Ask the drawings
A foreman is standing at the end of a row of racking and needs to know the conduit size for the home run to the combiner. Or the embed depth at a pier. Or which detail governs a roof penetration...
The problem
A foreman is standing at the end of a row of racking and needs to know the conduit size for the home run to the combiner. Or the embed depth at a pier. Or which detail governs a roof penetration near a parapet. The answer is somewhere in the plan set, which is a few hundred sheets across civil, structural, electrical, and the manufacturer's installation attachments.
So he calls the office. The project engineer is in a meeting, or on another call, or digging through the same PDF. The crew waits, or the crew guesses. Neither is good. A wrong guess on a trench depth or a torque spec turns into rework, and rework gets found at inspection.
Most of these questions are not hard. The answer is on a sheet. The delay is in finding it.
How the agent workflow works
The agent reads the current plan set, the spec book, and the latest addenda and RFI responses. It does not answer from general knowledge. It answers only from those documents.
The foreman sends a question by text or a field app: "What's the conduit size and burial depth for the DC home run on array block 3?"
The agent searches the documents and replies with three things: the answer, the sheet number and detail reference it came from, and the revision date of that sheet. For example, it might quote the electrical note and point to the specific detail callout so the foreman can open the sheet and confirm in thirty seconds.
When the documents conflict, the agent does not pick a winner. If the electrical plans show one conduit size and the spec section shows another, it reports both with their sources and sends the question to the project engineer's queue marked as a conflict. The same happens when a detail is missing, when a sheet is marked "see site-specific design," or when the question depends on a field condition the drawings don't cover.
The human checkpoint has two parts. The foreman verifies against the cited sheet before building anything that is hard to undo. The project engineer clears the flagged queue and, where needed, issues an RFI. Answers to flagged questions get added to the document set the agent reads, so the next person asking gets the resolved answer with its source.
The agent also keeps a log of every question and answer. At the end of the week, the superintendent can see which questions came up repeatedly, which usually points to a sheet that is unclear or a coordination gap.
What you need to set it up
- The plan set, specs, addenda, and RFI log as searchable PDFs in one folder, with a naming convention that includes revision date.
- An AI tool that can read and search those documents and be restricted to them.
- A way for the field to ask: a shared text thread or a simple form the foreman can use from a phone.
- A named person at the office who owns the flagged queue.
- Someone to load each new revision and retire the old one.
Setup is a few hours if your documents are already organized, longer if they are scattered across email and personal drives. Most of that time goes to cleaning up the folder, not configuring the agent.
Where it breaks
Stale drawings are the biggest risk. If a revision is issued and nobody loads it, the agent will cite a superseded sheet with complete confidence. The revision date in every answer helps, but only if the foreman checks it.
Scanned plans with poor resolution, handwritten markups, and small callouts inside dense details can be misread or missed. The agent can also quote a note accurately and still miss that a general note on a different sheet modifies it.
Questions that need judgment are not its job. Whether a field condition justifies a deviation belongs to the engineer.
Then there is trust. If the agent flags too much, the field stops asking. If it flags too little, someone builds off a bad read. Review the log in the first few weeks and adjust.
Finally, it only knows what is in the folder. Verbal direction from the owner's rep or a change agreed on site is invisible to it unless someone writes it down and loads it.
The bottom line
This workflow does not replace the project engineer. It takes the lookup questions off the engineer's phone and puts the sheet reference in the foreman's hand, while routing real ambiguity to the person who can resolve it. It is only as good as your document control. If you keep the folder current and someone owns the flagged queue, the crew spends less time waiting and more time working from the right sheet.
Related use cases
- QR-code crew check-in Field Ops
- Meter and tool check-out log Field Ops
- Two-week lookahead, built not typed Management