The drawing is
the datum.
An AI copilot for construction administration. Keeps the field true to the contract, from RFI to as-built, with an attestation layer that issues a signed, evidence-linked record of conformance.
Eric Wu just announced NavigateAI on LinkedIn with an open invitation. This is a worked response to that invitation, not a cold pitch. What follows is a proposed agent and an interactive prototype, grounded in the construction administration workflow I have actually run on a luxury retail buildout: real RFIs, drawing markups, finish schedule verification, conference reports, and a photo punch list with before-and-after pairs.
The thesis is short. Construction productivity has been flat to falling for sixty years while the rest of the economy roughly tripled. The cause is not the trades. The cause is the seam where the drawing meets the field: ambiguity that lives in one senior head, RFIs that sit for days, markups locked inside one person's Bluebeam session, and verification done from memory. The drawing of record exists. The problem is that the field cannot stay continuously true to it.
DATUM is the proposal. Two layers, one loop. A copilot that captures, references, comments, routes, and verifies in the field worker's hand, and an attestation layer that turns the captured evidence into a graded Attestation of Conformity, on the moments where money and risk move.
The copilot
Capture, RFI, drawing markup, drawing verification, punch list, upskilling, knowledge on demand. In the field worker's and the administrator's hand, on web, mobile, and glasses.
The attestation
Cross references field evidence against the contract drawings and specifications. Issues a signed, evidence-linked Attestation of Conformity at graded levels, or blocks and names the nonconformity.
Seven stages. One loop. DATUM rides it.
Every demo below is one stage. The agent's reasoning mirrors how a competent administrator already works a job, made continuous and evidence-linked.
- 01ObserveA photo, measurement, question, or defect, pinned to a location.
- 02ReferencePull the governing sheet, detail, spec section, or schedule line.
- 03QuestionRaise an RFI, or mark up the drawing if the drawings resolve it.
- 04RouteSend to the responsible party with a due date and a clear ask.
- 05VerifyCompare the corrected work to the datum. Capture the back check.
- 06AttestIssue a graded Attestation, or block and name the nonconformity.
- 07RecordRoll into the as-built and the portfolio conformance record.
Capture the walk.
The first ten minutes on a site is the most valuable ten minutes. The phone is the only tool that goes everywhere the work goes. DATUM lives there.
Tap the unit plan. A located pin drops, an item is written with trade, severity, room, and the governing sheet. Pre-seeded with three real items so the surface reads as complete before you touch it.
Captured items
Trade, severity, room, and sheet inferred from the pin location. Each item routes to a responsible party in the next stage.
Demo · Real capture pin and live item write. Locations and sheets are illustrative.
Raise and resolve the RFI.
An RFI is the single most expensive sentence on a job. The industry average answer takes seven to fourteen days. On my last portfolio I held the average at 1.8 days, because the question had everything the answerer needed inside it.
DATUM drafts the question against the cited sheet, proposes a grounded answer from the specifications, attaches the citation, and routes it with a due date. The administrator approves and ships.
Click "Draft RFI" below. DATUM will compose a precise question against the cited sheet.
Awaiting draft.
Demo · Live draft and grounded answer. Sheet numbers are illustrative, the structure mirrors a real Procore card.
Mark up the drawing.
When the drawings resolve the question, the answer is a markup, not an RFI. A clouded revision, a dated stamp, a dimension callout in red. The vocabulary every architect already speaks.
Tap the controls below to draw a real revision cloud. Add a dated stamp. Add a dimension callout. DATUM suggests the clause and the responsible party.
Demo · Real cloud-draw, stamp, and dimension callout. Drawing is a simplified illustration.
Verify built against drawing.
Verification is where most jobs leak. The senior administrator checks the finish, the dimension, the material code, against the sheet of record, from memory. DATUM does it against the actual sheet, every time, with a citation.
Enter a finish code. Try ST-5 for a match against the spec, or ST-10 to see a deviation flagged with a cited tolerance.
Sheet of record · A641 line 14
Captured in field
Demo · Real comparison against an illustrative finish schedule line. Tolerances are stand-ins.
Punch list with photo evidence.
The punch list is the single artifact where the contract gets finally honored or not. On my real list, every row carried a condition photo and an empty slot reserved for the back check. The empty slot is the verification loop in physical form.
Tap Capture back-check on any open row. The photo slot fills, the status advances from Open to Ready, and a verification pass advances it to Verified, ready for attestation.
| Item | Room | Sheet | Issue | Responsible | Status | Photos |
|---|
Demo · Status advances Open · Ready · Verified. Photo pair is illustrative.
Junior works like senior.
The expensive knowledge on a job lives in three or four heads. When those heads are not on the floor, the junior crew either guesses or stops. DATUM is the senior head at the point of work, every time, with a citation back to the spec.
Try a question, or tap a suggested one. The answer types out, grounded in the project's own spec sections.
Demo · The corpus is the project's own specs and past jobs. Citations are illustrative.
Attest the work against the contract.
This is the moat. Capture and markup prove the work is right. Attestation makes that defensible. DATUM cross references the evidence against the cited sheet and spec, then issues a graded Attestation of Conformity, or blocks and names the nonconformity with its clause.
Pick a level, then run the check. Self-attested for small items, witnessed for material items, independent for safety-critical. The level sets the seal and the audit trail required.
Demo · Graded attestation maps to AIA G702, G703, G704 attestations and to conformity assessment levels.
An embedded-champion rollout.
Field tools fail when they parachute in. The honest path is one site, one champion, one loop closed, then expansion. Each gate is a go or no-go. The agent's adoption ring is the number of conformance items it has carried through Verify and Attest in production.
Click the stages. The adoption ring fills as each gate clears.
Percent of in-scope conformance items carried through Verify and Attest in production. Gates are honest. No gate, no advance.
Demo · Click stages to advance the rollout. Adoption ring updates with each gate.
The tokens, on the page.
Every color, type face, and motif you see is documented here. Status carries a shape and a label, never color alone. The markup red is real, lifted from the dated stamps and red pen used in actual construction administration.
Fraunces, Hanken Grotesk, JetBrains Mono, Caveat.
An editorial serif for display, a humanist sans for body, a mono for data, and an informal hand for margin notes and clouded labels.
Each carries a shape and a label. Color alone is never the signal.
Why CA is the right entry.
Eric framed Opendoor's pain plainly: roughly 5,000 homes a month, 10,000+ subcontractors, and $750M a year in renovations, with constant quality control pressure. The conformance record was the asset the operator never had. DATUM is the system that finally builds it, one attested item at a time.
Construction administration is where the drawing meets the field, and it is almost entirely manual. That is the connective tissue NavigateAI's four pillars were built for.
Quality control and verification attack rework. Upskilling transfers the senior-held tacit knowledge. Scoping and capture compress the variability. Knowledge on Demand grounds every RFI in the spec. The pillars map one-to-one onto the diagnosed constraints, and CA is where they land in the same hand.
The numbers above are from Brian Potter's productivity research. Sixty years of flat, while everything else moved. Industry shipped tools, none of them touched the field reliably. The shortage of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers makes that gap urgent, not optional.
One agent, three surfaces.
DATUM runs the same loop on web, mobile, and glasses. The attestation call is the same on every surface. The snippet below is illustrative, not a real API.
Illustrative only. The point is the loop and the surface symmetry, not the API.