The superintendent stops his site walk. A puzzled concrete contractor is wandering around with a tape measure. What’s the spacing spec on these bollards?
The answer sits somewhere in the 500-page spec book, but who has time to look? Together, they take measurements. Two valuable people waste 15 minutes, literally “pulling tape” to guesstimate data buried somewhere in their own systems.
At Procore's 2026 Innovation Summit, Thiago Da Costa, Senior VP of AI & Data at Procore, pointed out that these moments add up.
Specifically, he said that project teams lose an average of three hours a day to manual tasks. He added that these stoppages are the backbone of the productivity crisis costing construction $1.8 trillion in rework and operational drag every year.
Agentic AI can help reduce costs. It helps to prevent experienced talent from devolving into highly paid data retrievers.
Using AI, top general contractors are replacing simple data storage with systematic, real-time guidance that drives faster, smarter decisions—letting their best teams get back to what's really important.
Pulling teeth: The daily grind of digging up data
Even tech-enabled field teams squander time clawing information from fragmented emails, cloud storage, and point solutions.
One person taking 10 minutes to search for specs five times a day consumes 50 minutes. Multiply by 10 people doing the same, and a full day goes down the drain. Then add overhead costs from your highest-paid leaders double-checking the information.
Rework and waste eat up roughly 35% of construction costs, Da Costa says. The problem festers unchecked because field teams are pressured to find answers fast. Construction generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and they just can’t keep pace.
“In a world where we’re facing a major labor shortage, we cannot afford to waste the time of skilled professionals on data entry and information hunting.”
– Thiago da Costa, Senior VP, Data & AI, Procore Technologies
Don’t just store data—execute on it
Simple cloud storage holds your data. Generative AI summarizes it. Agentic AI acts on it.
Construction-specific agents make project data easier to find and act on. These digital co-workers can scour spec books, find and analyze drawings, and help uncover discrepancies before they force costly rework.
You can use AI to:
Quickly verify a spec: AI agents quickly grab those bollard specs with their linked drawings. Progress is confirmed or risk averted.
Proactively prevent delays: Next week’s light fixtures won’t arrive on time. AI agents can be used to draft an RFI or submittal request for the PM’s review to help get alternative local fixtures approved faster.
Check submittals: An APM quickly uploads a trade partner’s submittal and checks compliance. Less time spent combing through the submittal and pondering over a response.
Put the right tools in your peoples’ hands
Avoid the narrow AI packages that solve only a fraction of problems while creating new ones. Also, steer clear of overly general AI that isn’t tailored to building.
Competitive GCs deploy construction-specific tools like Procore AI to connect drawings, contracts, and schedules to power real-time field execution.
Agentic AI purpose-built for construction is trained on industry workflows and contextual data. By analyzing project data, it can help teams make sense of that information and leverage it to take action.
Your best talent wins back the time to focus on high-value strategy, quality builds, and mentoring the next generation.
You lead the pack.
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