Great points, I share similar skepticsm with the 96%. Most of the marketed "AI solutions" are surface level and not workflow condensing.
Original Message:
Sent: 10-24-2025 09:32
From: Adam Roderick
Subject: Artificial Intelligence
@Lance Baggett I've asked a ton of people this question. There are some amazing tools and all demo well, but not everything delivers. A recent survey shows 96% of enterprises report no material difference to productivity or profitability that can be attributable to AI.
That said, here are the categories that people are either already doing or are most excited about, some mentioned already by @Greg Boden and @Reece Barnes
- AP automation. This is a combination of OCR (reading PDFs or images and extracting data points like company name, invoice number, etc) and automation (putting data into the ERP or AP solution through an API). It's not new but the recent AI advances make it better.
- Search. "I just want to ask a question and get an answer" -- Microsoft has done a great job of integrating email, calendars, documents, etc into Copilot. Also not new, but AI/LLM chat interface is so much better than previous solutions
- AI notetaking. One of the most popular segments of applying AI
- Predictive analytics. Forward-looking reports, dashboards and analyses work well. LLMs are great at producing an answer even if it isn't perfectly accurate. This is fine for projections, which have a lot of judgment and what-ifs baked in.
- Other. You may not see these directly from your seat, but they are affecting construction:
- Job progress tracking. The combination of bodycams and other video with AI analysis is gaining a lot of interest. It's a little like AP automation--take unstructured inputs, like PDFs in once case or video feeds in another, and feed it to AI for analysis
- Design automation and takeoff. Design tools can now take descriptions and generate a ton of output that designers can then tweak. That can then generate cost estimates and materials ordering plans. This isn't new but AI is helping make it easier.
- Software engineering. All the SaaS vendors are using coding copilots (analogous to Microsoft's Copilot in outlook, but for software engineers) to accelerate their coding.
What's coming?
- Data analysis. This has proven more difficult, not just in construction, because LLMs all hallucinate. Aggregating data requires multiple levels of 100% accuracy to get to an accurate result, and LLMs struggle with this. But, we will see this mature. The other difficulty is getting all the data into one place so the AI can see it holistically (ERP, PM, CRM, time tracking, etc). I've spent a lot of time here.
- AI tools in ERPs. All SaaS vendors are working on ways to integrate chat and AI into the day to day. The most common outcome for this will be automated, customized workflows built on top of existing ERP functionality.
- Labor planning. I've been working with a couple of companies on automating staffing plans. Beyond hard rules like "are Sally and Joe certified and available for Job X?" but also soft rules that AI is really good at like "Sally and Joe had a fight and shouldn't work together for 2 weeks while they cool off"
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Adam Roderick
Founder & CEO, Datateer
303-335-9929
adam@datateer.com
Original Message:
Sent: 10-23-2025 10:35
From: Greg Boden
Subject: Artificial Intelligence
We are on Microsoft 365, so have multiple Copilot (ChatGPT 5) licenses for people to use. It has been pretty transformative to our team. It helps manage email, create meeting agendas based on emails and chat threads, research trends for planning, and a lot more. We are also developing a few 'Agents' to do more in depth queries. You just need to dive in and start playing with it. Once you do, you will never use a search engine again.
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Greg Boden
CFO
Midwest D-Vision Solutions
Salt Lake City UT
(801) 505-4291
Original Message:
Sent: 09-30-2025 09:45
From: Lance Baggett
Subject: Artificial Intelligence
With the explosion of AI and AI tools the last couple years I am curious if anyone has any great tools they are using.
I was in a meeting with a company where their employee handbook and SOP were put into an AI model so employees could ask questions to get answers to company policy. I have also seen some useful AI notetaking tools like fireflies.ai that summarize meeting notes and action items for team members.
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Lance Baggett CMA
Controller
Letsos Company
Richmond TX
(281) 832-0499
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