AI agents for construction that draft the quotes, bid summaries and purchase orders your team approves.

FactoryJet builds these as custom agents. For a contractor, the agent answers inbound calls and web forms at any hour, asks about the job, books the site visit and follows up on quotes you have sent. It can draft the quote from your price book for your estimator to approve. Prices and contracts stay with your people. Before a contract, we show the agent working on your own data.

Retell AI, Bland and Vapi bill by the minute with no monthly minimum on their entry plans, per their pricing pages on 11 Oct 2026. For a seasonal spike, compare how many calls each runs at once. Retell AI lists 20 free concurrent calls, Bland's Start plan 10 with a cap of 100 calls a day, and Vapi 4 on its usage plan. Goodcall bills per caller served and Smith.ai per call. All five are products you set up yourself. For a custom voice agent, FactoryJet quotes the build and the ongoing support as fixed prices in writing.

It is software that does one office task and stops at a draft. It reads what arrives, such as a request for a quote, an invitation to bid or a supplier invoice, looks up your price book and job records, and saves a draft for a person to approve. Unlike a chatbot, it starts work when the document arrives, with no one typing a prompt.

Mostly for paperwork. Takeoff tools measure drawings. Procore's agent library, which listed 20 pre-built agents when we counted on 11 Oct 2026, drafts RFIs (requests for information), checks submittals against specs and turns field photos and voice notes into daily logs. Autodesk generates submittal logs and fills a bid board from forwarded bids. Custom agents cover work that crosses systems, such as quotes from your price book, phone answering and purchase orders.

There is no single best one, because each tool does a different job. For measuring drawings, look at takeoff tools such as Togal, Kreo and Beam AI. For questions about project records, use the AI inside the platform that holds them, such as Procore or Autodesk Forma. For bookkeeping, start with Sage Copilot or Intuit AI. For work that uses your own price book or crosses two systems, have an agent built.

Yes, several kinds. QuickBooks' AI page describes AI-drafted estimates you review and edit, and follow-ups to leads found in your inbox. Ready-made phone products such as Goodcall and Smith.ai answer calls for small offices. Takeoff tools measure plans. A custom agent is the route when the work depends on your own prices and rules, for example a quote drafted from your item list for your estimator to check.

We build agents and do not sell or rank management software. Two platforms publish what their AI does. Procore lists pre-built agents for RFIs, submittals, daily logs and bid leveling, and puts Agent Studio, for configuring your own, in its Enterprise tier. Autodesk Forma, the new name for Autodesk Construction Cloud, includes Autodesk Assistant and automatic submittal logs. Choose by where your project records already live.

It can do the reading and the sorting. The agent pulls the due date, scope, location and bonding requirements out of each invitation, checks them against rules you set, such as trade, distance and current backlog, and writes a one-page summary with a suggested go or no-go. A person makes the decision. Beam AI and Autodesk both ship bid tracking of their own, so check those first if you use them.

Parts of them. A submittal is the product data, shop drawings or samples sent for approval before material is ordered. An agent can list what each spec section requires, match manufacturer cut sheets to it, flag a mismatch and keep the log current. Review and approval stay with your project engineer and the design team. If you run Procore, its Submittal Review Agent already cross-checks submittals against specs and contracts.

In our view a general chat assistant is the wrong tool for it, and we would not price a job from its count. Measuring to scale is what takeoff tools are made for, and they publish their accuracy. Togal states up to 98% on floor plans. Kreo says its Auto Measure 3.0 lands within 94% of the real geometry on busy plans. This question appeared on five of the ten Google searches we ran on 11 Oct 2026.

Not on its own. An estimate needs two things a chat window does not have: quantities measured from the drawings and your current prices. A takeoff tool supplies the first. Your price book supplies the second. An agent built for you joins the two and saves a draft estimate in your system, where your estimator checks every line before it goes out.

Takeoff is counting and measuring what a drawing calls for, such as square feet of drywall, feet of conduit and numbers of fixtures. AI takeoff means software does the detecting and measuring from the PDF. Togal describes its tool as one that automatically detects, measures and compares directly from drawings. Drawer AI says it detects power devices, lighting fixtures and panel schedules on PDF drawings. Have a person check the result before it is priced.

We do not rank them. On 11 Oct 2026, Togal ranked first on Google in the US for both 'ai takeoff software' and 'ai estimating software'. Togal, Kreo, Beam AI, STACK and Trimble all sell AI takeoff, and Drawer AI is built for electrical work. Their accuracy figures are their own claims. Ask each for a trial on a drawing set you have already measured by hand, and compare.

In four places. Takeoff tools measure the drawings. An agent reads the request and the spec, so nothing the customer asked for is missed. It prices each line from your own item list and flags the lines it cannot match. And it follows up after the quote goes out. The estimator keeps the judgment calls, such as scope gaps, exclusions, site conditions and margin.

Buy software for measuring drawings. That problem is the same for every contractor, and products exist for it. Have an agent built for what is particular to you: your price book, your customer terms, the ERP or accounting system your orders live in, and the way your office follows up. The two work together, with the agent picking up from the quantities the takeoff tool exports.

For takeoff, two vendors publish electrical features. Drawer AI says it detects power devices, lighting fixtures and panel schedules on PDF drawings and generates conduit paths from each panel to every device. Trimble says its Automate Takeoff feature detects and counts outlets, switches and fire alarm systems. For the office side of an electrical contractor, such as quotes, phones and purchase orders, a custom agent fits.

Yes. Procore's agent library listed 20 pre-built agents when we counted on 11 Oct 2026, including a Submittal Review Agent, an RFI Agent, a Bid Leveling Agent and a Daily Log Agent. Procore says more than 150 built-in actions let agents create or update records, that its AI follows your existing role-based permissions, and that agents never take action without sign-off. Agent Studio, for configuring your own agents, is listed in the Enterprise tier.

Yes. Procore's developer documentation describes REST APIs secured with OAuth 2.0, a standard sign-in method for software, for creating, reading, updating and deleting records. It says a custom app can be installed privately for one company, and a company administrator chooses which projects the app can reach. Plan for two rate limits, one hourly and one over 10 seconds. Procore also says its Agentic APIs are in a Design Partner pilot.

In QuickBooks Online, yes. Intuit's developer reference lists create, read, update and send operations for both the Estimate and the PurchaseOrder objects, and calls a purchase order a non-posting transaction. QuickBooks Desktop works differently. Intuit says its Web Connector is a Windows application installed on the same machine or local network as QuickBooks, so an agent exchanges data through that.

Sage's construction page lists AI-powered takeoff tools that feed its estimates, alongside bid management and job costing with purchase orders and AIA-style billing. Sage Copilot is its AI finance assistant, shown for Sage Intacct, and Sage notes that some features shown are illustrative and vary by product and region. For custom work, Sage Intacct's developer site recommends its REST API.

From your own item list and customer terms, read from the system that holds them. That can be an ERP such as Odoo, NetSuite, SAP Business One or ERPNext, an accounting system with an API such as QuickBooks Online, or a spreadsheet to begin with. It does not take prices from the internet. A line it cannot match to an item is flagged for your estimator.

No. Every quote, bid summary, submittal package and purchase order is saved as a draft, and a named person on your team approves it before it goes anywhere. The software vendors draw the same line. Procore says its agents never take action without sign-off, and Autodesk says its AI works with the expert in control.

Answering your own inbound line is one thing. Calling people is another. On 8 February 2024 the FCC ruled that calls made with AI-generated voices are 'artificial' under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and its rules require telemarketers to obtain prior express written consent before robocalling consumers. We build inbound answering and follow-up to people who asked for a quote. Ask your lawyer before any outbound campaign. This is not legal advice.

It hands the call to a person. We set the rules with you before launch: which questions it answers, when it transfers to the office or a mobile, and what it does after hours, which is usually to take the details and book a call back. Every call is logged with a summary, so your office does not have to ask the caller the same questions again.

It depends on how many systems the agent reads and whether it writes to them. Building a custom AI agent costs roughly $5,000 to more than $180,000, according to development firm ProductCrafters' 2026 breakdown. That range covers every kind of agent and is not specific to construction. FactoryJet quotes the build and the ongoing support as fixed prices in writing after a short scoping call.

For ready-made products, the vendors' own pages showed this on 11 Oct 2026. Goodcall lists plans at $79, $129 and $299 a month, billed by the number of different callers served. Smith.ai's AI Receptionist lists a free tier of 25 calls a month and plans at $150 and $500 a month, billed per call. A custom voice agent is a build. FactoryJet quotes that build and the ongoing support as fixed prices in writing.

A pilot on one focused job, such as drafting quotes from emailed requests, usually takes two to four weeks. A production build with permissions, logging, approvals and monitoring usually takes six to twelve weeks. Access to your systems is the biggest variable. It goes fastest when you can hand over a test login and a set of past quotes at the start.

Yes. Before a contract, we show working software on your own data. For a contractor that usually means one real document, such as a request you have already quoted or a bid invitation you have already answered, run through a first version of the agent so you can compare its draft with what your team did.

Yes. Software changes. Procore's own documentation says its rate limit values can change at any time. The same team that built the agent watches its logs, re-tests it when something changes and fixes what breaks. FactoryJet keeps managing the servers, the AI models, the API connections and the upkeep, so your office does not have to.

You do. The agent is built for you and the code is yours, along with the notes that explain how it works. We still look after it day to day: the servers, the AI models, the API connections and the updates. If you later move the work in-house or to another firm, the code and its notes go with you.