Earlier this month, the AWP community took over Daikin Park in Houston for the biggest AWP xChange North America in the event’s history. Even after expanding capacity, the event was sold out! The room was filled with Owners, EPCs, and contractors from across the industry, and the conversations carried straight from the morning sessions onto the warning track and into a field-level suite for an Astros game.

For O3, hosting a record crowd in the AWP hub of Houston was more than a milestone. It signals that AWP has moved past the early-adopter phase, that the appetite for honest, practical conversation is growing fast, and that our customers are willing to share what is actually working in the field.

A signal moment for AWP 

For years, AWP has been a discipline that owners and EPCs were curious about but cautious to adopt. The room in Houston felt different. It was full of practitioners who have done the work, lived through the rough starts, and wanted to compare notes with peers who have done the same. The growth of the event mirrors the growth of the methodology itself, and with new xChange editions launching in Europe and the UAE later this year, Houston set the bar for what those events can be.

On stage: the themes that landed

The morning was built around customer-led sessions, not vendor pitches, and a few clear throughlines connected them.

The first was that AWP wins are made on the front end. Jimmy Richard from Shell opened the day with a clear-eyed look at Front End Loading and the digitalization that supports it, making the case that even strong execution cannot rescue a project with a weak FEL. Lara Crump from McDermott carried that thread further with a session on enabling constraint-free construction, drawing on McDermott’s work scaling AWP on mega projects in Africa.

The second theme was that AWP is no longer just an oil and gas story. Ramon Shumaker from Dematic walked the room through how Dematic is applying AWP to automated conveyor installations, a use case that sits well outside the traditional AWP footprint. It was a reminder that any industry dealing with manpower constraints and complex sequencing has something to gain.

The third theme, and the one that drew the most energy, was honesty about what AWP actually looks like in the field. Jeremy Brunson of Turner delivered the session everyone has been talking about since: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AWP.” His candid look at the gap between projects that achieve real predictability and projects that drift into “workface planning in disguise” was the favorite session of the day by a wide margin according to our post-event survey. Juan Velasco from Worley closed the speaker line-up with “AWP In the Wild,” sharing how AWP performs across very different contract structures, contractor capabilities, and data environments. Different contexts, same underlying challenges, same recommendations for where AWP has to start.

Recognizing the people moving the industry forward

This year’s xChange also marked the presentation of four awards to clients and individuals whose work is shaping where AWP goes next.

The Innovation & Product Feature Award went to Turner for significant collaboration with O3 on product development, and for being among the first to embrace auto packaging at scale.

The AWP Project of the Year went to McDermott for expanding the pioneering use of AWP on mega projects in Africa, applying it to construction management to give execution contractors clear visibility into available workfronts.

The AWP Award for Driving Change went to Dematic for bringing AWP into a new industry and demonstrating that the methodology belongs anywhere manpower efficiency and constraint management matter.

The O3 Champion Award went to Martin Swaine of Shell, a driving force behind the implementation and mandate of AWP at Shell and the primary champion of AWP technology across Shell projects globally.

What attendees told us

Our post-event survey came back with a 9.2 out of 10 average likelihood-to-recommend score, 75% of respondents giving us a 9 or 10, and zero detractors. That is the strongest feedback we have ever gotten from a North American xChange.

The qualitative responses captured the day better than the numbers did. One attendee wrote that the event was “substantive, informative and not salesy.” Another said the speakers “had relevant topics and was not redundant to other AWP conferences.” A third pointed to the “variety of topics and attendees,” and another said hearing from “Owners, EPC, and Contractors… the triumphs and tribulations they are having” was what made the event work.

Where we go next

Houston was the second xChange of 2026, coming just a few weeks after AWP xChange LATAM. This year, AWP xChange travels next to Europe and the UAE, making 2026 the biggest year for AWP yet! 

Bigger than that, the energy at Daikin Park said something the industry has been working toward for a decade. AWP has graduated past the debate stage. Customers are scaling it and comparing real results in the open, and the conversation has shifted from “should we be doing this” to “here is what we have learned doing it.” For O3, getting to convene that conversation and provide value to the industry is invaluable.

Thank you to everyone who joined us, to our speakers, to our sponsors at CII, Insight AWP, and Chemelex, and to the customers whose work earned this year’s awards. We can’t wait to see you next time!