I’ve seen $200m+ projects run on Excel. And it works Hey everybody, I’ve been ignoring my email newsletter, and I wanted to put some time and effort into restructuring and improving it. It had become secondary to my YouTube videos. So I’ve decided to give it a big reboot. Each week I want to deliver three things: 1. News - keep you up to date with the latest developments in AI and construction 2. Inform - share some insightful stat, insight or study that changes the way you think 3. Work - deliver one perspective, process or demonstration that improves the way you work I have two goals for this: 1. Encourage people to use the massive amount of free resources in Contractors Hub. I’ve added tons of sample projects, tutorials, templates, guidebooks, and I’d love to encourage people to use it. 2. Build a newsletter that distils everything I’m learning I'll try to keep everything very short and to the point. Obviously, if you don’t want to receive them, just click unsubscribe below And if you want to comment or follow the discussion, you can comment along on the accompanying post each week: News: What happened this week 1. Lots of new models (as always). Sonnet 5.5 appears to be the standout. Topping our drawing analysis and take-off benchmark, and it’s really cheap to run. Seems like a great model. 2. ChatGPT Dots dropped. From my testing, it is a worse version of GrokBot. GrokBot is great btw; I have been using it every day. 3. A construction contractor’s AI roll-out exposed huge document-control problems. The biggest challenge to the roll-out was conflicting file names, duplicate documents and unclear revisions. I have had the exact same experience experimenting with ChatGPT/Claude co-work. File names and folder structures matter. Quite an interesting article: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/ai-doesnt-fix-data-problem-construction-need-unified-language/831774/

Using AI to review is a great way to start and gaps in an estimate are cheaper to find before you submit than after you've won the job and are building them at your own cost. I gave Claude the bid folder, including the estimate and a register of all requirements in the documents. It came back with 26 items that weren't ready to go. The four checks: - Is everything priced? - Is anything priced twice? - Does the maths tie? - Do the price and programme match the contract? I don't blindly fix all 26 it's a starting point into what to look into more deeply into. There will be some that I know where sorted somehwre else but more than likely they'll be a couple of good catches. If you want to grab the skill used you'll find it in our community ContractorOS. I go through the whole thing in the video.

For me, time management and prioritization is the clear winner. At the end of the day there is always more work than time Choosing the right task to focus on is always going to be the most important thing. In this video, I tried to explain the concept with an example from one of the worst projects I've worked on

A PM's week mostly goes on admin, like minutes, registers, reports and chasing people, and on the surprises nobody picked up until they cost days and money. AI is good at the admin, and set up properly it helps with the surprises too. You don't need to start with anything fancy. I'd build up in this order: - Give it one job, like turning a meeting transcript into action items or a first pass on a submittal review. - Connect a Claude or ChatGPT project to a desktop copy of your job folder. It finds the LDs itself and pulls the spec and site diaries into an RFI draft. - Have it review your work. Check a bid against the spec for anything missed, or list the week's must-do actions. - Turn the jobs you repeat into skills, saved step-by-step instructions with your templates that the AI follows every time. - Schedule the ones that keep track of things, like a daily register pass that proposes updates for you to approve. My first must-do list came back far too wordy. Start with a short prompt anyway and tune it from there. Once you have a few skills, one's output feeds the next. I check each before it moves on, because you're responsible for what goes out. I go through the whole thing in the video.

The term operating system gets thrown around a lot. It makes sense if you work with AI every day, less so if you're in construction and super busy. The benefits of having one are very real though. At its core it's bringing your business context, projects, history and processes together so the AI knows what you want, where to find it and how to use it every time. Think of a new site engineer. With no walkthrough, no SharePoint access and no past examples, their first site report is going to be pretty bad. Give them all of that and they'll do a pretty good job. It comes down to four parts: - The tool, usually Claude or ChatGPT - Context, so it knows your business, projects, team and where everything lives - Memory, so what happens on Friday is known on Monday - Workflows, how your business actually runs, captured in skills You're still doing the thinking, the AI just pulls out the information and drafts it up. I go through what it looks like for construction in this video. https://youtu.be/_h891ucQ898