When preparing to submit bids, the full scope of work for each project can run up against time and resource limitations. It’s an often time-consuming task and can feel like wasted effort for bids that are not won. It can also require a great deal of specialized knowledge that a less-experienced bid preparer may find daunting.
“People love to bid jobs, there’s a competitive nature to it, some excitement over whether you win or lose,” says Michael DeMarie, president of contractor ProWest Constructors. “But scoping is a tedious job.”
The Wildomar, Calif.-based firm has been looking to grow its business, which today is mostly work on public construction projects. But the effort involved in preconstruction bid preparation has been a bottleneck. More bids equals more scope preparation, and that’s the part that doesn’t always get done. “We don’t have trouble finding estimators and everyone enjoys bidding, but when you’re preparing all these bids at the same time, you don’t have the time to scope it out very well.”
Looking to boost their bid preparation without replacing their estimators and preconstruction team, ProWest tried out artificial intelligence-based scoping agents from the tech firm Precision. The automated, agentic AI tools can draw on knowledge from past bids and relevant project documentation to quickly rough out the scope of work for bids, allowing estimators to review them, spot problems early, and keep moving.
This AI agent is not replacing human effort. Rather, it’s doing the work that many in the industry elect to skip or put off, says DeMarie.
«Having a tool like this allows us to actually scope jobs before we bid them. When you have hundreds of sheets of plans, thousands of pages of documents and maybe two or three weeks to prepare a bid, this full scoping work wasn’t getting done,» DeMarie says.
Initially, ProWest wasn’t even using Scope AI for bid preparation; they were using it to scope out bids they had already won. “It came down to how do we get our subcontracts out in a timely manner,” explains DeMarie. “The job’s already started and half the subcontractors haven’t been hired yet—and with price volatility today, we want to get everyone under contract quickly.”
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Project documents are uploaded to Provision’s Scope AI agents, which can then work out project costs and generate RFIs and, according to Provision, eventually flow this data into takeoffs and estimates broken down for subcontractors. “By releasing Scope [AI agents], we’re starting to automate the whole preconstruction process,” explains Luigi La Corte, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Provision. «So right now you can go from two weeks to one week per bid, and the whole time the Scope AI is catching mistakes in your bid documents.»
La Corte says Scope AI is not intended as a replacement for traditional preconstruction workflows, but rather another layer to check everything and automate some of the process. It can work with files from popular preconstruction software, including BuildingConnected, Procore, and the old standby, Microsoft Excel.
«It would be a hard time getting a general contractor away from their Excel spreadsheets, so we’re not trying to make our own Excel,» says La Corte. «We’re going on top of it to maintain the documents across the full preconstruction phase.»
And with the Scoping AI agent, it can learn to work with how a particular contractor prepares bids. «Everyone bids differently,» says DeMarie. «The way we prepare trade packages for our bids, we are now trying to get the output of the scoping agent to match how we put our packages together. It’s nice to be able to customize it to our way of doing things.»
With more preconstruction AI agents on the way, Provision sees these tools working together to manage risk up front in construction, hopefully avoiding costly rework and change orders. «Missing scope keeps estimators up at night, so we see this as a spell check for scope. We want these products to work with them,» says La Corte.
