AI for construction
AI for construction
More bids per estimator, RFIs answered from your own documents, permits watched daily. 5x ROI in 30 days, or we work free.
- General contractors
- Trade subcontractors
- Service trades
- Developers
Teams we build for
- Hoyes Michalos
- Nurse Next Door
- Fedi
- UBC Sauder
- Merchant House Capital
- Picton Investments
- Campbell Froh May & Rice LLP
- Barnakl
- Hungerford
- Breez
Teams we build for
- Hoyes Michalos
- Nurse Next Door
- Fedi
- UBC Sauder
- Merchant House Capital
- Picton Investments
- Campbell Froh May & Rice LLP
- Barnakl
- Hungerford
- Breez
Teams we build for
- Hoyes Michalos
- Nurse Next Door
- Fedi
- UBC Sauder
- Merchant House Capital
- Picton Investments
- Campbell Froh May & Rice LLP
- Barnakl
- Hungerford
- Breez
Estimators cannot bid enough jobs.
Takeoffs by hand cap how many bids go out the door. The jobs you never bid are the most expensive ones.
RFIs and submittals pile up.
The answer exists in the spec. Finding it takes longer than the question deserved, and the register grows while the architect waits.
Site paperwork trails the work.
Daily logs, change orders and photos reconciled at the end of the week, from memory.
The change order is still a text message.
The extra work is done, photographed and half-forgotten. It gets priced at closeout, if the super remembers, and fought about either way.
Sub paperwork expires mid-job.
The drywall sub's insurance certificate lapsed three weeks ago. Nobody knew until the draw asked for it.
The draw waits on the paperwork.
Progress claims assembled at month end from whatever the file holds. Holdback math by hand. Every missing backup page is a day of cash.
A project manager's Thursday on site
The day starts on the deck
humanHe walks the pour deck with the superintendent at 6:40. A missed sleeve at grid B4, and a duct run fighting a beam. He records a voice note and shoots four photos before the trades stack up.
The walk becomes the paper
By the time he is back in the trailer, the voice note and photos are a daily log entry and a draft RFI, the clash tied to the detail on S-301 and the spec section it contradicts.
He reads the RFI before the architect does
humanThe sleeve question goes out as drafted. The duct clash does not, because it is a coordination problem for the mechanical sub, not a question for the consultant. He kills that draft and books the sub instead. Nothing reaches the architect unreviewed.
The submittal register advances without him
Three submittals came back from the consultant overnight. Statuses update in Procore, the resubmit letter for the rejected hollow metal frames is drafted with the reviewer's comments quoted, and the two packages about to go late are flagged.
The cert chase runs while he runs the job
The drywall sub's insurance certificate expired Tuesday, so the chase started Tuesday. Today the renewed certificate lands and the file closes, with WCB clearance letters checked on the same pass.
He prices the missed sleeve
humanThe missed sleeve becomes a change event. He calls the estimator, they set the number, and the change order package assembles behind the decision with the photos, the RFI reference and the labour backup attached. A person sets every dollar.
The draw starts before month end
Approved change orders and the month's placed quantities read from the job cost in Sage and draft into the progress claim against the schedule of values, holdback math shown, ready for his review before the owner's cutoff.
Construction, before and after
The manual path is dashed: Takeoffs cap bid volume, RFIs answered from memory, Permits checked by hand. The system path replaces it, and a person approves before anything ships: First-pass quantities, Draft answers cite the spec, Municipal data watched daily.
Before: by hand
- 01Takeoffs cap bid volumehuman
- 02RFIs answered from memoryhuman
- 03Permits checked by handhuman
After: the system
- 01First-pass quantities
- 02Draft answers cite the spec
- 03Your approvalhuman
- 04Municipal data watched daily
The research
Canada's construction industry needs to hire 306,200 workers by 2034 and may still be short 34,300 (BuildForce Canada, 2026, forecast).
BuildForce Canada · 2026 · BuildForce Canada national labour market forecast, built on Statistics Canada labour force and investment data with industry validation, published July 20, 2026
Who this is built for
You bid the jobs you used to decline
Invitations you passed on for want of takeoff hours become bids. First-pass quantities come off the drawings for you to verify against the details, and the go or no-go brief is on your desk while the tender is still open. The number stays yours. Pricing never leaves the estimating room.
The paper keeps pace with the pour
RFI drafts cite the spec section they answer from. The submittal register advances without you standing over it. The change order carries its photos and its RFI reference the day the extra work happens, not at closeout. You run the job. The file keeps up.
Quotes go out the day of the site visit
For a mechanical or electrical shop the margin leak is the quote that took a week. The visit's photos and notes become a priced draft in your format, the follow-up runs until the customer answers, and service agreement renewals surface before they lapse. ServiceTitan stays your dispatch board. This feeds it.
The log is done when the boots come off
Photos, manpower counts and the day's voice notes become the daily log before dinner, and the paperwork stays current with the work instead of trailing it by a week. Anything that touches a safety call flags a person. You watch the work, not the keyboard.
What stays human
- The day starts on the deck
- He reads the RFI before the architect does
- He prices the missed sleeve
The steps the day below leaves to a person, by design.
Proof from the pattern
Peak Construction is a past Advizr client, and an interior design client's permit scrapers watch municipal construction data every day. The published case below shows the same monitoring and document mechanics in another industry.
We guarantee 5x ROI inside 30 days of deployment, in writing, measured against a baseline you sign before we build. If the system misses the bar, we keep working for free until it clears.
The numbers in construction
Canada's construction industry needs to hire 306,200 workers by 2034 and may still be short 34,300 (BuildForce Canada, 2026, forecast).
BuildForce Canada · 2026 · BuildForce Canada national labour market forecast, built on Statistics Canada labour force and investment data with industry validation, published July 20, 2026
38% of contractors report measurable business impact from AI, up from 17% a year earlier (Construction Owners, 2026).
Construction Owners · 2026
A University of Kansas study found AI takeoff 76% faster than leading tools (University of Kansas / Togal.AI, 2025).
University of Kansas / Togal.AI · 2025
What we build for construction
Get the bid out
Takeoff and estimating support.
Quantities extracted from drawings for an estimator to verify against the scale they trust, whether that is On-Screen Takeoff or a printed half-size set. The win is bids per estimator per week.
Bid pipeline automation.
Invitations triaged, go or no-go briefs assembled, closing dates tracked so nothing closes unbid by accident.
Permit and tender monitoring.
Municipal permit and tender data watched daily, the same mechanic our scrapers already run for a real estate client today.
Answer from the spec
RFI and submittal automation.
First-draft responses pulled from your specs and drawings with the source section cited. The PM reviews before anything reaches the architect.
Closed-RFI memory.
What went wrong on the last job answers the next one. Closed RFIs and reviewed shop drawings indexed so the company stops re-learning its own lessons.
Keep the job paid
Change-order and daily-log assembly.
Field notes and photos structured into logs and change documentation the day they happen, with the RFI reference attached.
Subcontractor document chase.
Insurance certificates, WCB clearance and safety tickets pursued and tracked to expiry.
Progress draw assembly.
Approved change orders and placed quantities drafted into the progress claim against the schedule of values, holdback math shown. A person signs before it reaches the owner.
The economics
Before and after economics
Line
- Takeoff on a bid
Before
Measured by hand off the drawing set, and the week's bid count is capped by it
After
First-pass quantities arrive for verification. A University of Kansas study measured AI takeoff 76 percent faster than leading tools
- RFI and submittal paperwork
Before
Drafted from scratch and from memory, per question, while the register grows
After
Drafted from your own closed RFIs and the spec, source cited, for the project manager to review. The measurement here starts at your baseline
- Manual hours in scope
Before
At the page defaults, 5 people spending 10 hours a week on takeoff math, spec hunting and the document chase is 50 hours, $3,750 a week at $75 loaded cost
After
The calculator below prices your own crew, and the 5x ROI guarantee is measured against a baseline you sign before we build
- Bids per estimator
Before
Capped by the takeoff hours available in a week
After
The win this page is judged on, kept qualitative on purpose until your baseline is signed
Rows derive from two sources only. The University of Kansas takeoff study already cited on this page's stat rail (76 percent faster is the university's figure, not the vendor's). And this page's calculator defaults (5 people, 10 manual hours each per week, $75 loaded hourly cost, which is 50 hours or $3,750 a week in scope). No other figures. The anchor case is in deployment in another industry, which is why this page's proof is labelled adjacent, and it publishes no outcome number, so the RFI row stays qualitative.
The objections
Our supers run the job from a truck. They will not open another app.
They do not have to. The field keeps doing what it already does, photos, voice notes and texts, and the system reads that exhaust into logs, RFIs and change files. The adoption burden lands on the office, where the paperwork already lived. Nobody retrains a foreman.
Sub quotes and our margins are the whole business. One leak kills us.
Bid pricing is scoped per project at the database layer and never enters a shared context. Sub quotes stay in the estimating room's own store, under no-training API terms, in your accounts. The plug number you carried on bid day is not in anyone's model and not in any other job's context.
A wrong RFI answer gets built. Then we eat the rework.
Nothing self-issues. Every draft answer cites the spec section and the detail it came from, so checking takes seconds, and the PM reviews before anything reaches the architect or the field. The eval set is graded against your own closed RFIs, where the accepted answer is already known, before the system touches a live job.
Every architect writes the spec differently. Our jobs have nothing in common.
The spec book is more standardized than it feels. Your specs already follow MasterFormat divisions, and the variation lives in the details, which is exactly what an index handles. An answer cites this job's sheet and this job's section, never a generic one, so the architect's formatting quirks are the input, not the obstacle.
Procore keeps announcing AI. Why not wait for the platform to do it?
Because the work crosses systems and a platform feature stops at its own walls. Your tender sits on a portal, the spec is a PDF from the architect, the sub's certificate arrives by email and the draw goes out in the owner's format. Whatever the platform ships, someone still has to run the seams. Meanwhile 38 percent of contractors already report measurable business impact from AI, up from 17 percent a year earlier, and some of them are bidding against you.
Where the data comes from
Drawings and specs
The IFC set, the addenda, the spec book in its MasterFormat divisions, reviewed shop drawings and every closed RFI from past jobs, whether they live in Bluebeam Revu sessions, Autodesk Construction Cloud or a folder tree named after the job number. Indexed together they are the corpus, and an answer cites the sheet and the spec section it came from.
Where it stops. Read-only, and originals stay in your store. Your own closed RFIs answer across jobs, because that is the point. Sub pricing and owner documents do not, scoped to their project at the database layer, and nothing trains anyone's model.
Project mgmt
Procore, Buildertrend or CMiC holds the operating record: the RFI log, the submittal register, change events, daily logs and meeting minutes. The build reads it as the system of record and files drafts back into it, so nobody learns a new tool to see the work.
Where it stops. Writes are drafts and log entries only, each routed by a person. Job cost is read-only territory, bid pricing never enters a shared context, and nothing inside a software integration commits the company to anything.
Bid portals
BC Bid, bids&tenders, MERX and the GC invitation platforms, BuildingConnected among them, carry the tenders, the addenda and the closing dates. Agents watch them on a schedule, pull the documents when something matches your trade and geography, and open a go or no-go brief with the closing date attached.
Where it stops. Watching and reading only. Browser automation never submits a tender and never acknowledges an addendum, portal credentials live in your own vault, and a person submits every bid, every time.
How the system is built for construction
See the full capability mapRetrieval
Drawings, specs, submittals and RFIs from every past job, indexed together. Ask what the spec says about a detail and the answer cites the sheet. Ask what went wrong last time on a similar scope and the closed RFIs answer it.
- pgvector
- Full-text BM25
- Drawing and spec extraction
Agents and orchestration
Agents watch tender and permit sources on a schedule and open a bid proposal when something matches your trade and geography. Browser automation handles the bid portals. An estimator decides what to chase.
- agent-worker
- browser-sandbox
- Proposal queue
Evaluation
Takeoff and spec answers are graded against jobs your team has already bid, where the real quantities are known. A number that is confidently wrong on a bid costs more than no number at all.
- Eval graders
- Field-level accuracy
- quality-worker
Models
Vision and layout models to read drawings and site photography. Frontier models for spec reasoning and RFI drafting. Ordinary estimating math for the quantities, which needs to be auditable line by line.
- Vision and layout models
- Frontier models, one gateway, routed per task
- Auditable estimating math
Data boundary
Bid pricing and job cost stay in your accounts, scoped per project at the database layer. Subcontractor and client documents never cross projects by construction.
- Supabase row-level security
- Per-project scoping
- No-training API terms
Drawings and specs, Project mgmt, Bid portals feed a hybrid index. The agent runtime works from that index, and every consequential action passes a human approval before it reaches Ask your brain, Workflow builder, Task board.
Your systems
- 01Drawings and specs
- 02Project mgmt
- 03Bid portals
The system
- 01Hybrid index
- 02Agent runtime
- 03Your approvalhuman
Where your team works
- 01Ask your brain
- 02Workflow builder
- 03Task board
A project manager's Thursday on site
Chief estimator runs the day through the built system: The day starts on the deck, The walk becomes the paper, He reads the RFI before the architect does, The submittal register advances without him, The cert chase runs while he runs the job, He prices the missed sleeve, The draw starts before month end. Dashed steps stay with a person.
- 01Chief estimatorhuman
- 02The day starts on the deckhuman
- 03The walk becomes the paper
- 04He reads the RFI before the architect doeshuman
- 05The submittal register advances without him
- 06The cert chase runs while he runs the job
- 07He prices the missed sleevehuman
- 08The draw starts before month end
Built around your rules
| Regime | What it demands here | How the system complies |
|---|---|---|
| WorkSafeBC and OHS | Site safety duties sit with the employer and the prime contractor, and jobsite records carry worker personal information. | Anything touching a safety decision flags a person, always. Site photos and toolbox records are handled to respect worker privacy, and no system makes a safety call. |
| Builders Lien Act deadlines | Lien periods and the statutory holdback run on fixed clocks from milestones like substantial completion, and a missed date is unrecoverable. | The dates are tracked from the contract and the certificates and flagged early. Filings, lien advice and release decisions stay with your lawyer. |
| Prompt payment and adjudication | Where prompt payment law applies, Ontario's Construction Act and the federal regime among them, payment clocks run from a proper invoice and disputes move to adjudication on tight timelines. | Draw packages assemble complete and on schedule so the proper invoice goes out on time. Dispute and adjudication decisions stay with a person and your lawyer. |
| PIPEDA and BC PIPA | Jobsite photos, timecards and sub personnel records carry worker personal information under federal and provincial privacy law. | That data stays in your accounts, scoped per project at the database layer, under no-training API terms, with residency stated per engagement. |
| CASL | Bid invitations, sub outreach and service follow-up are commercial electronic messages needing consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe. | A sub packet or bid invitation goes out identified and unsubscribable, only to contacts with consent on file, and the data layer enforces that state, so an opted-out contact cannot be messaged. |
| Contract authority | Bids, change orders and contracts bind the company only when someone with authority signs them. | The system assembles the package. A person signs every bid, change order and contract, and browser automation never submits a tender. |
The regimes that govern construction, what each demands, and how the system complies
Regime
- WorkSafeBC and OHS
What it demands here
Site safety duties sit with the employer and the prime contractor, and jobsite records carry worker personal information.
How the system complies
Anything touching a safety decision flags a person, always. Site photos and toolbox records are handled to respect worker privacy, and no system makes a safety call.
- Builders Lien Act deadlines
What it demands here
Lien periods and the statutory holdback run on fixed clocks from milestones like substantial completion, and a missed date is unrecoverable.
How the system complies
The dates are tracked from the contract and the certificates and flagged early. Filings, lien advice and release decisions stay with your lawyer.
- Prompt payment and adjudication
What it demands here
Where prompt payment law applies, Ontario's Construction Act and the federal regime among them, payment clocks run from a proper invoice and disputes move to adjudication on tight timelines.
How the system complies
Draw packages assemble complete and on schedule so the proper invoice goes out on time. Dispute and adjudication decisions stay with a person and your lawyer.
- PIPEDA and BC PIPA
What it demands here
Jobsite photos, timecards and sub personnel records carry worker personal information under federal and provincial privacy law.
How the system complies
That data stays in your accounts, scoped per project at the database layer, under no-training API terms, with residency stated per engagement.
- CASL
What it demands here
Bid invitations, sub outreach and service follow-up are commercial electronic messages needing consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe.
How the system complies
A sub packet or bid invitation goes out identified and unsubscribable, only to contacts with consent on file, and the data layer enforces that state, so an opted-out contact cannot be messaged.
- Contract authority
What it demands here
Bids, change orders and contracts bind the company only when someone with authority signs them.
How the system complies
The system assembles the package. A person signs every bid, change order and contract, and browser automation never submits a tender.
Bid numbers, drawings and project documents stay inside your accounts, scoped per project, and nothing trains anyone's model.
How we build it for construction
Index the drawings and the closed RFIs together.
Most of what a project needs to know was already answered on the last job. We index specs, submittals and closed RFIs as one corpus and measure answers against jobs already built.
Automate the answer, not the number.
Spec and RFI questions get a cited first-draft answer. Quantities stay in auditable estimating math, because a confidently wrong takeoff on a bid costs more than no takeoff.
Add bid monitoring once estimating trusts the answers.
Tender and permit watching feeds a proposal queue. An estimator decides what to chase, every time.
What we will not automate
Bid pricing and anything submitted to an owner. We also will not connect a system to site safety decisions.
What that means in practice
Vision, documents and speech
AI for eyes and ears: reading documents, watching camera feeds, transcribing calls.
Where we stop. Bespoke computer vision is justified by volume and latency, not by novelty. Below that bar, a vision-language model on demand is cheaper to run and easier to maintain, and we will tell you which side of the bar you are on before anything is built.
Agents and orchestration
AI that does the work instead of just answering: looks things up, calls your systems, completes multi-step tasks, and knows when to hand off to a human.
Where we stop. Multi-agent swarms are oversold; most jobs need one well-guarded loop. If a cron job and a script solve it, that is what we build, because 90 percent per-step accuracy compounds to 59 percent over five chained steps and no framework changes that arithmetic.
Retrieval and RAG
Connecting AI to your actual documents so it answers from your knowledge, accurately and with citations, instead of making things up.
Where we stop. A dedicated vector database is justified by scale, not by default. Most of RAG quality is won or lost in chunking and indexing strategy, not in the model choice, and we have walked clients back from RAG to plain search when that was the honest answer.
Where your team works
Tour the platformAsk your brain
Ask a question. Get the answer and where it came from.
Every answer cites the document behind it, so you can check the source yourself. When the brain does not have the answer, it says so instead of guessing.
Workflow builder
Describe the workflow. Watch it assemble.
Say what should happen in plain language and the builder assembles the automation on a canvas you can read, run, and change.
Task board
People and agents, working the same board.
Every piece of work lives on one shared board, whether a person or an agent owns it. Handoffs between the two are explicit, so nothing falls in the gap.
Knowledge map
See everything the brain knows on one map.
Every document, person, and decision the brain has learned, drawn as one connected map. Thin spots are visible too, so you know exactly what to feed it next.
By team
The same system, seen from the desk that runs it.
- MarketingMarketing there is usually one person next to a day job, the team of one this page is built for.
- OperationsJob tracking, site handoffs and invoice matching are operations work at its heaviest.
- FinanceJob costing and progress billing run through the same close, with worse paperwork.
- HR and peopleSafety tickets and certifications expire on dates nobody watches, the same fix applies.
- Engineering and ITSite software, office systems and reporting usually land on one technical person.
Run your numbers.
Your operations
Savings use the low end of our hours-reclaimed range. The math is conservative on purpose.
The math
Calculated at the low end of every range.
Every first build is covered in writing: 5x ROI in 30 days. Or we work for free.
The hard questions
Free · 3-5 days
Know your number in five days.
We map your operations, find the highest-ROI automations, and hand you a ranked plan with the payback math attached. Yours to keep, whoever builds it.
Prefer to talk first? Book 15 minutes with James. No pitch deck.