Short answer: Tristan Wilson says agents trained on civil construction data pull out key information for human review. One estimator's two hours of typing bid items from three bid forms into Excel became two minutes and a CSV export.
Watch this answer from Episode 16 (starts at 10:00) · Episode 16 notes and transcript
From Episode 16: AI Agents Reinvent Construction, starting at 10:00.
Tristan Wilson [9:59]: And I think a lot of people, they hear that, think that, okay. Well, this is gonna all of a sudden, like, replace estimators, but that's actually not what we're seeing at all. We're actually seeing that these tools can actually just make estimators a lot better, improve their, quality of life, and basically make their lives a lot easier. So part of how we're able to do that is through AI agents. So, basically, these AI agents are the way it works is I have a bunch of bid documents. I upload those bid documents into Edgevanta, and then I have a bunch of AI agents that go through and parse through the documents and are trained on civil construction data, and they basically help me pull out all the important information out of the document. And then I review that. I am the, what's referred to as human in the loop. You guys are familiar with this, but I check that as I'm doing it. And a small example, like, was sitting with somebody in South Carolina last week.
Tristan Wilson [10:58]: She was working on a bid. She had three different bid forms. And the way that she would have to do this in the past is she would have to literally upload the p she would have to get the PDFs side by side and then type in into an Excel document because these are not formatted in a really good way. And that that could take two hours to type every single one of the bid items for the three bid forms. With our platform, she uploads the documents, presses a button, and there's an agent that's designed specifically to do that, go extract all those items, and she can literally press two buttons and exports it in a CSV. That two hours, gone. You can do it in a matter of two minutes. And then you can spend time on the stuff that really matters, which is like, how do I go build this job in the most cost efficient way and make sure that I have, a compliant bid? So that's kinda one small example of kinda the broader picture of how do we get people time back in their day with the help of AI. And then the second part of it is how do we make sure that we, like, win jobs but leave as little money on the table as possible?
