Short answer: Eldar Sadikov says 80% of customers are specialized commercial trade subcontractors, such as electrical, mechanical, concrete and drywall, building hospitals and data centers. Most still rely on emails, spreadsheets and manual data entry.
Watch this answer from Episode 33 (starts at 7:12) · Episode 33 notes and transcript
From Episode 33: AI Is Transforming Construction — We’re Entering a Golden Era, starting at 7:12.
Jordan Metzner [7:12]: Awesome. And can you tell us a little bit about like I mean, I guess your customers are maybe large contractors or large builders, or are they kind of project management companies or even material providers? Tell us a little bit about who's using it and like, again, I mean, there's construction, everything from, building a barbecue in your backyard to, obviously, like the World Trade Center, so everything in between. But, yeah, tell us a little bit about who's using it and kind of, where they found the best use cases for.
Eldar Sadikov [7:38]: Yeah. Our primary customers are, I would say, two camps. I would say 80% of our customer base is specialized trade subcontractors, but commercial subcontractors. So I wanna say that this is not your you know, don't think of it as residential contractors that do your home renovation, let's say. Think about commercial contractors that build hospitals, data centers, big office buildings, and in that segment, think about specific specialized trade subs like the electrical contractor, mechanical contractor that does all the hvac and plumbing, the concrete contractor, the drywall contractor. So those guys they do this massive project where they buy lots and lots of materials, thousands or hundreds of different and that's that's our primary customer base, and they and especially with the some of the latest trends in the industry where they build in this massive data centers, the size of Manhattan or you know, billions of dollars, they have very very aggressive timelines to build those projects. And they really need desperately need automation tools to streamline the whole process of procurement, what are we buying, when is that shipping, what have we received, have we paid for this, make sure that we're we're actually using the correct price and that we pre negotiate upfront. All those things that that go into procurement inventory, what's sitting in our yard, what's sitting in our warehouse, all those pieces, prefabrication, what are we prefabricated off-site, know, what are we delivering onto the site. So all this steps and AI is a big element of what we do in this because we automate so many so much of many of these workflows.
Jordan Metzner [9:19]: Yeah. I mean, I guess I didn't know the industry that well, but I presume even today that's still done a lot by pen and paper and spreadsheets and clipboards and things like that?
Eldar Sadikov [9:26]: Yeah. Most of this, the way it's done now in the industry, it's a lot of it is is emails, spreadsheets, and manual data entry into the underlying accounting software. So, even if you put it into the accounting software because it has to be done manually, somebody has to actually type every single line item with all the quantities, all the units of measurements into the you know, on premise a lot of times office software, and we automate all of that. So we basically take that work that has to be done by someone entering all this information, we automate the data entry and we automate all the verification steps so that you still have a human in the loop, but you take that that that busy work or that that that work that everybody hates. Nobody likes data entry if you talk to people, or nobody likes going and verifying is this correct or not. And that's what we do as a company and alleviate a lot of this pain.
