Knowledge / Workflows
AI submittal review
Checking each submittal against the relevant specification clauses and drawings, flagging omissions and deviations, and drafting the review response with the source of every finding.
Submittal review is the checkpoint between what the contractor proposes and what gets built. Done properly it is a comparison across three documents at once: the submittal, the specification clauses it was raised against and the drawings that show where the product goes. Done under time pressure it becomes a skim and a Status B. Structured knowledge lets a team run the comparison on every submittal, with every finding traceable to its source, and keep the reviewer on the decisions.
What the workflow involves today
Log the submittal and identify the specification section it was raised against, then confirm that is actually the right section.
Pull the governing clauses and any amendments, addenda or RFI responses that changed them.
Find the product on the drawings and schedules and note every location and rating it has to satisfy.
Read the package: proposal, data sheet, certificates, shop drawings, and the previous round's comments if it is a resubmission.
Compare, item by item, and write the response with a status and the reasons.
Chase the outstanding items and keep the register current across every trade.
Where generic AI tools fail
General-purpose tools stop at the package. Give them a submittal and they will summarise it, extract the product name and even suggest whether it sounds compliant. What they cannot do is the comparison, because the specification, the drawings and the previous revision were never part of the question, and the tool has no way of knowing which clause governs or which door schedule row matters.
The result is a review that looks finished and has not been done. The reviewer still has to open the specification, find the clause, open the drawing set, find the schedule and check the certificate, which is the work the tool was supposed to remove. Worse, a confident summary with no source makes the skim-and-Status-B habit easier, not harder.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the project record is structured knowledge rather than a folder of PDFs, the review starts from the relationship instead of the package. The submittal is already attached to the clauses it answers to and the schedule rows that call for the product, so the comparison runs across all of them at once.
What the reviewer receives is a draft response: each requirement listed with the value the submittal offers against it, the items that comply, the items that do not, the items the package does not address at all, and the previous round's comments marked as resolved or still open. Every line carries its source: submittal page, specification clause, drawing number and schedule row.
The reviewer reads the exceptions, checks the two or three findings that need judgement, edits the wording and returns the submittal. The time goes on the decision, and the response can be defended later because the evidence is attached to it.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
Related to
This workflow reads submittals, specifications, drawings and their schedules, and leans on the RFIs and variations that changed the requirement since tender. It sits alongside the specification-to-drawing consistency check and the RFI drafting workflow, which share the same underlying knowledge.
Does it work with resubmissions?
Which project systems does it read from?
How do we see it on our own submittals?