The paper that holds up payment. Carried.
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and general contracting: shops where the real work happens in the field and the paperwork chases everyone home at night.
Where does AI actually pay in the trades?
Three places, in our experience. These are the clearest wins we see in shops like yours, not results we promise. In every one, the software drafts and your people decide. If “agent” sounds like software-salesman talk, we wrote a plain-language definition in What an Agent Actually Is.
The job is captured and slotted before the dispatcher picks up.
Work arrives by phone, text, and voicemail, and someone retypes all of it. An agent captures the request, pulls the customer history, and drafts the schedule slot. The dispatcher still decides who rolls and when.
The invoice goes out when the truck leaves, not three weeks later.
The job is done, the invoice is not, and cash sits in the gap. An automation drafts the invoice from the job record the day the work closes, then watches what is outstanding and drafts the follow-up. The awkward calls get flagged for a person.
The estimate starts assembled instead of from a blank page.
Bids die in the backlog because assembling one takes a night you do not have. An agent pulls the takeoff details, your past jobs, and current costs into a working draft. The number that goes out the door is still the estimator’s.
In the trades the bottleneck is often already obvious: dispatch and invoicing. When it is, the AI Implementation Sprint can start there. If it is not obvious yet, start with the AI Readiness Audit and let the map tell you. Pricing is published, in plain numbers: audits run $3,500–$8,500; sprints $18,000–$60,000, fixed quote in writing. Not sure the shop is ready at all? The signs — and the 90-day fix — are published too.
Two cycles every contractor knows. Drawn before and after.
Illustrative vignettes, not client claims. In both, the machine assembles the paper and the person who knows the job signs it.
The pay application goes out on time, with the waivers already chased.
Before. It is the 22nd. The pay app is due the 25th and the schedule of values has to be rebuilt from four foremen’s texts, a folder of delivery tickets, and a change order that was approved verbally three weeks ago. The PM spends two evenings reconciling percentages, then starts calling subs for conditional lien waivers — three of which will not arrive until the 26th. Certified payroll for the prevailing-wage job is a separate scramble entirely. The application goes in late, and payment moves out thirty days behind it.
After. The schedule of values is assembled continuously from what the field already reports. On the 20th, a draft pay application is staged with each line supported by the tickets and photos behind it, and the change order attached where it belongs. Lien waiver requests went to every sub on the 18th, conditional and unconditional drafted per tier, with the non-responders flagged for a call rather than discovered on the deadline. Certified payroll and prevailing-wage records assemble from the same source data. The PM reviews and signs; nothing goes to the GC unapproved.
The win: the application goes out on the 25th every month, and the cash arrives on the cycle it was supposed to.Submittal and OSHA logs stay current without a Friday afternoon.
Before. The submittal log is a spreadsheet somebody updates when they remember. The OSHA 300 gets reconstructed at the end of the year from incident reports, some of which are in a truck. When the GC asks for a status or an inspector asks for a log, the answer takes a day to assemble.
After. Submittals are tracked from the moment they are issued, with ball-in-court and aging visible without asking. Incident reports filed from the field write straight into the log in the format the record requires. The paperwork stops being a reconstruction project and becomes a lookup.
The win: the answer to “where is that?” takes a minute, not a day.Illustrative builds, not client claims. What we would actually scope is whatever your free assessment shows is worth automating first. The one build we can name is MARCUS, a private AI back office for a regulated lender — the same architecture, a different set of nouns.
AI for construction businesses.
Want the numbers?
The full price list is published — audits, sprints, managed services, all on one page.
Read the price list →01What can AI do for a construction business?+
The paper that holds up payment: pay applications assembled on schedule, lien waivers tracked and chased across every tier, certified-payroll and prevailing-wage documentation prepared, submittal logs kept current, and OSHA logs maintained from what the field already reports.
02Will it work with how the field actually reports?+
That is the point. Foremen send photos and texts, not structured data. The agent reads what comes in, matches it to the cost code and the job, and drafts the document — a person in the office approves before anything goes to the GC or the owner.
03What about lien waivers and compliance paper?+
Waiver status is tracked per subcontractor per pay period, with the conditional and unconditional versions drafted and the missing ones chased automatically. Certified payroll and prevailing-wage records get assembled from the same source data rather than rebuilt by hand each cycle. A person signs everything.
04How much does it cost for a contractor?+
The AI Readiness Audit runs $3,500–$8,500; an AI Implementation Sprint runs $18,000–$60,000, quoted fixed in writing before work begins and guaranteed live within 90 days. For most contractors the first build pays for itself on the pay-application cycle alone.
05How long does it take?+
The audit runs 2 to 4 weeks and the first build 4 to 12, usually scoped to land between billing cycles. It is guaranteed: live within 90 days, or we keep building at no charge until it is.
06Do you work remotely or on-site?+
Denver, Colorado and Phoenix, Arizona are the two hubs we travel from; contractors elsewhere in the US work with us remotely. The job site is not where this work happens — the paperwork is — and the fixed prices are the same wherever you build.
See the wins in the trades.
30 minutes with a senior advisor who walks your dispatch, invoicing, and bid workflows and tells you what is worth automating, and what is not.
A fixed price, quoted in writing before we start, and a straight answer within 24 hours.
— Christopher Myers, Founder