AI systems for contractors, where the paperwork decides whether the job was worth taking
Where the money leaks
The tender lands as forty documents and a date
Drawings, specifications, addenda, instructions to bidders, a bond form and a schedule. Before anyone can decide whether to bid, somebody has to read all of it and pull out the parts that matter. That is a day of an estimator's time spent finding out whether the day was worth spending.
RFIs go out and nobody knows what came back
A question goes to the consultant on Tuesday. It is answered on the following Thursday, in a reply to a reply, to one person, who is on site. The crew works to the old detail for nine days because nothing told them not to.
The submittal register is one person's spreadsheet
Shop drawings, product data, samples and certificates, each with a review status and a date that only matters when it is late. It is maintained by hand, it is out of date by definition, and it is the first thing anybody asks for when a schedule slips.
The site knows on Monday what the office finds out on Friday
A delivery did not arrive, a subtrade was short two people, the ground was wrong. The foreman knows immediately. The information reaches the person who could have done something about it at the end of the week, in a report written from memory.
Chasing subtrades and suppliers is somebody's whole afternoon
Twelve calls to ask the same question about availability and pricing, then twelve more because half of them did not answer. It is not skilled work and it is done by the person whose time is worth the most.
The documents that expire are the ones nobody watches
Insurance certificates, WSIB or CNESST clearances, safety tickets, equipment inspections. All of them expire. Nobody is assigned to notice, so it gets noticed at the gate.
What we automate
Tender document intake and triage
The bid package read on the day it lands, with scope, key dates, bonding and insurance requirements, exclusions and the unusual clauses pulled out into something an estimator can read in ten minutes instead of a day.
Bid and no-bid screening
New opportunities scored against the work you actually want: trade, size, owner, location, delivery method and the terms you have decided you will not accept. The obvious no answers stop costing you a review.
RFI logging and follow-up
Every question raised gets a number, an owner and a due date, chases itself when the answer is late, and pushes the answer to the people on site rather than leaving it in one inbox.
A submittal register that maintains itself
Submittals tracked from issue to approval automatically, with the current status readable without asking anyone, and the overdue ones surfaced before they are on the critical path.
Daily site reporting from the field
Crews, weather, deliveries, delays and photos captured in a couple of minutes on a phone, and assembled into the record the office actually needs, on the day it happened.
Subcontractor and supplier requests
Availability and pricing requests sent to your whole list at once, answers collected into one comparable place, non-responders chased without anyone remembering to.
Change order and extra work tracking
Directed changes captured the moment they happen, with the instruction, the date and who gave it, so the claim is built from a record rather than reconstructed months later.
Compliance and certification expiry
Insurance, clearance letters, tickets and equipment inspections tracked with the renewal chased in advance, so nobody arrives at a gate and gets turned around.
General contractors and construction management
The bid decision is made under time pressure with incomplete reading. The package is large, the deadline is fixed, and the honest version is that most of it gets skimmed. The clauses that hurt are in the part that got skimmed.
Coordination is the product. A general contractor sells the management of other people's work. Every hour spent assembling status instead of managing is the margin leaving the job.
Closeout is a scramble because it was never a process. As-builts, warranties, O and M manuals and deficiency lists all get gathered in the last three weeks, from people who have already moved to the next project.
Bid package summarisation
Scope, dates, bonding, insurance, liquidated damages and unusual terms extracted from the tender documents into a one page brief, with the source page cited for anything that matters.
Trade coordination and status
Subtrade progress, manpower and deliveries collected on a schedule rather than chased, so the coordination meeting starts from a current picture.
Closeout document assembly
Warranties, as-builts and manuals requested from each trade as their work completes rather than all at once at the end, and assembled as they arrive.
Can a system decide whether we should bid a job?
We already use project management software. Does this replace it?
Our subtrades will not use another portal.
Specialty trades and subcontractors
You are quoting far more work than you win, by design. A trade contractor bids constantly. Every quote costs takeoff time whether or not it lands, which makes the speed and consistency of quoting the whole economics of the business.
Scheduling is somebody's phone. Crews, trucks and the general contractor who just moved your start date by four days. It is a full time coordination job that usually sits on top of somebody else's full time job.
Getting paid is a paperwork exercise. Progress billing, holdback, lien deadlines and the statutory declarations that go with them. Miss the paperwork and the money is late regardless of the work.
Quote request intake and turnaround
Requests from every general contractor you work with landed in one place, sorted, and answered fast, with the drawings and scope already pulled apart for the estimator.
Crew and dispatch scheduling
Crews assigned against real capacity, changes pushed to the people affected, and the knock-on effect of a moved start date visible immediately rather than discovered.
Progress billing and lien deadlines
Billing periods, holdback release and statutory deadlines tracked with the documents prepared in advance, so payment is not delayed by a form.
Every general contractor sends quote requests differently. Can that be handled?
Can it do takeoff?
We are twelve people. Is this too heavy for us?
Civil, excavation and infrastructure
Public tendering has its own machinery. Prequalification, mandatory forms, addenda that change the scope four days before close, and a compliance envelope where a missing signature disqualifies a compliant bid.
The work is measured, not estimated. Quantities, unit prices and progress measurement against them. The site records that support a progress claim are the difference between getting paid this month and arguing next month.
Equipment is the other payroll. Utilisation, maintenance intervals and location. Machines that sit are the most expensive thing on the job.
Public tender monitoring and screening
Postings watched across the systems you bid on, screened against your trade, region and capacity, with the addenda tracked so nobody bids to a superseded document.
Quantity and progress capture
Measured quantities and daily production recorded in the field and reconciled against the schedule of values automatically, so the progress claim is assembled rather than reconstructed.
Equipment tracking and maintenance
Utilisation, hours and service intervals tracked from the data your machines and crews already produce, with maintenance surfaced before a breakdown makes the decision.
We bid public work. Is anything here a compliance risk?
Our crews have poor connectivity on site.
Mechanical, electrical and industrial services
Two businesses in one. Project work runs on tenders and submittals, and service work runs on calls, dispatch and contracts. They have different rhythms and they are usually run out of the same office by the same overloaded people.
Service agreements are the good revenue and the forgotten one. Scheduled maintenance that gets deferred when a project gets busy is revenue you already sold and did not deliver.
The emergency call is the whole reputation. A plant down at 2am judges you on how fast someone answers, not on how good the eventual repair is.
Service call intake and dispatch
Calls answered around the clock, sorted by urgency and site, and routed to whoever is actually on call, with the equipment history attached before the technician arrives.
Preventive maintenance scheduling
Contracted maintenance scheduled, booked and confirmed automatically so it happens on cadence instead of whenever the project side goes quiet.
Submittal and shop drawing tracking
The project side's submittal register maintained without a person, with review status and overdue items visible to everyone who needs them.
Can a system handle an after-hours emergency call properly?
We run projects and service off one team. Does this force us to split them?
Equipment rental and heavy equipment
Availability is the only question customers ask. Do you have it, when, and for how long. Answered in two minutes it is a rental. Answered in two hours it is somebody else's rental.
Utilisation is the whole business model. A machine on a yard earns nothing. Knowing what is idle, what is overdue back and what is booked next is the difference between a fleet and a parking lot.
Delivery and pickup coordination eats the counter. Windows, drivers, sites that are not ready, and a customer who did not tell you the job finished early.
Availability and quote responses
Availability questions from phone, text and email answered against live fleet status in seconds, with a hold offered and an alternative when the machine is out.
Contract, return and overdue flows
Off-rent requests, extensions and overdue returns handled automatically, with the customer contacted before the return date rather than after it.
Delivery and pickup scheduling
Transport booked into real capacity, confirmed with the site, and reconfirmed the morning of, so a driver does not arrive at a locked gate.
Our fleet data is not perfectly accurate. Does that break this?
Can it quote a rate?
Industrial maintenance and plant services
Work orders arrive from everywhere. A plant call, a CMMS ticket, an email from a maintenance manager, a note from a technician on site. Whatever does not make it into one system is work you did and may not bill.
Shutdowns and turnarounds are the year in a week. Planning, permits, crews and parts all compressed into a window where an hour lost is not recoverable.
The compliance record is the licence to operate. Inspections, calibrations, permits and safety documentation. It is paperwork, it is mandatory, and it is exactly the kind of work that automates well.
Work order intake and routing
Requests from every channel captured into one queue with the site, the asset and the urgency attached, so nothing depends on which person received it.
Shutdown and turnaround coordination
Crews, permits, parts and daily progress tracked through the window, with the delays and the sequence changes visible while they can still be acted on.
Inspection and compliance records
Certificates, calibrations and inspection records assembled and filed automatically, with renewals surfaced before expiry rather than at an audit.
Our client requires their own system. Can this coexist?
Is there a safety risk in automating maintenance records?
Which of these to fix first
Everything above is a list, and a list is not an order. If you want the order for your own week rather than for the industry in general, the automation scanner asks nine questions about how your week actually runs and returns the three jobs to automate first, with the hours each one gives back. It takes about two minutes and nothing you enter leaves your browser. If the problem is the site rather than what happens after someone gets in touch, the website test scores your page against the nine checks a first-time visitor makes.
And if you run several of these
Everything above assumes one operation. Once there is more than one, a second problem arrives on top of it, and it is not the first problem repeated. Nine locations answering the same customer question nine different ways is not a capacity failure, it is a consistency failure, and it does not show up in any individual site's numbers.
If you run more than one construction and industrial operation, or a franchise system, a regional chain, a dealer network or a practice group, the layer that goes over the top of this page is on the multi location page. Start here for the workflows, go there for what changes when you duplicate them.
What a first build usually looks like in a contractor's office
Almost always the document intake, because that is where the hours are and the loss is measurable. Tenders and quote requests read on arrival, sorted, and summarised into something an estimator can act on the same day.
The second piece is usually the chase: RFIs, submittals, subtrade responses and expiring documents. These are pure follow-up, they are nobody's favourite job, and a system does them without getting busy.
Everything is built on top of the project software you already run. You own the result and the documentation.
The staged version of that order, with the test that says each stage is finished, is in the ninety day roadmap.
Why construction is not just another service business
The document is the job. In most industries the paperwork describes the work. Here the contract documents define it, and a difference between the drawing and the site is a commercial event, not an administrative one.
Your customer changes their mind in writing, sometimes. The instruction that arrives verbally on Tuesday and gets confirmed never is the single most expensive thing in the business. Capturing it at the moment it happens is worth more than any efficiency gain.
The cost of being late is asymmetric. A missed addendum, an expired certificate or an unanswered RFI does not cost you a little. It costs you the bid, the gate or the schedule.
If your work is mostly maintenance and service calls rather than projects, the home services page covers the dispatch side in more depth, and the two are usually built as one system.
Why Automatik
Built for your stack
Not a generic bot, the system is wired into the tools your business already runs.
You own the system
Full access, full documentation. No platform hostage-taking.
Bilingual by default
Customer-facing pieces work in French and English from day one.
Loi 25 compliant by design
Consent, transparency and data-handling designed in, not bolted on.