‘Trust but verify:’ How Novo Construction compares drawing packages with AI

Comparing drawings can be a time-consuming and tedious process. Novo Construction, based in Menlo Park, California, has turned to an artificial intelligence-enabled tool to help.

Novo has used BuildCheck, a software that performs AI-driven drawing review for city comments, RFIs and change orders, according to its website. Now, BuildCheck’s product, Diffs, has helped the builder on two different California projects, said Novo Chief Information Officer Colin Stoner. Diffs compares drawings with previous versions, helping professionals find their own diffs, or inconsistencies between drawings, faster.

Here, Stoner talks with Construction Dive about how Diffs helps the builder save time on drawing review, how the learning curve impacted the team and what the team has learned about AI through this experience.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: How does Novo use Diffs on its project?

COLIN STONER: The biggest get for us is pricing out projects early on. Not necessarily in preconstruction, but before construction starts. That’s when changes can impact the pricing dramatically, whether it’s moving a wall, adding a window, changing the doors, whatever.

Before, our project managers might try to use something like Bluebeam to overlay the changes and see what moved.  But doing that over hundreds of pages of drawings is cumbersome and makes you go cross-eyed.

So, what they’ve been doing instead with Diffs is using that overlay feature immediately through an automated process. You can run a “diff check,” and it flags issues on the project relating to those diffs.

Then, if a wall moves, the PM can go back, talk to their framing drywall contractor and start getting the price changes for that. Because typically with us, these changes can often change the scope we are contracted to do. 

That’s the really big win for us: being able to stay in front of the drawings as they evolve. It’s about saving the time and not having to look for all the changes manually. It simplifies that approach a lot.

What’s the learning curve been like with Diffs?

Before, when you’d have to spot the changes manually, the learning curve was pretty steep. But now that it runs that AI check for changes, it just flags any issues just like with the initial drawing check. 

Now, you go through, review the flags or dismiss them. There’s plenty of changes that are not pertinent, so they just get dismissed. It’s more about having that log and being able to capture those quickly. 

You can still click on it. It’ll highlight everything on the pertinent sheets where it’s referring to whatever changes exist. So, it’s pretty low friction for the learning curve now.

What have you learned about working with AI via using this tool?

Frankly, it just complements what BuildCheck does. 

It’s not that BuildCheck can’t do it; it just doesn’t really have those features yet. But for what we’ve been able to do, they complement each other. 

As far as changing the way our team looks at AI, I think more than anything, it’s made them more trustworthy of it in a lot of ways. At the same time, whether it’s something I’m pushing out to them or something that comes from one of our vendors, I always make sure to trust but verify. That’s the name of the game here.