Coincidentally, yesterday I had a client meeting and they ask for exactly that. I'm working as lead developer for https://howie.systems and we are building a co-pilot (knowledge platform) for the AEC industry.
Would love to have a talk. Your product could save us lot's of work!
- You’re right, data is very hard to come by. I’m curious, how do you plan to get around this? Outsourcing human labeling? We found it to be a very difficult task.
- The subcontractors and local construction companies we talked to were overwhelming excited about the idea.
- It’s entire people’s jobs to get this done and done correctly. They sit on site holding the pdfs in their hands, manually counting and calculating. You bet a lot of mistakes occur. They would absolutely love to have a digital assistant for this.
- Some of them (especially managers and owners) are quite technical and are using software such as BlueBeam and other CAD software to make these calculations. It’s quite manual currently, but gives great insight into a better solution. This led us to having the user manually select the symbol they wanted counted (which ML struggled to get right). Just getting the part counts (and highlighting them in the pdf) was a huge help!
- Impressive you got square footage calculations correct! In our experience, there was way too much variation between architects (and multistep dimension labeling) which made it hard (even for humans) to get right. How has your model generalized OOD thus far?
- Are you planning to integrate voice? Many of the subcontractors we worked with are very low tech. They usually talk with their clients in person, on the phone, or maybe text. But they don’t use email or their smart phones for much.
I will be following your work! I have friends who would love to use this once it passes the human threshold.
I'm asking because even though I am (mostly) technically illiterate I have asked both ChatGPT and Claude to help me build a scraper for construction material costs, from the suppliers we use, that can be updated in realtime or at least monthly. Haven't done anything with those instructions yet, but I would love nothing more than to use a tool that we could feed a blueprint into and then would tell me, with "laser-focus accuracy" <smile> how many x's the project would need and the costs. Even better yet if it could compare costs from suppliers and guide us to the lowest-cost supplier.
Edit: oh, while you're thinking of replying, how high fidelity do the blueprints need to be? Again, I'm sure you specify somewhere, but too lazy to find it. How far along the spectrum from "drawn on a napkin" to "fully standardized" do you accept?
For the second question, it really is most accurate on "fully standardized" blueprints due to our training distribution. Will work on improving that as well!
Best of luck with the business (and with getting to know the corp dev people at Autodesk/Procore/etc.--sorry, couldn't help myself!).
You'd still need people to check what actually got installed, so that you can bill for it. Like, there's only so much you can determine off the plans.
And what happens if (when) the plans are wrong or impractical?
My Dad worked in construction for his career, and I did briefly, and there's generally a lot of stuff that needs to be figured out on site due to physical or logistical constraints.
Sounds like this is just for homebuilding though, which is a much easier problem.
Separately, it seems like it would be incredibly useful to use your models in various embodied carbon estimation tooling and other decarbonization research streams. Have you thought about partnering with any academic researchers on this? If you are interested, let me know, as I can definitely connect you with a bunch of researchers who would be interested!
The benefit of estimating quantities and cost cycles in with pre-con and business development, the artifacts during the pre-con design phase tend to be different than the takeoff artifacts which are often transformed through BIM.
Did you learn something to the contrary? Or are you purposely targeting smaller firms and projects that don't use Bim and maybe won't for a long time?
BIM and other standardization is really the correct answer to this problem. This is a stop gap to cover for when/if that ever gets widely adopted.
On the other side, architects are using Revit more and more and takeoffs like square footage of flooring are accurate and take no time at all. That's another industry slow to change and that used to take more effort so many architects aren't providing that information to their clients, but technically there's nothing preventing it. There's a bit more hand waving when it comes to calculating number of studs etc, but that is pretty straightforward as well.
Source: I'm funemployed as a drafter for a local architect after 25 years in software.
Here are things to consider:
Experienced builders don't care about the takeoffs on a big picture basis, the takeoffs are usually wrong, even if perfectly done. In our experience half of drawings we receive, are heavily revised by the order is approved (heavily revised meaning over 10% has changed). EWP, structural metal need to be accurate but framing lumber, and sheet good can be off on counts at the lift quantity (+-1 lift for an average house).
Suppliers aren't responsible for the takeoff so the amount the quote is negligible (see drawing revisions, and trades can misallocate the materials - This can't be reasonably traced). Over? The customer ends up paying less, under? The customer pays more. This has been universal where I am (Ontario, Canada).
A large minority of plans are missing key elements (like sheer walls), pointing out, and showing these differences would be a big value add for the consumer (contractors using the materials) by the supplier.
Good customers understand that lumber is a commodity, a lower price this week can flip next week, and they'll contact their preferred vendor about the differences.
There's always a preferred vendor.
Not great customers will shoot drawing off to multiple suppliers, causing them all to do the same takeoff, wasting time, and money, only to deal with the same issues above. They'll still go back to their preferred vendor to get the lowest price.
Summary of the above is: EWP, and structural metal are key items because they rarely change, framing lumber, and sheathing requirements change all the time. What you're looking at is helping suppliers capture the bad customers (which are often the biggest, to be clear), but saving suppliers the time handling them is great. Also, accuracy, and pricing isn't that important (with caveats).
This isn't a statistically significant sample size, consider it anecdotal.
As a side point - sometimes the shady lumberyards do bid too low on purpose to win business. Then later have the contractor submit a change order. This often hurts their reputation unless the contractor is in on it to win a bid. The supplier doesn’t tend to lose money though as the bid is for the quantity of materials.
You could turn this into a selling point. As in, helping a contractor or competing supplier verify the takeoff.
I agree with your point, having a second, impartial source is important to confirm the ballpark.
If owners/developers understood this they could create contract structures that incentivize more fluid data collaboration aka the quantity take offs automatically generate as you are designing.
Pragmatically though in the current AEC landscape there is still a need for 2D QTO, nice work
It looks like your launch is opening this up to the general public - why not niche down to GCs? Maybe the launch is focused on simply gathering more blueprint data to feed your models?
Estimators miss things ALL THE TIME. It's the subject of seemingly endless in-house arguments between PMs and Estimators:)
One thing I've been thinking about is if you could use a model like this as the first pass for permitters (Like a GitHub Actions CI/CD) who review blueprints.
Many developers use the regulatory side of various engineering approval processes as a quality control check which costs money and time for the regulator who is tasked with enforcing a standard.
It would also be good to speed up the workflow for developers saying hey, this thing looks weird did you really mean to do this?
And then further on, you could add a way to check it for constructability. My framer friends often get annoyed at whatever engineer because the way the structure is designed is materially inefficient or hard to construct.
What's crazy about this is that the AI revolution is going nuts. We've started with Steel and customers who would traditionally bid on paper are now jumping straight to AI takeoffs. The impact is real.
One customer recently told us that he was able to bid on $200M more than he would have been able to otherwise: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7300899.... That's a couple of million in revenue that they would have worked away from because of capacity constraints.