal gives the day-one opening keynote, Zack Kass, global AI advisor and former head of go-to-market at OpenAI, opens day two, and mentalist Oz Pearlman closes the conference. Featured speakers include Procore's Steve Davis, Geoff Lewis, Walt Hearn, and Tooey Courtemanche, IBM's Paul Zikopoulos, and The B1M's Fred Mills.

Is Groundbreak worth it for safety and compliance teams?

Yes, if your projects run on Procore. The AI announcements shape what your safety data can do inside the platform, and the Expo Hall puts tools that connect safety records to Procore in one room for two days.

Does Procore have its own safety tools?

Yes. Its core safety tools are Observations, Inspections, and Incidents, and Safety Hub, a dashboard that brings them together with a repository for safety SOPs, opened to all customers as an open beta in May 2026. Procore announced pre-task plans, hazard analysis, certification tracking, orientations, and toolbox talks at Groundbreak 2024, so Groundbreak is a good place to ask which of those are available now. Procore Assist added photo intelligence with safety insights at Groundbreak 2025.

Does SafetyClerk integrate with Procore?

Yes. SafetyClerk's integration is listed on the Procore Marketplace and moves safety documents into Procore automatically. At Wesbuilt, it also updates daily logs from worker activity and keeps manpower counts matched to who's actually on site.

Can I watch Groundbreak sessions online?

Procore records select 2026 sessions and shares the recordings with in-person attendees after the event. Its site also hosts on-demand archives from past Groundbreaks back to 2022.

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