Construction
A general contractor makes or loses money on the changes that pass between companies
The AI Business Center Foundation (AIBC) is a think tank and advisory partner that helps the boards of construction, industrial and technical-services companies adopt artificial intelligence so that it delivers measurable results and builds competitive advantage. For general contractors we start with the flow of changes and queries on a contract.
The programme is no longer the main risk on a contract. Information that did not arrive has become the main risk
In practice, a general contractor is an integrator of information: it translates the requirements of the investor and the designer into subcontractors’ scopes, and their work back into reports for the investor. Every change passes through several companies, several documents and several systems. The margin on a contract depends to a large extent on how many of these changes are correctly passed on, priced and settled.
How cost and risk arise
- an investor’s change that does not reach the subcontractor in time and ends in rework on site,
- an order scope that the contractor and the subcontractor understand differently,
- technical queries whose answer exists, but in a different correspondence thread,
- records and reports that cannot be matched against the programme without manual work,
- knowledge of how the company runs a contract that depends on a few experienced managers.
AI tools speed up writing at each of these points. Without shared names and process owners, they also speed up the creation of discrepancies.
The bid department increasingly works with descriptions and schedules whose first version was drafted by an AI assistant, on the side of the contracting authority, the designer or the company itself. Standards, classes and parameters in such a draft have to be checked just as in a document written from scratch, because an error will pass into the bid and then into the contract. We describe the phenomenon in the analysis Specifications drafted by language models.
The first step
One contract and one process: the flow of queries and changes. We measure the time from request to decision and the number of follow-up queries, describe the process with the contract manager, agree a vocabulary of contract terms (scope, change, instruction, acceptance) and specify a pilot for the IT department.
What the Foundation does
- 30-day readiness assessment: a readiness scorecard for the office and the site, a prioritised list of processes, a pilot specification.
- Semantic transformation, that is, organising a company’s names, processes and data so that people, language models and board reports understand them the same way: a contract vocabulary shared by bid preparation, work preparation, the site and billing.
- GenAI competence: programmes for contract managers, site engineers and the bid department, built on documents from the company’s own contracts.
- AI value report for the board: time in the process, follow-up queries, rework, cost per task.
Frequently asked questions
Which general contractor process is suitable for a first pilot?
The flow of queries and changes on one contract: from a subcontractor's question or an investor's change, through the decision, to the update of the programme and the scope. The process has an owner, recurs on every site and can be measured by the time from request to decision.
Can AI prepare a claim or a response to a claim?
It can help gather and organise documents, the chronology and the correspondence, provided they are described consistently. The content of the position and the decision belong to the contract manager and the lawyer. The greatest value comes earlier: an organised flow of changes reduces the number of disputes.
Whom in a contracting firm does the assessment involve?
The board member responsible for operations, the manager of one contract as the process owner, people from bid preparation, work preparation and billing, and 20–30 office and site staff in the workshops.
Let’s start with an assessment
Let’s talk about one contract on which the flow of changes is worth measuring.