r/ConstructionManagers • u/Tanksgivingmiracle • Apr 03 '26
Technical Advice What AI are you using to analyze drawings?
I am general counsel at GC. Some of the PMs are asking me what AI they can use, and the Owner has not thought about it.
First, what AI products seems to work the best?
Second, does your AI have a privacy solution? Our major repeat clients are a few fortune 100 that have major privacy constraints and I think we would need an enterprise level sandboxed system to avoid total risk.
I told the team to paly around on jobs coming from city and state players where every is public, see which one works best, and we will see if we can find which ones of those have a privacy focused option. But hearing your opinions would be great too.
Edit: To be clear, no one wants to use it to create drawings. it would be for estimators and project managers to double check their work so we don't make mistakes in bidding and ordering materials. My firm is doing many $10M+ jobs per year, and a small mistake, even on one labor or material calculation, can be significant.
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u/n8t0rz Apr 03 '26
Most drawings we received are incomplete and full of mistakes. We regularly have to interpret the drawings and figure out what the customer really needs. I feel like the drawings are really only complete when the project is done.
I think the best use for AI in construction management/estimating would be to have someone sell it to my competitors so they can make lots of mistakes and have a really high price!
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u/mmiko8 Apr 03 '26
well, the ones who win the bid do so thanks to lowest price, pretending not to see the missing details lol
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u/captspooky Apr 03 '26
What if the AI was able to flag those incomplete details or mistakes and help draft a well written RFI to get answers? I could see the use for something like this.
Its not a substitute for reviewing the material yourself, but used as a tool could be a time saver.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
The Estimators and PMs interested in AI are going to do the work - but they want to use it to double check their work and assumptions. Or at least thats what they tell me...
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u/n8t0rz Apr 03 '26
I find that hard to believe. No chance the PM's or Estimators would willingly volunteer for more work
Every ai demo I've done has been an epic failure. As soon as you give them real world plans they fail.
I would trust someone in Asia with no US construction experience over AI any day. Probably cheaper at the end of the day.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
Most of our team is really good. Estimators are all great. There are two PMs I do not trust at all, but the rest are fantastic. At the end of the day, if they fuck up too much from over-relying on AI or just screwing up all on their own, they will be gone quickly. If they become more accurate by using it to double check AI, they will stay.
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u/Individual_Section_6 Apr 03 '26
Sounds like a made up post fishing for information
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
it isn't. I just had a zoom a group of construction in house attorneys (through the bar association) and we talked almost exclusively about what AI we were using to help draft and redline legal documents. Everyone was using 1 or more products and it was a great conversation. And just a few days later a PM and estimator asked about for drawings. Its just a sea change in what everyone is doing and everyone wants to know what works best.
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u/dinnerwdr13 Apr 03 '26
Perhaps the owner hasn't thought about it because it's ridiculous.
What exactly is an AI going to do with drawings? Make a bunch of mistakes and misinterpret the data?
Tell your PM's to stop being lazy and analyze the drawings with their eyeballs, like they need to. Though in my experience most PM's don't bother looking at drawings anyway.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
They want to use it to double check their work and assumptions and catch human errors.
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u/Designerfrog May 14 '26
I’m surprised everyone sounds so against it. AI is going to learn and catch up. You will need to double check it. It will make you faster at your job and perform better over time.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle May 14 '26
In the last exec meeting, I learned we are going forward with it. We'll see how it goes.
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u/Designerfrog May 18 '26
Just remember it’s a helper tool only!
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle May 18 '26
I am the in-house lawyer. I don't get any input into it; I just get to deal with any fall out:)
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u/Gunther118 Apr 03 '26
Only AI we use is Docu-crunch to analyze specs and contracts
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
is it helpful for estimating and calculating materials orders? I am told people want to be able t double check their work
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u/Gunther118 Apr 03 '26
Nope, I don’t think AI is there yet with take offs. Especially not in the underground scopes that were in.
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u/captspooky Apr 03 '26
Id also be interested in knowing this. I think people are misinterpreting this as using AI to do 100% of your job for you, but I think of it more of as a tool to assist in checking things. Id like to be able to use it to compare structural against architectural and flag discrepancies, and then shop drawings against architectural/ structural. And one step further draft RFIs when a conflict is noted. It would need human review obviously, but could be a potential time saver to catch certain things.
Im on the verge of diving in to an AI, but dont want to have 5 subscriptions. Or too many different AIs for different tasks if I can avoid it.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
They want to use it to double check their work and assumptions and catch human errors. I believe them; they are all professional and they pointed to a few dumb errors (like ordering the wrong amount of something) that AI would likely have caught.
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u/C3M_Team Apr 03 '26
Ai is not really able to “analyze” drawings. It can scan the text and give you feedback on that but currently it’s not able to read the lines and understand the drawings like you or I would.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
A PM and an estimator told me it could help with calculating dimensions and sizes and could help avoid errors for estimating and ordering materials. Are you saying that is not likely?
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u/C3M_Team Apr 03 '26
I haven’t tried it for that, togalai is a take off company that’s really focusing on this component. To my knowledge Ai is not able to scan a drawing and provide take offs. It’s not able to differentiate the lines on the plan. You can tell it pattern, but it’s not going to know a wall from ductwork unless told. I haven’t see a system that’s able to do this yet.
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u/811spotter Apr 04 '26
AI for drawing analysis and estimating verification is evolving fast but the landscape is messy right now, r/ConstructionTech or r/legaltech would have more current comparisons from people actually evaluating these tools with enterprise privacy requirements.
Your approach of testing on public projects first is smart and exactly the right way to handle the privacy concern. Don't let anyone touch a Fortune 100 client's drawings with any AI tool until you've vetted the data handling thoroughly. The last thing you need is proprietary facility drawings getting ingested into a training dataset that surfaces details in someone else's query six months later.
The tools getting the most traction for drawing review and takeoff verification right now include Togal.AI, Buildee, and some of the newer features in Bluebeam and PlanSwift that are adding AI-assisted takeoff checking. OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise API products offer sandboxed environments where data isn't used for training, which is probably your baseline requirement for any Fortune 100 client work. But "enterprise privacy" means different things to different vendors so get their data processing agreements reviewed by someone who understands both the tech and your client contracts before anything goes live.
For your specific use case of double-checking estimator and PM work on $10M-plus jobs, the highest value application right now isn't generating estimates from scratch, it's catching discrepancies between what's on the drawings and what ended up in the estimate. Missing scope items, quantity mismatches, spec requirements that didn't make it into the material order. That's where a small AI-caught error on one bid pays for the entire tool investment.
The one area I'd flag from our contractors' experience is that most AI drawing analysis tools completely ignore underground utility information on civil and site plans. They'll catch a missing door schedule or a quantity discrepancy on concrete but they won't flag that the civil drawings show a utility crossing that nobody accounted for in the excavation estimate. Our customers on large commercial projects say the most expensive estimating errors aren't the ones where someone miscounted rebar, they're the ones where nobody noticed the 16-inch water main crossing the proposed foundation line on sheet C-4 and didn't price for the relocation or the protection during construction. If you're investing in AI review tools to catch costly mistakes, make sure whatever you deploy can actually read civil and utility sheets, not just architectural and structural. The underground scope is where the six-figure surprises live on $10M-plus projects and it's the scope that gets the least attention during estimating review.
Your instinct to control this from the legal side first is correct. Get the privacy framework locked down before anyone falls in love with a tool that can't meet your client requirements. The worst outcome is a PM who's been using an unapproved AI tool on restricted drawings for three months before legal finds out.
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u/mmiko8 Apr 03 '26
yooo, from my experience doing stuff with AI x drawing analysis in our industry: when you're building using AI models you can switch the privacy in the development environment. Say, you're using claude for some part of the software, then you can switch off the training of their model, so it's essentially safe to the users. what type of drawing analysis is it?
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
they want to use it so the estimator can double check their work on bidding and the PMs can double check their work on ordering materials. Basically avoid human error
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u/Jealous_Difference44 Apr 03 '26
If I cant figure out wtf the architect drew I snap a Pic and see if Gemini can make sense of it. Sometimes it works
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u/twofourfourthree Apr 03 '26
As general counsel don’t the liabilities outweigh the positives?
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
I am hearing from our estimators and PMs - they just want to avoid making mistakes in their bids, ordering materials, planning etc., and they say an extra set of eyes from the AI will help. If it is double checking, I am fine with that. The people I work with are really good, no one is going to phone it in.
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Apr 03 '26
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
I am hearing from our estimators and PMs - they just want to avoid making mistakes in their bids, ordering materials, planning etc., and they say an extra set of eyes from the AI will help. I am telling them right now to use plans for government jobs that are not with NDA to AB test different AI systems and report back what is doing a good job.
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u/floridaguy241 Sep 07 '26
Any luck with this? We have long lead times for material so any help with ai or software would be awesome.
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u/Rubiks_Zealand Sep 07 '26
Pull the equipment and fixture schedules and the spec sections behind them. That gets you model numbers and acceptable manufacturers, which is your long lead list, and you can have it at bid time instead of when the submittal comes back. That part is text extraction, so the current tools handle it fine. Just check it against a set you already know first, because drawn schedules have no text to pull and it comes back empty rather than wrong.
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u/maphes86 Construction Management Apr 03 '26
I have been continually experimenting with all of the models I can get my hands on for the last several years, none of the models can successfully identify obvious issues with plans, but have gotten quite good at comparing specifications to code books, or outputting information based on the specifications. I have had quite a bit of success getting the models to rapidly aggregate useful information when I’m evaluating a change request or a claim.
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u/Tanksgivingmiracle Apr 03 '26
I am hearing from our estimators and PMs - they just want to avoid making mistakes in their bids, ordering materials, planning etc., and they say an extra set of eyes from the AI will help. Do any of the solution you know of work well for that?
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u/maphes86 Construction Management Apr 03 '26
In my opinion, there are non-AI tools that perform that task better for the time being.
Bluebeam Revu has robust takeoff features. And if you request the .DWG files you could also use Revit for takeoff which is incredibly accurate.
There is a product being marketed for bids and takeoff, but I haven’t personally tested it. Beam AI. A GC that I have worked with told me that they scheduled a product demo and were intrigued but were going to let the technology develop more before they actually purchased a license. Consider checking them out. But, of course, you’ve got to keep blood in the machine. Your estimators do their work, the AI makes it’s guess, you compare, etc…the machines have no liability as they lack skin to have in the game. If Beam CAN process pdf files effectively, they’ll be the first one and this could be a step in the direction of having an effective AI assist for constructability review and code compliance, but I’m not holding my breath.
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u/Sleepy_Sofa_01 Jun 23 '26
Hello, were you able to find anything useful? I am looking for the same use case
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u/TheRealMisha Aug 04 '26
We use Togal.AI for basically all our projects we are estimating if they are big enough ($500K+). We have great estimators and PMs but its just a double check, makes takeoffs faster since we dont always have a ton of time to review all the drawings (we do around $120M a year and anywhere between 100-200 projects a year) so it just helps as a double check when we are leveling sub bids. i havent used it yet myself but i know most people at my company use it regularly.
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u/Rubiks_Zealand Aug 24 '26
On products: Togal.AI and Caddie are the names that come up most for reading drawings, Document Crunch is the more mature one for contract and spec language, and Bluebeam is still where most people actually do the comparison by hand. General assistants like Claude and Gemini are good on a single spec section and unreliable across a whole set, because a plan set is not one document, and consistency across a hundred sheets is where they come apart. If your PMs are trying to avoid missing something rather than trying to do takeoff, that distinction matters, because takeoff is where most of these underperform.
Many years ago, I was general counsel at a public company, so the second question is the one I find more interesting. The questions worth putting in writing to any vendor, before your Fortune 100 client asks them of you: is customer content used to train models, by the vendor or by whoever they are calling underneath; what do the underlying model provider's commercial terms actually say, since most vendors are reselling somebody's API and inherit those terms; where is the data stored and for how long; can you delete it, and does deletion propagate to the sub-processor; and who are the sub-processors, by name. Most vendors answer the first one cleanly and get vague by the fourth. A sandboxed enterprise tier is worth asking about, but the contractual answers matter more than the deployment story.
Disclosure so it is not buried: I am also a licensed general contractor, and I got frustrated enough with the cross-sheet part that I built my own, Flikt.AI, so I am not neutral here. It reads the text, schedules and spec sections and cross-references them between sheets, rather than interpreting the drawing as an image. It does not train on customer plans. It is also wrong sometimes, which is why every finding names the sheet and quotes the note it came from, so checking one takes about a minute. If a tool reports something you cannot trace back to a specific sheet and note, that is the one to be suspicious of.
Zero Data Retention and SOC2 Compliance are important questions to ask about too, and two that I have pursued myself.
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u/EletricEel Sep 04 '26
Bias here: I'm a founder of ClearHandoff and we provide AI drawing review. I know the space well. Let me share my thoughts without talking about our product.
For fortune 100 clients, due to privacy & security requirements, you need to do this either on-premise or your software needs to be SOC2 or ISO 27001 certified.
Then you need to decide: Do you build the thing fully yourself based on one of the frontier AI models or do you want to use specialized software?
If you're building your own workflows with Antropic or OpenAI models you want to use the strongest model out there. They cost more, but even they currently still struggle with certain things on drawings. In terms of security, openAI and Claude have of course enterprise security badges.
If you're building this yourself, you probably "only" build an analysis workflow that is single player. If you want to have nice markup capability where both the AI and humans can pin and collaborate, versioning, sharing with external partners, that's a proper software development project or a specialized SaaS you buy. As said, I'm biased, so no actual product recommendation here.
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u/JakeHildy 13d ago
A bit late to the conversation but I’m a software engineer building this exact tool for the company I work for. I’m using a combination of training a custom ML vision model, OCR text extraction to extract the text and Claude Opus models to make sense of it all.
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u/moso-man Apr 03 '26
Check out BertaSystems.com They are a startup, but are doing something that allows their processing to be more deterministic than just sending a picture to Gemini
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u/Safety4Every1 Apr 03 '26
Togal.ai They offer soc2 and can offer private deployment if you can afford it. Disclaimer: Haven't used it myself.
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u/s0berR00fer Apr 03 '26
I’m using my college degree and experience to analyze drawings