Short answer: Tristan Wilson says he once submitted a $6.5 million airport bid 19 seconds late that would have won. He says contractors leave about 8% on the table on average, and AI can now parse documents with human-level accuracy.
Watch this answer from Episode 16 (starts at 8:05) · Episode 16 notes and transcript
From Episode 16: AI Agents Reinvent Construction, starting at 8:05.
Tristan Wilson [8:05]: So that's really important. And then the other part, the other challenge is, like, if you miss a small detail and I actually have a horror story about this. So I was the estimator on a six and a half million dollar airport bid, and I missed a small requirement in the bid form so that we had to submit something from our subcontractors, and they did it in an addendum, which is like a change kinda last minute. And I messed up, and I got all the forms late. And I submitted my bid, which was 6 and a half million dollars nineteen seconds late, and we would have had low bid and won the job. And it really, really, really burned. And those are the types of things that that that happen and that should never, right, should never happen again. So there's that. And then there's also, like, figuring out how to price the jobs. There's, like, market information that's out there. And if you in an ideal world, you would try to predict what do you think the competitors are gonna do because in low bid construction, you don't get any multiple shots at it. You get one shot. So everybody submits their bid. They open the bids up. It's called ribbon read, and you either won or you didn't.
Tristan Wilson [9:11]: And, also, there's a big amount of money that gets left on the table in between first and second place. So those are kinda like the three things that, that we really help people with, and they're really expensive challenges. So, like, if you got a five person estimating team that spends 20% of their time on spec review, that's a $100,000 that you're investing in that every year. If you miss one small qualification on a bid, that could cost you million a million or millions dollars worth of work, and you leave about, 8% on the table on average on a lot of the public work. So, what's different now, like, what's changed is that AI can now, like, parse and understand documents with human level like accuracy, and it was not able to do this, a couple of years ago, and now it can.
