The AI agent for construction: win the tenders, keep the site moving

Four flags this morning, with no request from you.
· A subcontractor has been working on the Verne site for 12 days without the client's acceptance. The declaration went out on 24/07, it has not come back accepted, and the site records show their crews on site since the 27th.
· Interim application no. 7 on the Aubel site has not been submitted. The period closed six days ago; €84,200 is not in the payment cycle.
· The defects liability period on the Mareuil site expires in 21 days and three snags are still open.
· A second subcontractor's compliance certificate expired on 31/07. They work on two sites. morning-watch_4-flags.pdf4 flags · site and amount
⛓ Source · subcontract declarations, site records, applications, handover minutes, supplier documents

Declared, yes. Accepted, no — and those are two different things.
What I have established, document by document: the declaration went out on 24/07, the client acknowledged it on 25/07, and no acceptance, and no approval of payment terms, has come back. Site records place their crews on site from 27/07: twelve days.
What that means in practice: until acceptance is secured, the subcontractor has no right to direct payment, and the main contractor remains solely liable to them. If the job goes wrong, you are the one paying twice.
What I have already written: the chaser to the client, with the dated chronology of the documents — declaration of 24/07, acknowledgement of 25/07, first site record of 27/07 — and the acceptance form ready to be returned signed; and beside it, the letter informing the subcontractor of their position, ready to go the day you judge they should know.
The clock, meanwhile, is running: twelve days today, and every further day of work without the act adds to what you carry alone. The decision stays a site decision, and it is yours: stopping a crew has a cost, a programme and a person on the other side, and it is signed for. You read, you sign — the chaser goes out within the minute. acceptance-chaser_subcontractor.pdfChronology · form to return signed
⛓ Source · declaration of 24/07, acknowledgement of 25/07, site records

I watch, continuously, what you have opened to me: subcontract declarations and their return, site records, the applications calendar, handover minutes and liability periods, everyone's certificates. A document that went out and never came back, a crew on site without its paperwork, a period closed with no application, a liability period nearing its end — I say so, I do not wait to be asked.
Routing follows your organisation: the unaccepted subcontractor to the site manager and the director, because it is a company risk and not a site matter; the application to the site manager, copied to accounts; the snags to the manager of that site; the certificate to the office manager, who chases it.
With a chase: 24 h on the subcontractor and the application — one gets worse every day, the other shifts your cash position by a month; 72 h on the rest. Then a weekly summary to the director: by site, never by person.

What this morning has already given you: €84,200 put back into the payment cycle with application no. 7 ready to submit, twelve days of unaccepted subcontracting stopped dead, backed by the paperwork timeline and the acceptance request to be returned signed, three snags brought back inside the 21 days left before the liability period ends, and an expired certificate chased on both sites concerned.
From tomorrow: a month of cash that does not slip, and a company risk closed before it makes you pay twice. What I do not yet execute is not a prohibition, it is a mandate that has not been given: submitting an application, chasing the client in your name, stopping a crew — you set the scope and the cap, you date it, you withdraw it on a word, and execution takes minutes. Your prices and your paperwork never leave the company: I open what you open to me, site by site, and every look-up is logged.
The next step is ready: application no. 7 and the acceptance chaser await your reread. Say “send” and both go out before noon.
✎ Proposal · watch and chases to be configured — you set the thresholds

The phone, I do not pick up — and I say so before you start counting on it.
I take your requests on your written channels: WhatsApp Business, your website chat, email. VoIP telephony is not included: the voice channel is sold separately, as an option, carried by the voice agent for the telephone switchboard. Until it is ordered, someone in your office answers the calls, and nothing below says otherwise.
What your call log shows, and I stop at the finding: 128 calls unanswered out of 412 over six weeks, or 31% — mostly between 07:00 and 08:30 and between 12:00 and 13:30, the two windows when the site manager is out on the works. I measure it, I do not fix it.
What I handle meanwhile, because it is written down: 312 requests came in over those same six weeks through WhatsApp Business, the website chat and email. 274 went back out with no one involved, the answer being in your programmes:
· 131 supplier requests — delivery slot, site access, clearance under the crane, who signs for the delivery note. The answer comes from the week's programme and the site layout;
· 79 requests from trades and subcontractors — order of works, progress of the trade ahead of them, contact details of the foreman on site that day;
· 44 requests from clients and homeowners — progress, handover date, what happened to a snag;
· 20 cold approaches and job applications, politely turned away and logged.
Coordination is the part that wins you hours: when a supplier moves a delivery — whether they write to me, or your site manager notes it for me after taking the call —, the knock-on is worked out against the programme and the following trade is told straight away. Over six weeks, 23 announced changes, 23 following trades told the same day — four had been, before.
38 requests were passed up to a person, and that is the right number: accident, stoppage, dispute, anything that binds the company. They go to the site manager, with the request summarised and the file opened.
A rule added in week 2, and it has held since: two of your projects share a street name, and seven requests suffered for it. I now ask for the job number or the client's name before routing: every request has gone back to the right site for four weeks.
For the 128 missed calls, two paths, and the choice is yours: announce your written channels on your telephone greeting, which moves part of the volume without adding anything to what you pay here; or order the voice agent for the telephone switchboard, which picks up, and which is billed separately. The second does not start without your order, and I will say so again every time the question comes back.
⛓ Sourced · call log, requests received on your written channels, site programme, contacts book

Not for the last six weeks: qualifying enquiries has been running over the same six weeks as reception, and it has booked 34 technical visits.
What came in, across every channel: 96 quote enquiries — 41 by phone, logged by your office manager after the call, 38 through the website form, 17 by e-mail. What I ask each one, in the order a person can actually answer: the nature of the works, the site address, the area or the run, the date they are hoping for, the budget if they name one, whether they own the property or act for the owner, and whether an architect or a planning consent already exists — that last question alone separates a real project from a wished-for one.
What qualification returned on the 96:
· 34 within your trades and your radius → technical visit booked, with the address, the access, the floor and what to bring;
· 27 within your trades but beyond 45 km → passed to the director with the distance and the estimated value, because 45 km is not turned down the same way at €4,000 and at €90,000;
· 21 outside your trades → set aside, with the reason written down;
· 14 with neither date nor budget → chased once after a fortnight; 6 replied, and 2 of them are among the 34.
What grouping the visits changes: the 34 visits fit into 12 outings grouped by town and by half-day, against 34 separate journeys before. 22 journeys avoided, 52 minutes median travel in your records — 1,144 minutes, that is more than 19 hours handed back to your estimator over six weeks.
The figure I publish about myself: of the 21 enquiries set aside, 3 were set aside wrongly — 14.3%. A swimming-pool tiling job you do take, and two extensions filed as “steel frame” on a single word in the message. I qualified on the enquirer's vocabulary, and people rarely name a trade the way you invoice it.
What I changed, on two points: qualification now rests on your 9 trades actually invoiced over 24 months, not on the words of the message; and every enquiry set aside goes to the director in a Friday list, with the exact sentence that caused it — four lines to scan. Over the next six weeks: 18 set aside, 1 wrongly — 5.6%, caught on the Friday and signed at €14,200. qualification_96-enquiries_34-visits.pdf96 enquiries sorted · 34 visits in 12 outings · 3 wrong exclusions fixed
⛓ Sourced · 96 quote enquiries, 34 visits in 12 outings, 3 wrong exclusions out of 21 then 1 out of 18