For commercial builders and project teams
Margin does not leak out of the build. It leaks out of the paperwork.
The concrete went in fine. The frame went up on program. What cost you was an unregistered variation, a claim that went in short, and a fortnight of someone senior assembling a defects list from four phones.
None of that is a construction problem. It is a document problem, and document problems are the ones this technology is actually good at.
Where it actually goes
Four failures, all of them administrative, all of them expensive, and every one of them familiar to anyone who has run a commercial job.
The variation nobody wrote down
A consultant answers an RFI, and buried in the response is a change of scope. Nobody registers it as a variation. Six weeks later the work is done, unpaid, and the argument is about what an email meant in March.
The subbie whose insurance lapsed
Certificates were current at induction. One expired in month four. Nobody was watching the expiry dates because they live in a folder, and now there is an incident and a coverage question.
The claim that went in short
Approved variations existed, in the CA's inbox, in a meeting minute and in a marked-up drawing. Two of the three never made it into the progress claim, and by the time anyone noticed the window had passed.
The defect list assembled at handover
Photos on four phones, notes in two notebooks and a spreadsheet somebody started in week nine. Assembling it takes a week of someone senior, and the items that get missed come back during the defects liability period.
What we are not proposing
Not replacing your project management platform. Procore, Aconex, Cheops, Jobpac, whatever you run — it stays. We read from it and write back to it.
Not making contractual decisions. Whether something is claimable, whether to issue a notice, whether to dispute — your CA decides, with the relevant clause already in front of them.
Not a site app for the crew. This is back-of-house. The people whose day changes sit in an office with a contract open on one screen and an inbox on the other.
Where teams usually start
One area, one project, measured against how it is done now. Nobody should commit a whole business to this before seeing it work on a live job.
Questions
No, and it usually sits alongside them. Those are systems of record — they hold the RFI, the drawing, the claim. What they do not do is read a 40-page consultant response and tell you which two paragraphs changed your scope. That reading is the work we automate, on top of whatever you already use.
No. Ripping out a project management platform mid-job is a terrible idea and we would not propose it. We read from what you have and write back into it.
Completely different problem. ai-tradies.au is for an owner-operator missing calls while on the tools. This is for a project team on a multi-million-dollar contract drowning in documents. Different buyer, different failure mode, no overlap.
No. It reads, extracts, cross-references and flags. Whether a variation is claimable, whether to issue a notice, whether to dispute a claim — those stay with your CA and your lawyer. The value is that they are deciding with the relevant clause already in front of them instead of hunting for it.
Every state has its own regime with its own timeframes, and missing one can cost you the money entirely. We do not interpret the legislation for you. What we do is make sure a claim landing in an inbox is registered and surfaced the same day rather than found a fortnight later, which is the realistic failure.
Broadly, projects where a contract administrator exists as a role. Below that the document volume usually does not justify it, and we will say so.